Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple admitted on Thursday that while he had always known that former New York Times editorial-page editor James Bennet was right to publish an op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) calling for the National Guard to quell violent rioting in American cities during the summer of 2020, he and his colleagues refrained from saying so at the time because they were “afraid.”
Bennet left the Times — officially, he resigned — just days after the op-ed was published. In a recent interview with Semafor, Bennet said that he was treated like an “incompetent fascist” by his colleagues and that publisher A.G. Sulzberger “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage and used my reverence for the institution against me.”
According to Wemple, senior leadership at the Times, including Sulzberger, “scrambled to pulverize the essay in order to vindicate objections rolling in from Twitter,” but the paper’s “review didn’t deliver the factual bloodbath alleged by critics,” and “Sulzberger seemed disappointed.”
At the time, the fervor to find error with the pieces was driven by a revolt from Times staffers, many of whom tweeted out a variation of the line “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” Wemple reached out to 30 staffers to see if they still agreed with the assertion, and none offered to go on the record with their replies.
“In initially sticking up for the Times’s role in publishing controversial fare, Sulzberger had it right. The paper had published an opinion by a U.S. senator (and possible presidential candidate) advocating a lawful act by the president,” argued Wemple.
“Our criticism of the Twitter outburst comes 875 days too late Although the hollowness of the internal uproar against Bennet was immediately apparent, we responded with an evenhanded critique of the Times’s flip-flop, not the unapologetic defense of journalism that the situation required,” he wrote. “Our posture was one of cowardice and midcareer risk management. With that, we pile one more regret onto a controversy littered with them.”
The Times declined to comment on the particulars of the story, instead calling Bennet “a talented journalist with deep integrity,” for whom the paper has “great respect.”
Bennet told Semafor that he has never apologized for running the op-ed, and that his only regret is affixing an apologetic editor’s note to it.