We all remember the brouhaha over the NY Times decision to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton in which Cotton suggested using the National Guard to manage rioters in the summer of 2020. The Times was attacked on Twitter and from within by a group of younger staffers led by Black@NYT and pushed by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Eventually the paper apologized profusely and James Bennet, the editor who allowed the Cotton piece to be published, was fired.

Recently, Bennet told Ben Smith (formerly of the Times and now at Semafor) how he felt about all of that. Is it just me or does he almost sound like a conservative media critic? [emphasis added]

Bennet believes that Sulzberger, the publisher, “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 said. “He still could have fired me.”…

The Times and its publisher, Bennet said, “want to have it both ways.” Sulzberger is “old school” in his belief in a neutral, heterodox publication. But “they 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.”…

“I actually knew what it meant to have a target on your back when you’re reporting for the New York Times,” he said, referring to incidents in the West Bank and Gaza.

“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 said. “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.”

Today, Erik Wemple at the Washington Post has a really excellent piece looking back over the history of this incident. His conclusion is that Bennet was right about basically everything and his critics were trying to appease a mob.

Wemple notes that Cotton’s piece started life as a tweet sent out at a moment when protests were turning into riots around the country after the death of George Floyd.

Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.

If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.

We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) June 1, 2020

Twitter threatened to censor his tweet and Cotton proposed writing a piece for the Times about Twitter’s reaction. But the Times convinced his office to focus instead on the topic of the original tweet. On June 3, they published it under the headline “Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops.” Immediately, there was a backlash. [emphasis added]

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, tweeted that the paper should have done a news story to push back against Cotton’s ideas, as opposed to “simply giv[ing] over our platform to spew dangerous rhetoric.” Astead W. Herndon, a national politics reporter, made a similar point, tweeting that “if electeds want to make provocative arguments let them withstand the questions and context of a news story, not unvarnished and unchecked.” There were other persuasive broadsides against the decision to publish Cotton.

Many Times staffers, however, forwent the rigor of argumentation and tweeted out the following line — or something similar — to express their disgust: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” The formulation came from the internal group Black@NYT and received the blessing of the NewsGuild of New York as “legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety,” Smith, then the Times’ media columnist, reported at the time.

The “danger” tweets — along with a letter from Times employees slamming the op-ed — landed with impact. Although Sulzberger initially defended publication as furthering the “principle of openness to a range of opinions,” he bailed on that posture within hours.

Having turned tail and run, Suzberger then set about finding some justification for doing so. The set up a fact-check that was designed to prove what a mistake it had been to publish Cotton in the first place. [emphasis added]

Whereas media outlets typically develop arguments to defend work that comes under attack, the opposite scenario played out over the Cotton op-ed: Top Times officials, according to three sources, scrambled to pulverize the essay in order to vindicate objections rolling in from Twitter. A post-publication fact-check was commissioned to comb through the op-ed for errors, according to the sources, even though it had undergone fact-checking before publication. The paper’s standards desk spearheaded work on an editor’s note.

Deputy editorial page editor James Dao, who pushed for publication of the piece, spent more than an hour on the phone with a Cotton aide that Thursday night to inventory alleged problems. Dao, says the aide, was pointedly unenthusiastic about the pursuit. “It sounded like he had a gun to his head and he had to find something,” the aide — who is no longer with Cotton’s office — told this blog…

Sulzberger seemed disappointed upon being told that the post-publication fact-check hadn’t punctured the op-ed, according to a source involved in the process. The Erik Wemple Blog asked the Times for another example of an editor’s note apologizing for nonfactual issues. The Times didn’t answer that question, among others.

In retrospect, the claim that black Times staffers were endangered by the op-ed seems particularly indefensible. Wemple reports he spoke to about 30 staffers and asked if any of them still believed that. None were willing to defend it on the record.

Personally, I’m not invested in James Bennet’s career but I think this was a pretty clear case of arguably the most powerful newspaper in the US buckling under pressure from a woke mob using woke mob tactics to get their way. The fact that the mob won is definitely bad news.