Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms

The protest worked: The paper veered into internal crisis, and the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, decided he could not continue with Mr. Bennet running the Opinion section, which had repeatedly stumbled in ways that infuriated the newsroom.

Mr. Bennet acknowledged that he had not read the Op-Ed before it was published, which people at all levels of the Times saw as a damning admission. He said in a virtual meeting with nearly 4,000 Times staff members on Friday that he had long believed that for “ideas and even dangerous ideas, that the right thing to do is expose them on our platform to public scrutiny and debate, and that’s the best way, that even dangerous ideas can be discarded.” But, he said, he was now asking himself, “Is that right?” (Mr. Bennet declined to discuss the situation further with me.)

At the same meeting, Times executives thanked staff members for their public outrage, and later that day published an editor’s note atop Mr. Cotton’s article, saying that it contained allegations that “have not been substantiated,” its tone was “needlessly harsh” and that it should not have been published.

And while those angered by Mr. Cotton’s piece dominated the Twitter and Slack conversations and won the day, some staff members disagreed in private and public with the decision.

“A strong paper and strong democracy does not shy from many voices. And this one had clear news value,” Michael Powell, a longtime reporter and sports columnist at The Times, wrote on Twitter. He also called the editor’s note an “embarrassing retreat from principle.”

The fights at The Times are particularly intense because Mr. Sulzberger is now considering candidates to replace the executive editor, Dean Baquet, in 2022, the year he turns 66. Competing candidates represent different visions for the paper, and Mr. Bennet had embodied a particular kind of ecumenical establishment politics. But the Cotton debacle had clearly endangered Mr. Bennet’s future. When the highly regarded Sunday Business editor, Nick Summers, said in a Google Hangout meeting last Thursday that he wouldn’t work for Mr. Bennet, he drew agreement from colleagues in a chat window.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-times-washington-post-protests.html