James Freeman sells managerial contempt for AI surveillance to his donor-class readers. His May 27 column converts a labor dispute over AI-driven surveillance at the New York Times into a pre-emptive machine designed to train the Journal’s business-conservative readership to distrust any reporting that might scrutinize corporate power. We used to run this exact playbook for the Journal’s page; the column walks through the technique deployments as they appear.
New York Times readers subjected to funereal stories about artificial intelligence and its alleged threats to employment, education, security and life itself might have assumed the newspaper was just expressing its traditional fear of new technology. After all, dire warnings against productivity tools that turned out to yield enormous benefits for society have been appearing in the Times since at least 1928. Being wrong for a century is no crime. But now it seems that a very contemporary and more personal issue could be gnawing at Timesfolk and driving them to the brink of paranoia.
The column opens with the Smear-by-Association Scorn — a WSJ Appendix A.3 inversion for destruction. Freeman ties Times AI coverage to a century of being “wrong” about technology, then delivers the contempt-drenched “being wrong for a century is no crime” — a punchline that reframes the newspaper’s journalism as a permanent institutional failure pattern rather than a series of specific editorial decisions. The technique functions as a pre-emptive nullification machine: any reader who encounters a future Times story about AI’s labor-market effects will recall not the story’s evidence, but Freeman’s century-long smear. The specific journalistic questions — which productivity tools, which warnings, what was the actual historical record — are never raised because the column’s job is not to answer them. The column’s job is to make the questions irrelevant by making the questioner a joke. We ran versions of this exact opening for years; the century-spanning smear is the brochure’s cover art.
At the Times’ crosstown rival, Alexandra Steigrad reports for the New York Post:
This may be an argument for all of us to be more charitable when critiquing New York Times coverage of advances in the software industry. If Times employees sincerely believe that Times management is using AI to run the newspaper like a dystopian police state, can we really expect staff to file perfectly balanced copy on the potential of AI?
This is the Faux-Charity Smear — Bad-Faith Catalog ID 24 — operating through Arch Smug Concern. The word “sincerely” does the heavy lifting: it grants the Times staff the appearance of good faith while infantalizing their concerns as obviously paranoid. The phrase “dystopian police state” is Freeman’s own caricature, not the union’s language; the union’s actual concern, per the documents Freeman later quotes, is management’s refusal to answer basic questions about how AI surveillance tools would be used to monitor performance and discipline. Freeman knows this. The caricature is the point. By inflating a legitimate labor concern — “will management track us with opaque AI tools and punish us with the data?” — into a cartoon, he trains the reader to hear all labor concerns as hysterical exaggeration. The specific fear — AI-driven workplace surveillance — is a fear shared by workers across every industry the Journal’s business readership manages. The column’s sleight of hand is to make the fear look ridiculous when held by journalists, thereby implying it should look ridiculous when held by anyone. That’s the donor-service move: immunize the managerial class against the surveillance anxiety their own adoption of AI tools is generating in their own workforces by making the anxiety’s most public expression look like privileged paranoia.
According to the union’s website:
Ms. Steigrad at the Post reports:
This column doesn’t envy Times management having to deal with the Times staff, but let’s keep an open mind and allow for the possibility that the newspaper’s management is just as unreasonable as its newsroom. Back at the union’s website, the rhetoric is getting fairly harsh:
This passage is the Equivocation as Objectivity, deployed with the deadpan precision of a man who knows his audience will never take the “both sides” framing seriously. Freeman grants that management might “be just as unreasonable” as the staff, but the structure of the column has already done its work: the staff have been framed as paranoid hysterics, so granting that management might also be unreasonable is like granting that the sun might also be warm. The equivalency is a sham. The line “doesn’t envy Times management” is a solidarity signal to the Journal’s own management class — a wink across the aisle that says your labor problems are real, and we see them, and this column is here to help.
Now this seems completely unfair—for Times staff to suggest that Times leadership is being unethical when the union’s own unanswered requests for information clarify that the guild doesn’t yet have the full story. Perhaps there are investigative pieces to be done here by enterprising Timesfolk willing to plumb the depths of the surveillance they allege is being conducted by their employer.
Now Freeman deploys Displacement of Responsibility — Bandura Mechanism 4 — as a gaslight. The column quotes the union’s own unanswered requests for information to argue that the guild “doesn’t yet have the full story,” then calls criticism of management “completely unfair.” But the reason the union lacks the full story is that management refuses to provide it; the surveillance questions the Guild asked, per Steigrad’s reporting, concern exactly how AI tools will be used for performance monitoring and discipline. Freeman uses the vacuum management created to blame the union for complaining in vacuum. That’s the gaslight: the boss hides the data, and the columnist says the worker can’t criticize because she doesn’t have the data.
Here is the mirror. This column is not about AI. It is a permission slip for the boss who wants to track his own workers and call their fear a century-long joke. Every business-conservative reader who smirks at “dystopian police state” will hear the same phrase from his own employees, and he will already have been trained to dismiss them as paranoid. That is the long con. We wrote it for them.
— Phukher Tarlson