Cowardly NYTimes Execs Now Say Sen. Cotton Op-Ed ‘Didn’t Meet Its Standards’

June 5, 2020 Admin

‘We’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes…’

Tom Cotton photo
Tom Cotton/Photo by Michael Vadon (CC)

(Liberty Headlines) In an embarrassing about-face, the New York Times said Thursday that an opinion piece it ran by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, which advocated the use of federal troops to quell nationwide riots that followed demonstrations against police mistreatment of black Americans, did not meet its standards.

Cotton’s op-ed, titled “Send in the Troops” and first posted online late Wednesday, caused a revolt among the Times‘s leftist journalists, with some saying it endangered black employees. Some staff members called in sick Thursday in protest.

The Times said in a statement that a “rushed editorial process” led to publication of a piece that did not meet its standards.

Cotton taunted the paper on Twitter Thursday night, accusing it of “surrendering to the mindless woke mob.” He said on Fox News on Thursday, “I think it, once again, exposes the hypocrisy of all these woke progressives who claim to defend liberal values, but as soon as they’re presented with an opinion with which they disagree they go into meltdown, they demand censorship, they refer to words as violence, they call for firings at their newspaper.”

The Arkansas Republican’s piece remained on the Times’s website Thursday evening. The Times said it was still determining whether the column will be corrected or what to say in an editor’s note attached to it.

Earlier Thursday, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editorial page editor James Bennet defended its publication, saying they believed it was important to discuss controversial ideas in a public forum rather than keep them quiet.

But, the Times reported that later, Bennet revealed that he had not read Cotton’s piece prior to its publication.

“As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes” to its opinion pages including expanding its fact- checking operation and reducing the number of op-eds, which are opinion pieces written by outside contributors that it publishes, the Times said its statement.

Cotton’s column supported President Donald Trump’s call to bring in federal troops to stop violence associated with protests against police treatment of minorities. He denounced “nihilist criminals” out for loot and “left-wing radicals like Antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit (George) Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.”

Among the Times journalists who had protested publication of Cotton’s piece was Nikole Hannah-Jones, who last month won a Pulitzer Prize for her magazine piece called “The 1619 Project,” a distortion of U.S. history about black Americans since the first arrival of slaves.

“As a black woman, as a journalist, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this,” Hannah-Jones tweeted.

Bennet had written that he personally disagreed with Cotton and believed troops could lead to innocent people being hurt. The Times’s opinion page had published several pieces with that view, he said.

“Readers who might be inclined to oppose Cotton’s positions need to be fully aware of it, and reckon with it, if they were to defeat it,” Bennet wrote in an essay. “To me, debating influential ideas openly, rather than letting them go unchallenged, is far more likely to help society reach the right answers.”

Still, he said, “I know that my own view might be wrong.”

Poster Comment:

Patton had a Bull Terrier. When a Chihuahua barked and the dog cowered, Patton exclaimed, "Coward!" ;)