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By Max Towey
Just over five years ago, The New York Times hit publish on an op-ed that sparked a newsroom mutiny. The result was the exile of several editorial page editors, including the most senior one.
The op-ed in question was titled “Send In the Troops” and authored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). In the piece, published on June 3, 2020, amid the post-George Floyd rioting and protesting, he called on the government to invoke the Insurrection Act to send in the military and end the looting.
He wrote:
Outnumbered police officers, encumbered by feckless politicians, bore the brunt of the violence. In New York State, rioters ran over officers with cars on at least three occasions. In Las Vegas, an officer is in “grave” condition after being shot in the head by a rioter. In St. Louis, four police officers were shot as they attempted to disperse a mob throwing bricks and dumping gasoline; in a separate incident, a 77-year-old retired police captain was shot to death as he tried to stop looters from ransacking a pawnshop. This is “somebody’s granddaddy,” a bystander screamed at the scene.
The backlash to his piece was swift and fierce. Jazmine Hughes, an NYT editor, said the piece “endangers all black lives.” She sarcastically tweeted, “As if it weren’t already hard enough to be a black employee of the New York Times.” Nearly 500 Times staffers signed a letter condemning the piece. A number took sick days to protest it.
NYT publisher AG Sulzberger initially defended the piece, writing that his paper publishes “views from across the spectrum.” The next day, editorial page editor James Bennet defended the piece with a follow-up titled, “Why We Published the Tom Cotton Op-Ed.”
Bennet said he disagreed with the piece and ran other pieces that disagreed with it, but nevertheless defended his decision to publish it:
We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this. It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.
Bennet’s explanation failed to quell the uprising. He was soon out of a job, as were his allies at the paper. The ramifications of that unrest are growing by the day, culminating in a new media deal that could reshape the modern news landscape.
In today’s We The 66, we look at the NYT revolution, the editors it forced out, and how they are taking their revenge on the legacy media in a way few could have predicted.
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