Former New York Times editor blasts newspaper over Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco: 'Threw me in the garbage'

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Emily Compagno on ex-NYT employees’ revelations: ‘Free press is supposed to be the arm of the people’

‘Outnumbered’ discusses two former New York Times employees calling out the legacy paper for shutting out conservative voices and playing politics.

Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet blasted his former outlet over the Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco that cost him his job, saying the newspaper cares too much about appealing to its left-wing subscriber base and hung him out to dry to a liberal mob.

Bennet told the new media outlet Semafor that publisher AG Sulzberger "blew the opportunity to make clear that the New York Times doesn’t exist just to tell progressives how progressives should view reality. That was a huge mistake and a missed opportunity for him to show real strength. He still could have fired me."

"I actually knew what it meant to have a target on your back when you’re reporting for the New York Times," he said, indicating he felt Sulzberger was disloyal.

"None of that mattered, and none of it mattered to AG. When push came to shove at the end, he set me on fire and threw me in the garbage and used my reverence for the institution against me," Bennet added. "This is why I was so bewildered for so long after I had what felt like all my colleagues treating me like an incompetent fascist."

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Bennet spoke publicly for the first time about the wrenching June 2020 episode when his section approved an op-ed by Cotton, a conservative Republican U.S. Senator, advocating for military force to quell violent uprisings in cities over the George Floyd murder. Cotton's op-ed set off a volcanic eruption at the Times, with liberal staffers tweeting en masse that the op-ed put Black staffers in danger. More than 1,000 Times staffers signed a letter in protest, and Bennet resigned amid the uproar.

The Times, which has published op-eds – now called "guest essays" – from Vladimir Putin and representatives of the Taliban, conducted a review in response to staffer anger and concluded the column did not meet its standards for publication. It added an editor's note accusing Cotton of fudging facts about antifa's role in civil unrest and using a "needlessly harsh" tone." 

Bennet signed off on the editor's note but noted he did not write it. He also added he had never apologized for running Cotton's op-ed in the first place.

"My regret is that editor’s note. My mistake there was trying to mollify people," he told Semafor's Ben Smith, a former New York Times media columnist.

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"[T]hey want to have the applause and the welcome of the left, and now there’s the problem on top of that, that they’ve signed up so many new subscribers in the last few years and the expectation of those subscribers is that the Times will be Mother Jones on steroids," he added.

He also admitted he did not read Cotton's article before it went to print at the time, initially defending the column's publication but resigning less than a week later. Editorial assistant Adam Rubenstein, who helped green-light the piece, left the newspaper six months later.

Bennet is the younger brother of Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. He now writes for The Economist.

For his part, Cotton blasted the Times in 2020 for caving to a "woke child mob," and conservatives have pointed to the situation as a clear example of the newspaper's liberal bias. 

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Former Times opinion editor Bari Weiss characterized the civil war at the time at the paper as one between old-school liberals and "wokes." The center-left writer resigned from the paper in 2020 as well, citing what she called the Times' illiberal, bullying environment toward non-progressives.