Adam Rubenstein’s recent piece in the Atlantic about the Tom Cotton op-ed debacle at the New York Times marked the latest unflattering inside account from that period of turmoil at the paper. But National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on The Editors podcast, argued Tuesday that the Atlantic should look in the mirror.
“The Atlantic,” Cooke said, “probably feels that it can get one over on the Times by publishing this because they share an audience. But even the paper, or the magazine . . . in which this exposé was written, is guilty of the same thing, exhibits many of the same pathologies. This is endemic in American life.”
Cooke reminded listeners, “The Atlantic was guilty of broadly the same thing with our own Kevin Williamson a few years ago. The same editor is there. The same senior management team is there.”
The handling of Cotton’s 2020 op-ed — which had called for use of the Insurrection Act to quell the George Floyd riots, and caused a staff uproar at the Times — was, as Cooke put it, “a public manifestation of what was clearly going on inside, and it hasn’t changed. And it’s not going to change until something forces it to change.”
He voiced concern about the trajectory of American media institutions as “younger people” who “are responsible for all of this are going to move up into management roles, and the older people who are to some extent resisting it, although not enough, will die off.
“I don’t understand how anyone has got themselves into this way of thinking, but I’m not quite sure what it will be that extirpates it.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.