By Patrick Martin
wsws.org
New York Times in crisis over op-ed backing military takeover
By Patrick Martin
6 June 2020
The decision by the New York Times to publish an op-ed column by Republican Senator Tom Cotton supporting President Trump’s call for a military takeover of the United States has produced a political uproar among the newspaper’s staff and readers and forced the editorial page editor, James Bennet, to issue a public apology.
There is a lot to apologize for, since Cotton’s column was a fascistic diatribe that sought to justify the use of the military to suppress the ongoing mass demonstrations against police violence and brutality, sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, by four Minneapolis cops.
An unabashed sinophobic imperialist, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) typifies the ugly mentality of rabid US exceptionalism and crypto-fascism embraced by so many yahoos in the American state and its affiliated "security" institutions.
The column was based on the most flagrant lies, claiming “rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy,” that the police were by and large the victims of protester violence, rather than the other way around, that even after governors have called up the National Guard, in some cases “the rioters still outnumber the police and National Guard combined.”
Cotton particularly cited “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” In fact, however, there is no evidence of any role by the nebulous Antifa in alleged rioting, and not one person arrested on federal charges in the course of any of the protests has been linked to it, although several have been identified as white supremacists engaged in provocations. Even FBI Director Christopher Wray, in congressional testimony three years ago, admitted that the group did not exist as such, saying, “we’re not investigating antifa as antifa—that’s an ideology, and we don’t investigate ideologies.”
On the basis of wild and unsupported claims, which smeared hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters as violent rioters, Cotton demanded “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” He called for use of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to authorize deployment of the regular military against the protests.
The op-ed appeared on the Times website Wednesday night, and then in its Thursday print edition. It provoked wide opposition among the staff, with more than 800 signing a letter of protest, dozens calling in sick Thursday, and many more planning more public action Friday.
The initial response from Bennet and publisher A. G. Sulzberger was to defend the decision. “I believe in the principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those we may disagree with, and this piece was published in that spirit,” Sulzberger wrote in an email to the staff. Bennet claimed that it was important to make the views of public officials known, even if editors disagreed with them. This threadbare justification for printing a piece of fascist propaganda was blown apart, however, when Bennet admitted that he had not even read the op-ed before it was posted on the newspaper’s web site.
Late Thursday, Sulzberger reversed himself, and the Times issued a statement declaring that the op-ed column did not meet the newspaper’s standards because of a “rushed editorial process.”
“As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes” to the opinion pages, the statement said.
Press reports from an internal staff meeting indicated that it was the Times that solicited Cotton’s input, rather than Cotton asking for space on the op-ed page. This is extremely significant, if true, since it was well known in political and media circles that Cotton was the most vehement advocate of using troops to drown the mass protests in blood. In a statement issued Monday, hours before Trump’s appearance in the Rose Garden to threaten military force, Cotton called for “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters”—in other words, kill them without mercy. Under the Geneva Conventions, giving “no quarter” to enemy combatants is a war crime.
The initial claim by Sulzberger and Bennet that they were merely encouraging public debate over the policies of the Trump administration by publishing Cotton’s column is belied by one unambiguous fact: the Times has itself not published any editorial on Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act and send troops into major cities—possibly including New York City—in the four days that have passed since Trump’s six-minute statement in the Rose Garden.
In this, of course, they are in lockstep with the leadership of the Democratic Party, which has also been completely silent about Trump’s open preparations for an unconstitutional mobilization of the military against the American people.
The publication of Cotton’s column thus takes on a different character: it was more of an effort by the Times—which is not just a newspaper, but also a multimillion-dollar business—to take out an insurance policy. In the event Trump went forward with his demands for the mobilization of troops all over America, carrying out what would amount to a military coup against the Constitution and democratic rights, the Times would be recognized by the newly empowered presidential junta as a potential ally.
Bennet: deep and longstanding ties with the national security state.
Sulzberger, Bennet and Executive Editor Dean Baquet are now backpedaling furiously. They okayed the publication Friday of an op-ed column by Michelle Goldberg that was headlined, “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed.” The commentary attacked management’s claim that publication of op-ed columns by Vladimir Putin and Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani had set a precedent that justified publishing Cotton’s. Goldberg noted that Putin and Haqqani’s columns had not been advocating armed attacks on Americans, while “Cotton, by contrast, is calling for what would almost certainly amount to massive violence against his fellow citizens.”
