Last Thursday, as the New York Times was facing a staff rebellion over Senator Tom Cotton’s incendiary op-ed advocating military force to contain the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editorial page editor James Bennet met via videoconference with small groups of employees. Bennet had defended publishing the piece, headlined “Send in the Troops,” issuing a statement that the Opinion section “owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy.” But now he was taking tough feedback from staffers who were flabbergasted that their own newspaper’s Opinion pages had given voice to a federal lawmaker’s call to dispatch soldiers into the streets, where many protesters and also journalists had already been subjected to over-aggression and violent tactics by the police.
Bennet had always maintained that he was committed to publishing a diversity of opinions on the pages he supervised, and he had a well-articulated sense of what their role was in the culture, “setting and modeling standards for engagement and respectful disagreement,” as he told me two years ago. Armed with this philosophy, he and the newspaper had weathered the criticism in the past. But amidst the national turmoil, this seemed to many like a fire-in-a-crowded-theater moment, when his free-speech ethic was sorely inadequate as a guiding principle of the Op-Ed page, which is designed to include positions that oppose those of the progressively minded editorial board. Almost as soon as the article was published, Times journalists, in an unprecedented online rebellion, took to Twitter to denounce it, often including the phrase, “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
These periodic Times crises, from Jayson Blair to Judith Miller to the dismissal of Jill Abramson, always have had to do with the paper’s importance and credibility as an American institution, and its employees’ perception of it. David Carr once said, describing the intensity of these convulsions, that if your actions threaten “this thing we all hold in common,” there will be hell to pay. The current crisis, unfolding amidst wrenching, painful, hopeful unrest, is a generational watershed reflecting the national moment, and it is liable to remake the Times in ways that were previously unimagined. The so-called woke-wars focus in much of the discussion about Cotton’s op-ed is an oversimplification. The situation raises deep questions about news and truth and what can count as permissible opinion, ones that the Times has always believed it had answers for and, suddenly, does not. But it’s also a story of basic editorial dysfunction, where Bennet’s Op-Ed page was said to be publishing more articles than it could adequately discuss and vet. Speech can be free—but words matter.
The backlash over the Cotton op-ed was the latest in a series of explosions that clouded Bennet’s four years running what many would still consider to be the most powerful and influential opinion platform in American journalism. When it came to the earlier controversies, Sulzberger had always stood by his embattled editorial page editor, but now Bennet’s future was looking less certain. In one of those Thursday staff meetings, he was asked point-blank if he was the right person to lead the Opinion section. His answer was hardly a resounding show of self-defense. “I don’t know,” Bennet replied, according to people familiar with the exchange.
Three days later, that question was answered unequivocally. A little after 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, Sulzberger sent a companywide email announcing that “James Bennet has resigned as Editorial Page Editor,” and that Jim Dao, a long-serving member of the department who oversees Op-Eds and had managed the Cotton op-ed, which was quarterbacked by an editorial assistant, would be moving to a new role in the newsroom. (“I oversaw the acceptance and review of the Cotton Op-Ed,” Dao tweeted on Saturday. “The fault here should be directed at the @nytopinion leadership team and not at an intrepid and highly competent junior staffer.”) Another of Bennet’s deputies, relative newcomer Katie Kingsbury, was appointed to serve as acting editorial page editor through the November election. “Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing process, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” Sulzberger wrote. “James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.”
The swift timing was a surprise. On Friday, Bennet and Dao held a long and emotional videoconference with the Opinion department, during which both of them were brought to tears, according to someone familiar with the meeting. Bennet spoke about changes they were going to usher in and protocols that were going to be fixed—in other words, he didn’t sound like someone who didn’t intend to continue running the section. “I don’t get any sense that he’s gonna resign,” a source told me that afternoon. As of Friday evening, according to Times sources, there were no indications that a shake-up was imminent. But the wheels determining his fate were already in motion.
Earlier that day there had been a two-hour, all-staff virtual town hall in which Bennet, Sulzberger, and other members of management fielded tense questions from employees. Sulzberger, after initially backing the principle of publishing the op-ed, now conceded that it should never have been published. “The tone was contemptuous, and the piece was needlessly and deliberately inflammatory,” he said. Bennet “seemed so sad,” as someone who was tuned in put it. “He seemed beaten down. It was kind of crushing to watch him.”
At the town hall, Bennet took ownership of the debacle, but for many of his colleagues, it was too little, too late. On a company Slack channel with hundreds of participants, employees complained to one another that the brass wasn’t really addressing their concerns, or offering a forensic accounting of how the Cotton piece, which was criticized for inaccuracies and exaggerations, had made it through the editing gauntlet. “It was fairly tragic, just full of anguish and pain,” another source said. A former Times executive who was following the whole situation told me, “After the town hall meeting, what became clear was that he couldn’t stay in that job, because it was clear that the newspaper no longer supported him, and in a political job like that, if you don’t have support, you’re dead.”
