Look at the comments. The New York Times readers whole-heartedly endorse his idea, proving it was not in jest in their minds at all.
NYT receives anonymous "leaks" from the deep state. WaPo may be worse, bought by Amazon's Jeff Bezos for $250M, who in that same year received $600M from the CIA, and now will provide cloud storage for them. No declaration of conflict of interest when they "report" on the CIA.