Readers Had Become Confused After Noting That All Forty Seven Opinion Columnists Say The Same Thing
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
New York Times Columnists Issue Joint Statement Clarifying They Are Not The Same Person
NEW YORK — The forty-seven opinion columnists of the New York Times issued a joint statement Tuesday confirming that they are, despite reader confusion on the matter, distinct individuals with different names, different bylines, different physical appearances, and different offices within the Times building, if any of them use offices, which some of them do not.
The statement, which ran to 840 words and was published simultaneously on each columnist’s personal newsletter and on the Times Opinion section’s website, was prompted by what the columnists described as “a sustained pattern of reader correspondence in which readers express difficulty distinguishing between us, confuse our individual pieces with those of colleagues, and occasionally write to one of us criticizing a piece that was written by a different one of us.”
The statement was organized and drafted by senior columnist Emmeline Hartwell-Pierce, who has written for the Times Opinion section for fourteen years. She told reporters at a press call Wednesday morning that the confusion was “understandable in a limited sense” because all forty-seven columnists “share certain commitments, including a commitment to serious engagement with important issues, a commitment to evidence-based analysis, and a commitment to the kind of centrist rationalist perspective that has been the Times Opinion section’s editorial identity for many years.”
She added that the columnists were, despite these shared commitments, “distinct people with distinct voices” and that readers who took the time to “read each of us carefully” would “find meaningful differences in our approaches, our emphasis areas, and our tonal registers.”
The Confusion
The reader confusion addressed by the joint statement has, by various social media analyses, been building for approximately five years. A commonly circulated online quiz titled “Which Times Columnist Wrote This?” has, by its creator’s report, a median score of approximately 34 percent correct identification among respondents who describe themselves as regular Times readers. The quiz presents short passages from various Times columnists and asks respondents to identify the author. Several passages regularly defeat even committed Times readers.
One quiz passage, taken from a recent column about the importance of institutions, the dangers of extremism, and the need for reasoned dialogue, was correctly attributed to its author by 11 percent of respondents. The remaining 89 percent attributed it to one of five other columnists who had, in the same month, written columns about the importance of institutions, the dangers of extremism, and the need for reasoned dialogue.
The joint statement’s authors acknowledge this data without engaging with its implications. The statement notes that “the quiz’s methodology is not transparent” and that “individual column identification is a poor measure of meaningful intellectual distinction between columnists.”
This kind of acknowledgment of a data point combined with a methodological objection that does not refute the data point is consistent with a long pattern in institutional responses to critical assessments of their products.
The Distinguishing Features
The joint statement’s longest section is a twelve-paragraph enumeration of the forty-seven columnists’ distinguishing features. The distinguishing features include: different geographic focuses (several columnists focus on domestic politics, several on international affairs, one specifically on the intersection of technology and society, one specifically on food as a lens for understanding culture); different methodological approaches (several rely primarily on data, several primarily on narrative, several on a combination); and different biographical backgrounds (the columnists include former academics, former journalists, former government officials, and one former professional athlete).
The statement notes that these distinguishing features “produce meaningfully different perspectives on the same events” and invites readers to “engage with each columnist on their specific terms rather than as a collective.”
The invitation is, by available evidence, one that readers have found difficult to act on. The quiz results suggest that the specific terms of each columnist are, to many readers, not reliably distinguishable from those of their colleagues. Whether this reflects a failure of readerly attention or a genuine substantive similarity among the columnists is the question the joint statement does not address.
This is consistent with a wider pattern in institutional media self-assessment in which the assessment focuses on internal diversity markers rather than on whether that diversity is visible to the external audience.
Reader Reactions
Reader reactions to the joint statement were, predictably, mixed. One reader emailed to say she appreciated the clarification but that she had, after reading the statement, realized she had been thinking of two of the columnists as one person for three years and was “not sure she could undo this.” Another wrote to say he had read the statement twice and still was not sure which one was Emmeline Hartwell-Pierce. A third wrote to praise “the columnist who wrote the piece about columnists being different people” and addressed the letter, specifically, to “whichever one of them it was.”
For more on New York media culture, see NewsThump for related British opinion journalism satire.
The forty-seven columnists continue to write their columns. They are different people. The confusion, by available evidence, persists.
The Wider Pattern
The Times columnists’ joint statement has, since its publication, attracted commentary from media critics who note that the confusion it addresses is not primarily a readerly failure but an editorial one. If forty-seven columnists writing for the same publication are producing work that is routinely misattributed between them by engaged readers, the more informative question may be about the publication’s editorial culture rather than about the readers’ attention. Bohiney.com published a thoughtful piece on this dynamic Wednesday that is worth reading alongside the original statement. The London Prat’s media criticism coverage regularly addresses these broader questions about institutional voice and individual distinction in opinion journalism. The columnists have, as of Wednesday, not issued a response to the secondary commentary. Each of them has written, or is preparing to write, a column about something else. The columns will be, between them, meaningfully distinct. The readers will do their best.