And Josh Marshall wins the award for best use of the word "Timesian"

Josh Marshall puts his finger on one of the issues I've long had with the New York Times. (emphasis added)

The New York Times has a rather lengthy and Timesian piece out this morning on the on-going mystery of Jerry Falwell Jr, his wife and family and this “pool boy” who they befriended and then put into the divey youth hostel business in South Florida. For those who’ve read the earlier reporting by Politico, Buzzfeed and Reuters, there’s no big new bombshell or piece of evidence in the new piece. (If anyone’s read it and thinks otherwise, let me know.) What there is is bits and pieces of more confirmation and nuggets of detail throughout. It’s a classic Timesian piece, the kind fellow journalists often grind their teeth over. The Times comes in late, largely with other people’s reporting and makes the whole thing official with splash of Times holy water. And yet, as usual, they’ve used their name and resources to unearth enough new details and additional confirmations to put the whole edifice on a rather firmer footing.

How much of this is insult and how much is injury? No institution in journalism is as relentlessly smug and as compulsive with its self-congratulation, but just being annoying isn't a crime, so does this go beyond the hurt feelings of a few competitors? I'd say yes for at least a couple of reasons.

I tend to be dismissive of charges of plagiarism partially because I'm far more concerned with crimes of content underneath the byline, but also because we only focus on a form that is minor and relatively rare. There are all sorts of ways of stealing other writers' work, ideas and style, and as long as you don't actually lift specific phrases, it is a crime without consequence. 

Writers for the New York Times routinely arrive late and build on the foundation of other journalists. They may mention the previous work, but it's the NYT story that gets the attention, even if it adds relatively little.

More importantly, the practice of automatically anointing any story from the paper "groundbreaking and definitive" status feds the rot that is already undermining the paper's culture.

In terms of quality, the New York Times is no longer our best paper (the Washington Post has been blowing it away ever since Marty Baron took over and certainly since they lost Margaret Sullivan). It may not break the top five. It is still, however, the paper that matters.

Self-examination has never been a strong suit of the New York Times, but since its disastrous handling of the 2016 election, it has doubled down on the denial and has become openly hostile to its critics. The reception that stories like this get help the paper maintain the fiction that nothing is wrong, and that's the worst possible outcome.