Former New York Times Editor Claims Colleagues Treated Him Like an ‘Incompetent Fascist’ for Running Cotton Op-Ed
In an interview with former New York Times columnist Ben Smith, ex-editorial page editor James Bennet finally spoke out about the controversy that led to his leaving the Times, saying he was treated like an “incompetent fascist” by his colleagues for having published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.).
Bennet left the Times on June 7, 2020, just a few days after the publication of the Cotton op-ed, which recommended that the National Guard be deployed to quell the riots that were plaguing American cities at the time. Social-justice minded Times employees led a public revolt over the publication of the op-ed, publicly accusing the paper’s leadership of endangering the lives of black staffers by giving a sitting U.S. senator a platform to air his views.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, who headed the Times’ 1619 Project, led the public backlash against Bennet.
“I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this,” Hannah-Jones tweeted at the time.
On Wednesday, Hannah-Jones denied her role in Bennet’s ouster, tweeting “I know the National Review has zero interest in accuracy or truth, but it’s absolutely false that I led any effort against James Bennett [sic] and the only proof offered is a single tweet when many NYT journos tweeted against that column. But my name gets clicks.”
I know the National Review has zero interest in accuracy or truth, but it’s absolutely false that I led any effort against James Bennett and the only proof offered is a single tweet when many NYT journos tweeted against that column. But my name gets clicks https://t.co/Vrov2v9jIt
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) October 19, 2022
Hannah-Jones’s name at no point featured in the headline of this article.
While Bennet had affixed an editor’s note to the column in the wake of the backlash, he now says that he wishes he had not.
“My regret is that editor’s note. My mistake there was trying to mollify people,” Bennet said in an interview with Smith’s new publication Semafor. He went on to accuse publisher A. G. Sulzberger of having blown “the opportunity to make clear that the New York Times doesn’t exist just to tell progressives how progressives should view reality. That was a huge mistake and a missed opportunity for him to show real strength.”
“I never apologized for publishing the piece and still don’t,” said Bennet, who also charged Sulzberger with disloyalty.
“When push came to shove at the end, he set me on fire and threw me in the garbage and used my reverence for the institution against me,” he continued. “This is why I was so bewildered for so long after I had what felt like all my colleagues treating me like an incompetent fascist.”
Bennet’s commentary was included in a larger profile of the Times, which Smith describes as being at a crossroads as it struggles with questions about its structure and increasingly progressive workforce and readership base.
“They want to have the applause and the welcome of the left,” said Bennet. “And now there’s the problem on top of that that they’ve signed up so many new subscribers in the last few years and the expectation of those subscribers is that the Times will be Mother Jones on steroids.”
