Within hours, Editorial Page Editor James Bennet took a defensive stance on Twitter, writing, “I want to explain why we published the piece today by Senator Tom Cotton.” His defense begat more outrage. On Thursday morning, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger sent a memo to colleagues defending the decision. Bennet also wrote a more formal defense expanding on his tweets.Yet, by late afternoon Thursday, the Times had bailed on the entire affair: “We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” the paper said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”
One moment, Cotton’s op-ed upheld the “principle of openness to a range of opinions,” according to Sulzberger’s memo to staffers. The next moment, its publication fell beneath the newspaper’s lofty requirements.
What happened here?
A reading problem, for one. A staff meeting on Thursday afternoon produced the revelation that Bennet himself hadn’t read the op-ed before its publication, according to a report in the New York Times itself. The boss’s failure to inspect every piece of copy churning through the Opinion section is in itself no scandal, considering its voluminous output. The culprit in this case, however, was a collective, shared sense that Cotton’s proposal to invade urban America with U.S. troops was fit to proceed along the usual editorial glide path.
...And much of the attention has fallen on Bennet’s opinion pages. He recruited former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens in April 2017 and watched as his new hire’s first column — about climate change — got mauled on social media. The column itself still bears a scar from that set-to, a consequential correction about how Stephens characterized the impact of climate change.
Other gaffes stemmed from management and process flubs. A year ago, the Opinion section published an anti-Semitic cartoon, prompting the newspaper to acknowledge that the responsible editor was “working without adequate oversight” in a "faulty process.” The section hired journalist Quinn Norton in 2018 to write about technology, only to then realize that she had written about neo-Nazi friendships and other troublesome material. She was fired hours after her hiring was announced. Another 2018 hire, Sarah Jeong, had written derisive remarks about white people; she lasted about a year.
In June 2017, the New York Times published an editorial suggesting that Sarah Palin’s political action committee had incited the murderous 2011 rampage of Jared Lee Loughner in Arizona. Palin sued for defamation, a step that opened the editorial process to a blast of sunlight. As it turned out, Bennet had inserted problematic language in the editorial without having taken basic, essential steps to confirm the details.
Missteps notwithstanding, Bennet has long been regarded as a possible successor to Executive Editor Dean Baquet. As recently as last fall, Sulzberger said this about Bennet to The Post: “Under his leadership, Opinion has been vital, creative and unafraid to tackle big issues, from privacy to domestic abuse to the legacy of slavery. He’s not only a great editor, but a deeply honorable one. As much as any journalist I’ve worked with, he’s constantly pushing himself to make the right journalistic decision.”
...How the masthead of the New York Times looks back on all this is difficult to discern. In Friday’s staff meeting, Sulzberger said that the op-ed never should have been published and didn’t meet the newspaper’s standards — this, after writing on Thursday that it embodied the paper’s spirit. In explaining that contradiction to colleagues at the meeting, Sulzberger downplayed the memo as a “placeholder” while the newspaper looked into the matter, according to sources logged into the meeting.
This particular placeholder isn’t holding anything.
The New York Times is experiencing a crisis of leadership and conviction. In just two days, it has alienated staffers, readers, liberals, conservatives, free-expression absolutists of all political persuasions and Tom Cotton. There’s a saying in Washington that if you’re angering both sides, you must be doing something right. The Times’s recent actions prove that such “wisdom” is a crock.
― Karl Malone, Sunday, 7 June 2020 21:10 (six years ago)