Quinn Norton is an engaging, funny, and stylish writer on technology and the odd communities that inhabit our digital world and make it so scary. She is also, to quote her own description, “a bisexual anarchist pacifist, prison abolitionist, & vegetarian. Currently I’m fretting about fair trade standards and ethical food.” What’s not to like?

Obviously that’s the question editors at the New York Times asked themselves not long ago, and they arrived at the same answer Edwin Starr reached when he wondered what war was good for: absolutely nothing. Earlier this month they decided to offer her a job on the paper’s editorial board. She decided to accept the job, thereby touching off a revolt from Times readers that resulted in her firing. It was six hours between the moment the Times announced her new job and the moment the Times let her go—in Internet time, roughly the equivalent of the Hundred Years’ War, except with more acrimony. The ejection of a slightly unconventional leftist from the opinion pages is the latest in a series of incidents that might give pause to the Times’s less excitable readers.

You would think Norton’s bisexuality, anarchism, pacifism, vegetarianism, and anti-prison activism would place her only slightly to the left of most people who take the Times as their daily meat. Indeed, her anxiety over ethical food should have been enough to seal the deal all by itself. But there were blemishes on her leftism, and Times readers quickly discovered them. A proctological probe of her Twitter feed showed that in years past she had used racial and sexual slurs and had once referred to a neo-Nazi as a “friend.” With protests spouting from various social media, the Times editors quietly backed Norton toward an open window and gave her a gentle push.

A few brave souls came to her defense. In the dimly remembered past—two years ago, let’s say—their explanations would have struck nearly all Times readers as exculpatory, and Quinn Norton, appropriately chastened, would have kept her job. Wired magazine, for instance, decreed that Norton’s ironic use of anti-gay language was covered by something called “in-group privilege,” a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card that she’d earned as a member in good standing of the “queer community.” The ugly racial talk and the Nazi friend were part of her larger evangelization efforts to racist louts. She was just code-switching, slipping into their lingo during her many attempts at online conversion.

Readers were having none of it; the disparaging tweets rained down upon the Times editors, especially the opinion editor James Bennet. Most of the outraged critics (all critics of the Times are outraged) cited other editorial decisions made by Bennet that ran contrary to their own vision of the Times. The preeminent offense was last year’s hiring of the occasionally conservative Bret Stephens, late of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, to serve as a regular columnist. His debut column expressed agnosticism about the long-term effects of global warming. Times readers were scandalized, the cancellations poured in, and the publisher was compelled to send an obsequious letter to his unhappy customers begging their return, with a promise to be more careful in the future.

But he hasn’t been careful enough. Since then, the opinion pages have published articles by the mercenary and paramilitary entrepreneur Erik Prince, the controversial gun control scholar John Lott, and other right-wingers whose views many Times readers have ruled out of court. Another recent hire from the Journal, a gifted and evidently armor-plated woman named Bari Weiss, has already become a dark figure in the fevered dreams of Twitter and Facebook. Right there in the New York Times she questioned some excesses of the #MeToo movement. And during the Olympics she praised the contributions immigrants have made to American life—but she did so improperly, in unapproved language. Readers and even her fellow Times employees accused her of “othering” the “marginalized.”

You’ve probably noticed that the great bulk of our culture—educational institutions, news and entertainment media, foundations, most corporations—is run by the kind of people who have been taught to misuse “other” as a verb, always transitively, never ironically. As a rule they are impressively credentialed and well-to-do, not terribly familiar with history or with non-popular culture, safely and lucratively employed as “knowledge workers.” They also have an unrealistically high degree of confidence in the opinions they share with their fellow readers. It is hard to overestimate the importance of the New York Times to the world they inhabit. Exposure to dissenting views is often difficult for them. Times critics used to describe unpopular op-eds as “offensive.” Now the term is more often “insulting.” The first implies a lack of taste. The second implies a lack of deference—to the reader, by the editors.

As it happens, the Times opinion page was invented in 1970 precisely to expose readers to views that could balance the undisputed leftward tilt of the paper’s unsigned editorials—“providing a platform for responsible conservative opinion,” as one early manifesto put it. Today, the unsigned editorials are more apocalyptically anti-Republican than they’ve ever been, but they’re not sufficiently hysterical to satisfy an incorrigible and extremely sensitive readership. If there truly are stirrings of rebellion against the paper that these readers rely on every day—for self-affirmation as much as for news—the consequences could be large. For nowadays, in this rough patch in journalism’s history, the paper relies on its readers, too; the duty of the hack is not only to inform but to ingratiate. Soon there may come a time when the editors of the world’s greatest newspaper will have to choose between their belief in unconstrained debate and the undisturbed comfort of their readers.