You remember James Bennet, don't you? He was the editor of the Atlantic who got hired to run the New York Times editorial section in 2016. One of his goals was to diversify the range of opinion on the op-ed page, which in practice meant hiring a bunch of conservatives. Needless to say, this didn't go down well with lots of liberal Times readers.
Bennet kept his job, but he exhibited some misjudgments here and there and apparently by 2020 his position was a bit tenuous. That was when the Times published an op-ed by right-wing Sen. Tom Cotton. The op-ed caused an uproar, and a few days later Bennet was gone.
It was all a bit fuzzy, though. The op-ed was published online, but never in print. It was handled by an assistant editor and Bennet wasn't involved. I read it at the time and don't recall thinking it was anything out of the ordinary for a publicity seeking twit like Cotton.
Eric Wemple of the Washington Post brought all of this back to light by writing a column a few days ago provocatively headlined "James Bennet was right." So I went back and read Cotton's op-ed again to see what I thought with the passage of time.
My response, yet again, was "meh." It was written during the BLM protests over George Floyd's death and Cotton was upset about the rioting and destruction that accompanied them:
Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.
....Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”
Cotton wanted the president to authorize military intervention in cases where "rioters and looters" were beyond the control of local police. In particular, he proposed an "overwhelming show of force," which sounds like a bad idea to me but an entirely normal one for a right-wing Republican. In any case, it's an idea to disagree with, not to put beyond the pale of even discussing. I continue to see the case for arguing with Cotton, but I still don't see the case for the entire Times newsroom going nuts and Bennet ending up out on his ear.
But no worries on that score. Bennet is now "Lexington," the columnist who writes about America for the Economist. So he landed on his feet.
It ain't Fallujah.
"I read it at the time and don't recall thinking it was anything out of the ordinary for a publicity seeking twit like Cotton....In particular, he proposed an 'overwhelming show of force,' which sounds like a bad idea to me but an entirely normal one for a right-wing Republican. In any case, it's an idea to disagree with, not to put beyond the pale of even discussing."
Was Cotton's editorial edited since first publication? I thought he advocated showing "no quarter" (aka kill 'em al) to the rioters?
You can find an un-paywalled version of the op-ed here:
I find it to be a tendentious screed, but the phrase "no quarter" does not appear in it.
Forgot the url:
https://archive.ph/LMwRX
Cotten, 6/1/20
And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.
https://twitter.com/tomcottonar/status/1267459561675468800
He called for 'no quarter' on Twitter. After this call for war crimes he was invited to write the OpEd.
Invited, eh? That does change the complexion of this discussion more than a little bit.
From The Times editor's notes currently posted above Cotton's op-ed piece:
"For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece. The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged. The essay also includes a reference to a “constitutional duty” that was intended as a paraphrase; it should not have been rendered as a quotation."
Presenting unfounded assertions as if they were fact seems pretty serious to me and certainly something that any decent editor should have flagged.
George Floyd can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned. Creep, criminal, damn fool. But hey… that didn’t justify his killing on the street. No loss to humanity though. Whatever sympathy I had was dissolved by that violence during the “protests”. Mostly though, Black Lives Matter could have demonstrated that they did, in fact, matter. But worth every gang shooting and whacked rapper it was clear that black lives didn’t matter to… blacks. Go figure.
Rot in hell George Floyd. That’s where he was going to end up anyway. (If there were a hell, which there isn’t.). 🤷♂️
Lol, why pretend you had any sympathy at all?
Always good to see white guys ranting about those insufferable brown folks and how they were just about to change their mind and support those minorities.....until the scary brown people did something and proved what everyone knew all along!
Lol , good times.
It’s been two years and clearly I’m not pretending. It’s still unfortunate that the black community squandered the opportunity. If black people want to argue that their 2022 social dysfunction is a result of centuries (1610!) of oppression then the least they could so is pretend to give a fuck about this wave of murder and mayhem afflicting them.
Clearly I’m ill equipped to do anything to help. Maybe this guy?
https://www.salon.com/2022/11/04/when-i-heard-takeoff-had-been-shot-and-killed-two-words-came-to-my-mind/
“But many of us who are from poverty remember exactly how those conversations went with our friends who struggled their way through middle school and couldn't see high school as an option. Professions like rapper and TV star are pipe dreams. City worker goes out of the window because you need a diploma or GED for that. But hustling, robbing and extortion are real and always hiring, and they pay every day.”
When they tell you who they are, believe them.
So. You're unhappy with other people and their reaction to Floyd's death, but you chose to portray that unhappiness with hostility toward Floyd himself.
I guess it isn't unheard of.
Don't feed trolls like "Justin".
Drums framing isn't an accurate portrayal of the situation.
-Cotton called for (on Twitter) the US military to kill rioters and looters, to leave nobody alive and accept no surrender. This is a war crime.
- The NYT editor failed to require Cotton to support his claim of an 'orgy of violence', failed to require an explicit distinction between the army being used in the past to protect brown kids from the local police/national guard and the army being ordered to kill protesters, and he failed to even read the article before it was published.
- The NYTimes pressroom didn't 'go nuts'. In actuality they asked that the NYT fact check articles before publishing, add an editor note to this article to clarify Cottons misstatements and for Cottons article to not appear in print. Nothing 'nutty' there.
Calling for the army to commit war crimes against American protesters seems a bit....severe? The fight against the imaginary woke mob has strange bedfellows.
+1
KD: are you sure it was not in print? I would double check that. If you get paid millions of dollars and your job is to read what is published and you don’t - well you lose your job - that’s what happens. People lose their jobs all the time for not doing it. In fact it would be strange if he had kept his job. Maybe liberals should start a new campaign of the right of workers not to work, kind of like defund the police.