Given the serious blow the op-ed column has given to the newspaper’s claim to be the standard-bearer for liberal public opinion against Trump, and Bennet’s amazing claim that he did not even read the op-ed column before it was published, it would not be surprising if the editor were given his walking papers by publisher Sulzberger.
But Bennet is not just any editor. His brother Michael is a US senator from Colorado. His father was a State Department official in both the Carter and Clinton administrations, and spent three years as the administrator of the Agency for International Development, a longtime instrument of American foreign policy, notorious for its role in CIA covert operations overseas.
The Bennets are part of the permanent national security apparatus, concentrated in New York and Washington, in which individuals shift roles and responsibilities, moving from government to think tanks to editorial positions, but always having as their top duty the defense of the interests of American imperialism.
In the 1970s, that integration was symbolized by the notorious switch in which Leslie Gelb, Times foreign correspondent and Democrat, effectively exchanged positions with Richard Burt, Times foreign correspondent and Republican. Gelb had moved from the Times to become director of politico-military affairs at the State Department in the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter. When Carter was defeated by Reagan, Burt moved from the Times to take over the position Gelb had occupied at the State Department. Gelb replaced Burt at the Times.
Today, such figures as op-ed columnist and former foreign correspondent Thomas Friedman and senior correspondents David Sanger and Michael Schmidt play similar roles, acting as direct conduits for the military-intelligence apparatus. It was Friedman, for example, who first issued the slogan, “The cure must not be worse than the disease,” which has become the mantra of the back-to-work campaign in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Sanger and Schmidt have been de facto drop boxes for the views of that section of the national security establishment that is hostile to Trump from the standpoint of demanding a more aggressive approach to Russia and Syria.
The Times is a key institution of American imperialism, helping sell the policies through which Wall Street, the Pentagon and CIA pursue the interests of the financial aristocracy, both at home and abroad. It acts as the conductor for what one critic called the “Mighty Wurlitzer” of imperialist propaganda and lies, setting the agenda for the television networks and the regional daily newspapers, and effectively determining much of what the American public reads and views.
Its exposure over the Cotton op-ed provocation only underscores the necessity for building and expanding the influence of the voice of international socialism, the World Socialist Web Site.
Addendum
New York Times editor James Bennet resigns over fascist op-ed
By Patrick Martin
9 June 2020
New York Times editorial page director James Bennet resigned Sunday, four days after the newspaper published an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, calling for the use of Army troops to crush the mass protests against police violence that are sweeping the United States.
Bennet told a staff meeting Friday that he had not read the column before it was published by the opinion pages he edits. His deputy editorial page editor, James Dao, who is responsible for the op-ed columns and edited Cotton’s fascist screed, has been removed from the editorial pages and reassigned to the Times newsroom.
The Cotton op-ed, headlined, “Send in the Troops,” was an unambiguous call for massive military violence against the American people. Making an amalgam of the relatively small number of rioters and looters and the huge popular demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd, Cotton declared: “One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”
Earlier in the week, Cotton issued a notorious statement calling on President Trump to send in the military, claiming that the (largely nonexistent) Antifa would be put to flight by the 101st Airborne Division and other heavily armed commando forces. “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” he declared. Such an appeal to kill without mercy is a war crime under international law. But it was just this bloodthirstiness that attracted notice from the Times editors, who invited Cotton to submit a column and then published it in the newspaper’s print edition Thursday.
The column provoked a rebellion among the newspaper’s staff, with more than 800 signing a letter of opposition. Bennet and publisher A. G. Sulzberger initially defended the decision on the grounds that, as Sulzberger put it, “I believe in the principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those we may disagree with, and this piece was published in that spirit.” Within hours, however, the ground had shifted, Sulzberger and Bennet declared that the op-ed column did not meet the standards set by the Times. Two days more, and Bennet was gone.
After 15 years as a Times correspondent, including roles as White House correspondent and Jerusalem bureau chief, Bennet became editor-in-chief at The Atlantic, before returning to the Times in May 2016 as editorial page editor. The Bennet family is fully “plugged-in” to the national security establishment. Bennet’s father Douglas was a top State Department official, head of the Agency for International Development—a notorious front for the CIA—and later head of National Public Radio. His brother Michael is a US senator from Colorado, serving on the Finance Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence.