Meanwhile, Sulzberger had done a thorough autopsy on the publication process. “It was clear there just weren’t enough eyes on the thing,” one of my sources said. “The system was cut short in a way that’s just not okay.” (Bennet, for instance, admitted he hadn’t read the Cotton piece before it went online Wednesday.) Sulzberger, who is close to Bennet, had been consulting with other members of his inner circle, which is known to include executive editor Dean Baquet, as well as two of his cousins who are in leadership roles at the Times—David Perpich, who works on the business side, and Sam Dolnick, who’s an assistant managing editor in the newsroom. The pattern of unforced errors and P.R. nightmares under Bennet’s leadership was undeniable: a Sarah Palin libel suit; a not-so-thoroughly vetted editorial board hire whose job offer had to be rescinded; the publication of an anti-Semitic cartoon; the botched editing of a Brett Kavanaugh book excerpt; and, just a few months ago, Bret Stephens’s highly problematic “Jewish Genius” column. Virtually everyone at the Times, from newsroom journalists to Opinion staffers to management, wanted these controversies to finally stop, but no one was confident that they would. Between that and the highly underwhelming town hall, the path forward became clear to Sulzberger. The publisher spoke with Bennet over the weekend, and it was agreed that he would resign, effective immediately.
I texted Bennet Sunday night and he declined to chat, but in his parting statement, he said, “The journalism of Times Opinion has never mattered more than in this time of crisis at home and around the world, and I’ve been honored to be part of it. I’m so proud of the work my colleagues and I have done to focus attention on injustice and threats to freedom and to enrich debate about the right path forward by bringing new voices and ideas to Times readers.”
On the scandal scale, if your run-of-the-mill newsroom tiff is a one and Jayson Blair is a 10, the Cotton fiasco probably ranks about a seven. Its timing and severity has everything to do with the widespread chaos sweeping across the nation and the world, a perfect storm of long-simmering racial anguish, civic unrest, and political instability, all of it occurring not only in the most supercharged election year in recent memory, but also in the midst of a global health crisis like none that has been seen in more than a hundred years. Throughout the country, and certainly within the ranks of the New York Times, emotions are running high. People are scared, people are angry; they’re distant when they want nothing more than to be close. Cotton’s call to arms—which came as Times journalists were tirelessly covering a worldwide social justice movement that is impossible not to sympathize with if you possess a soul—hit on every possible nerve that had already been frayed by these highly fraught realities.
The episode also dealt a career-upending blow to one of the most powerful figures not only within the institution, but arguably within the press as a whole. In 2016, after 10 years as editor of The Atlantic, the prospect of running the most valuable piece of real estate in American opinion journalism lured Bennet back to the Times, where he’d earlier made a mark as a White House correspondent and Jerusalem bureau chief. Replacing consummate Timesman Andy Rosenthal as editorial page editor, Bennet was talked about as a contender to succeed executive editor Dean Baquet. Until last week, even as Bennet weathered one storm after another, that narrative more or less held up, with the newsroom succession seen by many as a bake-off between Bennet and managing editor Joe Kahn. Whenever some screwup or highly divisive publishing decision would put Opinion in the crosshairs of the social media mobs, people would wonder, What does this mean for Bennet’s chances of becoming executive editor? In the wake of Cottongate, that thinking had shifted to, as one source put it, “Will he survive this?”
Bennet has a reputation as a smart and thoughtful editor (though Twitter has given voice to far less generous characterizations). In my interactions with him as a reporter, Bennet has only ever been responsive, kind, and willing to engage, even if I was writing about what a mess Opinion had become. Just a few months ago, as I reported in January, Bennet had initiated a significant overhaul of the department, which he was transforming into a more reporting-driven destination for big enterprise projects that effectively competed with work being done in the newsroom. Many of his staffers were deeply frustrated with the recurring earthquakes and their aftershocks, but they were also proud of the impact their work was having, and Bennet was optimistic about the future of the section. “I do think of it as a long game,” he told me at the time. “When I look at all the work that this team is doing, it’s awesome. I feel very good about the direction we’re headed in.”
People getting angry about Times op-eds is hardly new, nor is the concept of the Times giving a platform to contrarian or divisive voices, or ideas and perspectives that are repugnant to the paper’s readership, or even dangerous. (Vladimir Putin, Adolf Hitler.) A core principle guiding Bennet’s approach to the section was that readers should be exposed to such ideas, not protected from them, and he was committed to publishing writings that would, by their very nature, draw intense criticism. (Cotton, Erik Prince, the Times’ own Bret Stephens, whose hiring from the Wall Street Journal kicked off Bennet’s tenure with a thunderbolt of outrage.)
But in a social media environment of constant conflict, when any and all extreme opinions can instantly find a platform, and be instantly denounced, the wisdom of that approach began to look shaky, especially as entire news organizations themselves have been grappling with their place in this new world. Under intense pressure, the rules are being reimagined. Should the Times be the Walmart of opinion, one-stop shopping for every possible point of view, however outrageous or wrongheaded? These days, Twitter and Facebook already serve that purpose—so what role should the Times play? What should its imprimatur mean on an opinion article? Bennet’s successors will have to answer these questions.
Social media, which publicized and fueled the anger over the Cotton op-ed, also has a new dimension inside the Times, where people now have a highly effective mechanism for not only airing their frustrations, but organizing around them. By late Friday afternoon, that “feedback” channel on Slack where employees were weighing in about the company town hall had swelled to nearly 2,000 participants. “It tends to foment unrest as much as it expresses the unrest,” one of my sources observed. “That’s what’s different than before. The unrest tends to compound because of this internal communication tool where everyone’s seeing what everyone’s saying, and people are more willing to be vocal.”
Yet another source had an even more Black Mirror–esque assessment of Friday’s proceedings, hitting upon the surrealness of such a massive internal crisis being addressed 100% virtually (thanks to the new workplace conventions of a global pandemic). “The event felt like a YouTube video of people talking at you, and Slack felt like Twitter,” this person said. “It was just everyone angry on the internet.”
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