I agree with your points but want to point out that the op-ed editor of the NYT certainly doesn't earn millions of dollars. I doubt even the top editor, currently Joe Kahn, makes $1 million/year. Print journalism simply doesn't pay like that.
Is the salary of the Editor of the NYT indeed millions of dollars?
Because what he actually wanted was to slaughter everyone who dared to object.
Well, that's exactly what I was saying. But it was about right wingnuts like Cotton who equated all the peaceful marchers with "rioters and looters", instead of recognizing them as separate.
And isn't it funny how Cotton became all for "insurrection", as long as it was his peeps who were committing it?
I'm of the belief that we all somehow often assume everyone at the top should get to keep their job, no matter what, and I disagree with that.
It works both ways. For instance, I disagree with many people who are with me ideologically on many things, about Al Franken. In my opinion, he was a bit of a jerk (though also clearly the victim of a right wing set up) and nobody *deserves* to be a senator. Especially since he was going to be replaced by another Democrat, I didn't really care.
Similarly with Bennet. I suspect in most of these cases, there's a spark (in this case the Cotton op ed) which sets fire to kindling which had been accumulating. Then everything gets blamed on the spark and people cry "cancellation!" I read the NYT pretty regularly and the op-ed page had gotten notably right-ish without any balance. I recall a few months before the Cotton piece there was a piece by someone from Heritage, or maybe AEI, arguing that inequality didn't exist... that piece really needed some explanation published alongside it. It was very weird to read Krugman day after day and then read that piece. And by "weird" I mean it was piss-poor journalism. I felt the same way about the Cotton piece. It needed a piece alongside it pointing out the ridiculous errors of fact, such as that protestors had been especially violent. In this case, the fact that an assistant handled it, and not Bennet himself, just makes it worse. One of the shallowest most attention-seeking right wing nutjob GOP senators is writing a piece for you and you didn't read it before publishing? Sorry, that deserves firing. He didn't do his job.
Challenge or offend an orthodoxy and it will retaliate. You’re either with us or against us neither began nor ended with George W Bush.
Couple things here. Actually three. First, context matters. Especially after the tweet, running a comment by Cotton under the NYT's banner was nothing more than a provocation. He'd already made his position clear, and as noted here, it was way fringey at best. What was to be gained *in the public discourse* by giving him a major "respectable press" platform to spread it further?
Second, Cotton says "in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined." Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what happens in most demonstrations, marches, rallies, riots, civil disturbances? If not all public gatherings of just about any kind? That's why police and Guard train in "crowd control" tactics and develop "crowd control" doctrine, fer chrissakes. And why, in extremis, they're allowed to escalate from non-lethal to lethal weapons.
I can't think of any situation in this country in my lifetime that began with cops and military outnumbering civilians. Maybe in police states, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on that either. That's just Cotton parlaying public ignorance about these things.
Third, he's also calling here for the White House to decide when local situations are out of control, and not too long after there was a major discussion about that prospect over Portland because of a floated threat to do just that. Does anyone think Cotton would have been up in the front line applauding the Airborne in 1957 Little Rock if he was alive then? Avatar of local control and states' rights that he is? Give me an effing break.
So I repeat, giving him the imprimatur of the mighty NYT after he'd made his position crystal clear was nothing more than a provocation. That's bad enough in itself, but if Bennet hoped to insulate himself from blowback by leaving it to a sub-editor then he was a coward as well as a poltroon.
At best, he was gambling that he could draw more attention to the NYT, more eyeballs to the website, and generate tv coverage for the NYT, and be able to give interviews about his courage in thrusting this kind of crap before the non-Fox-viewing public.
Civilians undoubtedly outnumbered law enforcement at all of the BLM protests, but wasn't referring to civilians. He was talking about “rioters.” Since there were zero rioters at 94% of the BLM protests, law enforcement clearly outnumbered rioters at most of the protests.
I think Cotton's basic framework is correct. He distinguishes between peaceful protester on the one hand, and rioters and looters on the other. The former were exercising their Constitutional rights, and the role of the authorities were to protect those rights. The latter were engaging in criminal activity, and needs to be dealt with as such.
Cotton's proposal goes badly off the rails when he suggests using the military to enforce the law. But I think it's a bad answer to a valid question, which is how we maintain some semblance of law and order while respecting the First Amendment rights of the protesters.
The dominant narrative on the right, or at least what I perceive to the the dominant narrative, is to basically deny that the peaceful protesters exist. Possibly you have internalized this narrative to some degree. If you tend to think of “protester” and “rioter” as synonymous when discussing BLM protests, that would explain how you could fail to note which of the two words Cotton used.
You can, of course, take the position that the Times shouldn't have published an opinion piece about the BLM protests that was written by anyone on the political right. But if they were going to include a conservative perspective, they could have done worse than Cotton's piece.
If Bennett landed at The Economist, he was probably very good at his job. Messing up on one op-ed by a United States Senator seems to me less than a firing offense. Dislike Cotton all you want, there are 100 US senators and he's one of them. The Times should give space for the views of any major spokesperson in elected politics. I'm not advocating for free-lancers like Alex Jones, but people who got butthurt over Cotton's right-wing nuttery formed a mob that ousted a talented journalist/editor. How does that accomplish anything other than make the next editor inclined to censor views the left doesn't like. What happened to rational discussion? That The Economist snapped Bennett up suggests that he remains among the top print journalists around.
And while on on the topic, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were remarkable both for the vast numbers of peaceful protesters, and for the fact that opportunists availed themselves of the chance to smash windows to sully the image of the peaceful protesters. Where were the police. They got video of some of the window smashers. Were they right-wing provocateurs? Who knows, now?
And it did not help that some of the prominent protesters started calling for defunding the police. Almost no one really wanted that, and it handed the wingnuts a stick to use on BLM issues. Just my opinion.