Here Are the 5 Most Important Revelations from a Cancelled New York Times Editor’s Deep Dive Into Rot at the Gray Lady

James Bennet was editorial page editor for the New York Times in the summer of 2020 when the Gray Lady published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). Two days later, he was out of a job.

Cotton had argued that the United States military should be used to subdue the violent, unlawful riots that were springing up alongside peaceful protests of the murder of George Floyd. Backlash to the piece from progressive activists was to be expected, but Bennet had not anticipated the internal revolt that resulted in his ouster.

Here are five of the most notable revelations from Bennet’s 17,000-word deep dive he wrote for The Economist into the incident and rot corrupting his employer of nearly 20 years:

1. “Reliable” Outrage Over Conservative Voices

According to Bennet, “conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars within the Times.”

“Sometimes I would hear directly from colleagues who had the grace to confront me with their concerns; more often they would take to the company’s Slack channels or Twitter to advertise their distress in front of each other,” he explained.

A year into Donald Trump’s presidency, Bennet published a slate of letters from Trump voters reflecting on it. His colleagues were so outraged, they grilled him at an internal townhall in which they demanded to know when he intended on publishing a page full of letters written by supporters of former president Barack Obama.

“The question just didn’t make sense to me,” mused Bennet. “Pretty much every day we published letters from people who supported Obama and criticised Trump. Didn’t he know that Obama wasn’t president any more? Didn’t he think other Times readers should understand the sources of Trump’s support? Didn’t he also see it was a wonderful thing that some Trump supporters did not just dismiss the Times as fake news, but still believed in it enough to respond thoughtfully to an invitation to share their views?”

In another instance, a senior editor suggested Bennet “start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives.”

“Sometimes the bias was explicit,” remarked Bennet. “One newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.”

2. Publisher A.G. Sulzberger Embraced “Double Standard” Between Treatment of Liberals and Conservatives

After observing that “the Times’ failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues,” Bennet brought the problem to his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger.

He was less than receptive to Bennet’s concern for his conservative colleague’s complaints about double standards. As Bennet put it, “he [Sulzberger] lost his patience” and “told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it.”

“A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics,” argued Bennet. “But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.”

3. Racial Problems at the Paper

Bennet lamented “the generational failure of the Times to hire and promote women and non-white people, black people in particular” and described a culture that persistently disadvantaged and undermined black employees.

“Pay attention if you are white at the Times and you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them,” wrote Bennet. “You might hear how a black journalist, passing through the newsroom, was asked by a white colleague whether he was the ‘telephone guy’ sent to fix his extension. I certainly never got asked a question like that. Among the experienced journalists at the Times, black journalists were least likely, I thought, to exhibit fragility and herd behaviour.”

“As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock,” he continued.

4. The Times Repeatedly Botched Its Own News Coverage of the Cotton Op-Ed

The resignation elicited from Bennet was eventually done under the cover of dutiful, scrupulous commitment to standards and accountability:

To Sulzberger, the meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed and my departure in disgrace are explained and justified by a failure of editorial “process.” As he put it in an interview with the New Yorker this summer, after publishing his piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, Cotton’s piece was not “perfectly fact-checked” and the editors had not “thought about the headline and presentation.”

But if the Cotton op-ed was imperfect, the ensuing coverage of the backlash to it was an unmitigated disaster.

In the company’s Slack channel, one reporter complained that “amplifying a message that argues for MORE force only puts our own people in harm’s way, and undermines the paper’s commitment to their safety,” and submitted “I think it’s good that a lot of us will put our names on a strong condemnation.”

The next day, the supposedly straight-laced reporter had a byline on write-up that erroneously asserted that Cotton had advocated for the the military’s suppression of “protests against police violence.”

The falsehood was repeated in a second article about Bennet’s resignation, which asserted that Cotton had wanted “military force” to be used “against protesters in American cities.”

In fact, Cotton had taken pains to distinguish between “a majority who seek to protest peacefully” and “rioters and looters,” inveighing against the false equivalency drawn by some between the two groups.

The self-styled paper of record also reported as fact a Slack channel rumor that a junior editor named Adam Rubenstein had been responsible for editing the piece, discounting a more senior employee’s declaration that he had also edited the piece and overseen the publication process.

5. Times Staffers Demanded More Scalps After Inducing Death Threats Against a Junior Employee

The Times‘ mistaken singling out of Rubenstein, who had previously worked at the conservative magazine called The Weekly Standard, as a scapegoat resulted in him being the target of death threats, wrote Bennet.

“It was the newsroom that put him in harm’s way,” noted Bennet, who pointed out the irony of Times reporters asserting on Twitter and in the company Slack that the op-ed had physically threatened the wellbeing of Times reporters.

But the mob was not satisfied with Rubenstein’s suffering. During a company-wide townhall, angry staffers “demanded to know things such as the names of every editor who had had a role in the Cotton piece.”

“Having seen what happened to Rubenstein I refused to tell them,” recalled Bennet. “A Slack channel had been set up to solicit feedback in real time during the meeting, and it was filling with hate.”

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.