A more correct way of summarising the link you provided is that some historians contend the 1619 Project is at its core flawed, and it has been criticised by many prominent conservatives.
It’s a subject of much debate both in and out of academic circles.
While this list contains everything that is positive and great about journalism, it also embraces what makes journalism reviled. The Pulitzer award going to the 1619 project despite it's mistruths further erodes people's willingness to trust the media to do their basic job - to tell the truth.
The NYT article embraces the conceit from the media that they are they experts - they need not listen to historians, but instead journalists can be the sole arbiter of truth.
The articles "overarching contention that slavery and racism are the foundations of American history" is simply a story that the journalist wants to tell. The journalist ignored the truth in order to tell that story risks kicking out the legs to a true evaluation of America's (and more generally the west's) troubled history with race.
To some, the 1619 project becomes incontrovertible truth, backed by the Pulitzer and the NYT, and anyone who disagrees with it are racist. To others the easily disproved assertions discredit not only this article, but all well-founded criticisms of race in America.
This is how we get two Americas. Every man is entitled to their opinion, but not their own set of facts. If we ignore facts in order to feed our biases, we will never be able to talk about the truly hard issues that we have to master.
I'd recommend reading the three articles below, which constitute the public back-and-forth between the prominent historians who have been critical of the project and the NYT.
I'm not sure how you can read these (especially the brutal Atlantic article) and come away believing that the Times is acting in good faith w/ regards to the publication and defense of the 1619 Project.
When you look at the arguments offered up by the Times, they seem to be holding themselves to some standard other than objective truth.
Just look at their arguments in defense of Hannah-Jones' claim (which she states as a fact) that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery". The NYT offers their support of this argument in paragraphs 7-10 of the Editor's Response [0](the second half). The author does not even attempt to support the claim was factually correct. He makes no argument that this is the belief of any single individual, let alone a believe as common as Hannah-Jones makes it out to be. Instead he states the existence of a single anti-slavery ruling, and the fact that news of it appeared in the newspaper. QED, defending slavery was a primary motivation for the revolution!
To my eye, the author seems to be merely attempting to establish the argument's plausibility, as though the simple act of defending an argument is an acceptable substitution its for objective truth.
History is and always should be about inquiry, about discovery of truth first and foremost. Making statements of fact about history without a regard for the truth is dangerous. There's a word for that, you know.
And people are pushing to put this into public school curriculum!
> and it has been criticised by many prominent conservatives.
...and Socialists:
"Both Wood's and McPherson's remarks were published by the World Socialist Website, a left-wing, socialist website, which claims that the 1619 project's "aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal 'identities'—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race."[41] The site has also published interviews on the project with historians Victoria Bynum[42] and James Oakes,[43] and promoted a lecture series critiquing the project's alleged "racialist falsification of American and world history."[41]"
It’s a subject of much debate both in and out of academic circles.