One quirk of living on the West Coast is that, waking up three hours behind New York and Washington, I often arrive at the media fracas du jour from the extremity of its outrage radius, and then have to work my way toward the epicenter. The first thing I read on Friday morning, at 6:15 a.m., was a tweet from Adam Davidson, the podcasting pioneer and journalist, who wrote a much-heralded column for the Times Magazine during the height of the Hugo Lindgren era. “If I still worked at the NYT,” Davidson tweeted, “I would seriously think about quitting today.” 

I then noticed that my friend and fellow Puck partner, Peter Hamby, had offered a characteristically savvy macro-view on “the debate over the NYT editorial” (essentially, that it didn’t really matter). Finally, after perusing some more tweets from Blue-Check Media, most of them quite critical of whatever apparently egregious crime the New York Times editorial board had just committed, I arrived at the scene of the purported original sin: A lengthy editorial arguing that Americans “are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”