NYT Implodes Over Cotton Op-Ed While Poll Finds Nearly 60% Of Americans Agree With Him

While the New York Times self-immolates over the Tom Cotton Op-Ed – which they now say “did not meet its standards due to a rushed editorial process,” a new Morning Consult poll shows that 58% of voters – including 48% of Democrats, say they support the use of US troops to supplement city cops amid the protests.

The Tom Cotton New York Times op-ed represents the view shared by 58% of Americans overall, and 48% of *Democrats.* https://t.co/ulr7tWoRfG

— Essential Cernovich (@Cernovich) June 4, 2020

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Clearly the Times is far too woke for their own good.

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A long-simmering culture war at the New York Times, once the undisputed national paper of record, has burst into public view on Thursday as a group of young “woke” staffers at the paper denounced the opinion section’s decision to publish a column penned by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton urging President Trump to call in the military to restore order in cities across the US where violence and looting have broken out.

By now, more police officers have been killed since George Floyd’s murder after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck, cutting off circulation. An autopsy report blamed the officer’s decision to pin Floyd to the ground by his throat as the cause of death. The office is now facing second degree murder and manslaughter charges. But leftists continue to insist that all opposition to the looting in violence is a fascist dog whistle. Whether you think Cotton is an incorrigible fascist, or you agree with his position, the notion that a small but vocal minority of the body politic is pushing for the active suppression of political speech.

In a twitter thread, NYT columnist Bari Weiss – who has frequently attracted the ire of the “woke”/DSA/Bernie Bro faction, which hates “neoliberals” just as much as it hates “conservatives” (aka fascists, since everybody who isn’t a “democratic” socialist is a fascist, in their view) – explains the division between the younger “woke” reporters/staffers, and the older liberals, with executive editor Dean Baquet, the paper’s first black executive editor, caught in the middle.

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. (Thread.)

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

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The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

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Perhaps the cleanest example of this dynamic was in 2018, when David Remnick, under tremendous public pressure from his staffers, disinvited Steve Bannon from appearing on stage at the New Yorker Ideas Festival. But there are dozens and dozens of examples.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

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I’ve been mocked by many people over the past few years for writing about the campus culture wars. They told me it was a sideshow. But this was always why it mattered: The people who graduated from those campuses would rise to power inside key institutions and transform them.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

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I’m in no way surprised by what has now exploded into public view. In a way, it’s oddly comforting: I feel less alone and less crazy trying to explain the dynamic to people. What I am shocked by is the speed. I thought it would take a few years, not a few weeks.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

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Here’s one way to think about what’s at stake: The New York Times motto is “all the news that’s fit to print.” One group emphasizes the word “all.” The other, the word “fit.”

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

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W/r/t Tom Cotton’s oped and the choice to run it: I agree with our critics that it’s a dodge to say “we want a totally open marketplace of ideas!” There are limits. Obviously. The question is: does his view fall outside those limits? Maybe the answer is yes.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

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If the answer is yes, it means that the view of more than half of Americans are unacceptable. And perhaps they are. https://t.co/2zltJkLXE3

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

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Of course, many of the NYT reporters and staffers who denounced the op-ed also denounced their colleague’s take. One reporter even said the very decision to print the op-ed put the paper’s black reporters “in danger”.

Finally: Running this puts Black people, including Black @nytimes staff, in danger. pic.twitter.com/12UpKlcsAb

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner (@taffyakner) June 4, 2020

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In a post weighing in on the debate, the Columbia Journalism Review argued that Cotton’s views shouldn’t have been published because it was “built on lies”. However, the sections of the paper that it described as lies weren’t lies at all, but descriptions of the chaos across the country, recounted with perhaps a touch of hyperbole. But leftists frequently test the bounds of what’s believable, like when they accuse crime reporters of “spreading false narratives” when they report on black-on-black crime statistics.

The problem with this idea of the Times as an open forum for views of all stripes — no matter how abhorrent — is that by opening the door to all “operative opinion” (as a member of the Opinion section described it to me a couple of years ago), the Times becomes a platform for those who are hostile to its core values and at direct odds with the New York Times Company mission to “seek the truth and help people understand the world.”

The core problem with Cotton’s column, it seems to me, isn’t that its arguments are painful or dangerous (though they are those things too). It’s that it’s built on lies. “This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s,” it begins, before trotting out hyperbolic (and false) phrases like “the riots were a carnival for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements,” “orgy of violence,” and “cadres of left-wing radicals like Antifa infiltrating protest marches.”

Recent days have been marked by looting and violence. But the violence has sometimes been prompted by the police themselves, and the incidents getting the most attention have been isolated to a few commercial districts. The areas around the protests (to say nothing of the entirety of “American cities”) have been relatively calm and peaceful. As Davey Alba, a Times reporter who covers misinformation, pointed out on Twitter, the paper’s news side has already reported how promoting claims of unbridled urban unrest is part of the “untruths, conspiracy theories, and other false information…running rampant online” and being pushed by Trump and his allies.

Remember: These are the same people who forced their employers to describe riots as “protests” and looters as “demonstrators” leading to jarring headlines like “Violence and looting rage as George Floyd protests lead to clashes with cops in several states”.

The notion that we can trust them to be arbiters of the truth as simply laughable.