From the beginning, Bennet’s role at the Times was to push those causes that were of greatest concern to the military-intelligence apparatus. The Times editorial page was the first to raise the charge that then Republican nominee Donald Trump was a Russian agent, in the op-ed column by Paul Krugman given the headline, “The Siberian candidate.” This set the tone for the role of the Times as the spearhead of the bogus anti-Russia campaign.
It would be tedious, and now unnecessary, to retrace every step of Bennet’s work as one of the key opinion-setters for Wall Street and the CIA. It is possible to find that exposed in detail, and on almost a daily basis, in the articles posted on the World Socialist Web Site over the past four years. But it must be said that Bennet was a particularly unskilled manipulator of public opinion, a characteristic that was displayed in some of his personnel choices. A few highlights will suffice.
The New York Times, the state and the making of an amalgam: Who is James Bennet?
On July 26, 2016, the WSWS first took note of the role of the new editorial page editor in promoting the anti-Russia campaign.
The New York Times indicts Trump for questioning the CIA’s moral superiority
On February 9, 2017, we replied to an editorial in which Bennet & Co. defended the moral principles of the CIA, a byword for conspiracy, assassination and torture.
Why did the New York Times hire neoconservative columnist Bret Stephens?
On May 31, 2017, we discussed the hiring of Bret Stephens, deputy editor of the ultra-right Wall Street Journal, as an op-ed columnist. Stephens had been editor of the right-wing Jerusalem Post from 2002 to 2004, overlapping with Bennet’s tenure as Times bureau chief in the Israeli capital.
The New York Times and the strange case of Quinn Norton
On February 22, 2018, we analyzed the hiring and near-instantaneous firing of blogger Quinn Norton as the editorial page’s “lead opinion writer on the power, culture and consequences of technology.” Twitter users quickly circulated blog posts in which Norton described a neo-Nazi contributor to the fascist Daily Stormer as a personal friend, as well as messages containing homophobic slurs.
Why did New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger meet with Trump?
On August 6, 2018, we took note of a tweet in which Trump revealed a meeting with Sulzberger and Bennet at the White House, which all had agreed was to be off the record. Embarrassed by the disclosure, Sulzberger claimed he attended the meeting to “raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” but he gave no explanation of why his visit to the White House had to be carried out in secret.
New York Times op-ed by anonymous Trump official gives implicit support to palace coup
On September 6, 2018, we commented on the decision of the Times editorial page to publish an anonymous opinion piece by a supposed “senior official” in the Trump administration, claiming to be part of the anti-Trump resistance. This was a further effort to foster a palace coup in which Trump would be removed, or his administration’s policies shifted towards a more direct intervention against Syria and Russia.
New York Times laments stalled Venezuelan coup
On April 5, 2019, we commented on the Times’ editorial bemoaning the evident failure of the Venezuelan military to overthrow the elected president, Nicolas Maduro, and install in his place
Juan Guaidó, a US-selected puppet largely unknown to the Venezuelan population, but immediately recognized by Washington as the “legitimate” head of government. The editorial board, headed by Bennet, “offered a lament over the failure of the CIA and its Venezuelan assets to swiftly topple the Venezuelan government,” we wrote.
New York Times publishes anti-Semitic caricature of Harvey Weinstein
No sketch of Bennet’s four years at the helm would be complete without reference to the publication of an editorial cartoon, which, as we wrote on February 26, 2020, was “a caricature of Harvey Weinstein, the film producer convicted Monday of felony sex crimes, with overtly antisemitic overtones. Weinstein is Jewish.” The use of an image clearly modeled on those of the Third Reich was all the more despicable given that Bennet’s mother is a Holocaust survivor.
Another deputy editorial page editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, former editorial page editor of the Boston Globe, becomes acting editorial page editor through the November election, according to a statement issued on behalf of Sulzberger. The five-month interim period might appear odd but is easily explained: editing the editorial page of the New York Times is a position of enormous importance to the US ruling elite, much like being CIA director or secretary of state, and requiring the same vetting by the military-intelligence apparatus. It is logical, therefore, that a new, permanent editor will be selected in step with the formation of the new administration in Washington.
The internal kerfuffle at the NYTimes—as seen and reported by the paper itself.
Click on the orange button to read the NYTimes own account of this unusual internal event.
