I love the New York Times.

It is the talisman of American journalism, full stop. Slackwits will bray that it’s like any other liberal media outlet. Stockwits will caw against investment. And bitterwits will grumble that their product is so similar as to be indistinguishable from the New York Times. All bullshit.

I worked for its only ”competitor,” The Washington Post, and even we knew: The Times was where you wanted to go to, if not come from. Post reporters went to the Times, not the other way around. If the Times had a story cold, your only option was to confirm it. Because you were never going to upstage or outdo a Times story. The Times was truth. Is truth.

Which made it so heartbreaking to be a fully-engaged online subscriber for less than 24 hours.

I began the subscription quite by chance. I subscribe to the Times’ free Southern California newsletter, a curation of Times stories throughout the West. A story about covid mask safety lead me to the primary site, nytimes.com.

When I learned I had reached the limit of free stories, I considered subscription. I’ve always felt public information should be public, free and funded, like the public library system or PBS. But that’s another column. At $4 a month, the NYT was a screaming deal. And the industry buckles. So I took it.

When you subscribe to the New York Times online — as I’m guessing happens when you subscribe to any online news outlet — you’re greeted with an array of options on the news menu, all offered a la carte: sports stories; international reports; business pieces; cooking articles. My inbox was full enough, so I just clicked ”Breaking News.” I figured if Russia invaded Flint, I’d wanna have my day interrupted.

Within that day, I got an alert: The president had Covid. Ok, all systems working.

But later that day, I got another alert: Witnesses had been finalized for upcoming Jan. 6 hearings.

Uh oh.

At the end of the day, alert again: Pence staff called families to say tearful goodbyes, Jan. 6 witness testifies.

For one of the few times in my life, I went to bed with buyer’s remorse.

The next morning, this alert (always in red, always in caps) awaited me: President Biden’s Covid symptoms improved after his first full day of taking an antiviral drug, according to the White House physician.

Ok, now I’m pissed. That is not breaking news. Breaking news would have been if the president’s condition had worsened.

And I realized: The New York Times was still the talisman of journalism. But journalism itself had changed, and the Times was a dark reflection of that shift.

People who are not in the news business — and a frightening number who claim to be — have often misunderstood what journalism does. Journalism doesn’t cover reality. It covers exceptions to reality. That’s why it’s called news. It is something new and worth sharing. And the journalistic ethos states, quite chillingly: It’s not news if the school bus didn’t crash.

And in Biden’s case, the bus did not crash. At best, Biden’s Day One recovery was a day two story. It was a box score. But that urgent, breathless delivery of all news has made the conveyance actual news flaccid, impotent, forgettable. School Shooting! Trump Stupid! Abortion Overturned! Biden Aging! AMERICA WINS SHOUTING CONTEST!!!

The Times used to silently carry the big stick of truth. Now it screams it has a gun. That the Times can’t distinguish between breaking news and not-yet-reported news is heart-piercing and inevitably tied to journalism’s larger wayward drift:

We have forgotten the power of understatement.

So I canceled all emails. I’ll still keep the subscription; their stories remain unrivaled and the closest thing to that unattainable oxymoron of objective journalism. They’re still the truth.

But I’ll decide what breaks my day.