"You've Never Heard of Him, but He's Remaking the Pollution Fight," reads an online New York Times headline over an article about Richard Revesz, "a climate law expert and former dean of the New York University School of Law" who since January has headed the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
"You've never heard of him" is in this case a factually inaccurate New York Times headline, as in the case of Revesz, I not only have heard of him, I sat next to him once at a dinner. The Times seems to be underestimating its readers. Revesz himself had opinion pieces in the Times in 2019 and 2015 and 2012 and is quoted in the newspaper with some frequency. NYU's $5.7 million in loans to Revesz for a West Village townhouse and country home on 65 acres in Litchfield County, Connecticut, were a subject of a front-page news article in the Times in 2013.
If the Times is going to use "you" in headlines, it might want to try harder to do so in a way that is respectful of its readers, rather than insulting of them. Perhaps some Times readers even attended NYU Law School and would have heard of the dean? Perhaps some are professors at competing law schools? It's headlines like these that give longtime readers a sinking sense that the Times' new target audience is not people like us; that the Times headline writers would rather chase new readers than respect their existing audience.