The New York Times’s tasteless Queen op-ed

The Queen’s death has prompted an outpouring of mourning around the globe. But that sense of loss apparently doesn’t extend to the newsroom of the New York Times, where tragedy was inevitably greeted as an invitation for clickbait. Having previously hired the services of Russia Today’s Jonathan Pie to castigate Britain, the world’s worst newspaper has now blundered again, publishing an opinion piece on its homepage that most would regard as insensitive at best.

The piece was by Harvard academic Maya Jasanoff, titled ‘Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire’ – a command which, er, scarcely needs saying given HM’s love of the Commonwealth. Indeed, on her watch, Britain shed its imperial possessions and became the most multicultural nation in Europe. But given that the newspaper relies on self-flagellating Brits to fund its doomsterism, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the NYT claims the Queen ‘put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval’ nor that they opted to plug the piece on social media with the following quote:

We should not romanticize her era.