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James Bennet Resigns as New York Times Opinion Editor
A. G. Sulzberger noted “a significant breakdown in our editing processes” before the publication of an Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest.
James Bennet, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times, in 2017.Credit...Larry Neumeister/Associated Press
“Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” said A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher, in a note to the staff on Sunday announcing Mr. Bennet’s departure.
In a brief interview, Mr. Sulzberger added: “Both of us concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required.”
At an all-staff virtual meeting on Friday, Mr. Bennet, 54, apologized for the Op-Ed, saying that it should not have been published and that it had not been edited carefully enough. An editors’ note posted late Friday noted factual inaccuracies and a “needlessly harsh” tone. “The essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published,” the note said.
Mr. Bennet’s swift fall from one of the most powerful positions in American journalism comes as hundreds of thousands of peoplehave marched in recent weeks in protest of racism in law enforcement and society. The protests were set in motion when George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, died last month after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee.
- Thanks for reading The Times.
Mr. Bennet’s tenure as editorial page editor, which started in 2016, was marked by several missteps. Last spring, The Times apologized for an anti-Semitic cartoon that appeared in the Opinion pages of its international edition.
Last August, a federal appellate court found that Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate, could proceed with a defamation lawsuit against The Times over an editorial edited by Mr. Bennet that inaccurately linked her statements to the 2011 shooting of a congresswoman.
During Mr. Bennet’s first year on the job, two Times national security reporters publicly objected to an Op-Ed by the journalist Louise Mensch, who cited her own reporting on United States law enforcement’s purported monitoring of the Trump presidential campaign. Times reporters who had covered the same story, along with reporters at other outlets, were skeptical of her claim.
Mr. Bennet worked and held key jobs in the Times newsroom from 1991 until 2006, when he left the newspaper to become the editor of The Atlantic. Since his return, he has widely been considered a possible successor to Dean Baquet, who has been in charge of the newsroom for six years.
In his four years as editorial page editor, Mr. Bennet sought to expand Opinion’s range, making it more responsive to breaking news and better positioned to cover the tech industry. While he hired several progressive columnists and contributors, he also added conservative voices to the traditionally liberal department.
He reduced the number of unsigned editorials and encouraged editorial board members to write more signed opinion pieces; one editorial board member, Brent Staples, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing last year for a series of opinion columns on race in America.
Under Mr. Bennet, the opinion section also published investigative journalism, developed newsletters and a podcast. It also publisheda much-discussed Op-Ed by an anonymous Trump administration official who described a “quiet resistance” within the federal government.
The most prominent conservative columnist hired by Mr. Bennet, Bret Stephens, angered many readers with his inaugural Times column, in which he chastised the “moral superiority” of those who look down on climate-change skeptics. Late last year, Mr. Stephens published another column, headlined “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” that led to widespread criticism. After a review, the editors appended a note to the column and re-edited it to remove a reference to a study cited in the original version after it was revealed that one of the study’s authors had promoted racist views.
Mr. Bennet is the brother of Michael Bennet, a U.S. senator from Colorado, and he recused himself from presidential campaign coverage during his brother’s unsuccessful run for this year’s Democratic nomination.
Katie Kingsbury, a deputy editorial page editor, will be the acting editorial page editor through the November election, Mr. Sulzberger said in his memo to the staff. Jim Dao, the deputy editorial page editor who oversees Op-Eds, is stepping down from his position, which was on the Times masthead, and taking a new job in the newsroom. Mr. Baquet, the executive editor, said Sunday that he and Mr. Dao had just started discussing possible jobs for Mr. Dao. Mr. Dao did not reply to a request for comment.
Ms. Kingsbury, 41, was hired in 2017. Previously she was on The Boston Globe’s editorial board, where she won a Pulitzer for editorial writing and edited another Pulitzer-winning series.
In a note to the Opinion staff Sunday, Ms. Kingsbury, who declined to comment for this article, said that until a more “technical solution” is in place, anyone who sees “any piece of Opinion journalism — including headlines or social posts or photos or you name it — that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.”
Senator Cotton’s Op-Ed prompted criticism on social media from many Times employees from different departments, an online protest that was led by African-American staff members. Much of the dissent included tweets that said the Op-Ed “puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” Times employees objected despite a company policy instructing them not to post partisan comments on social media or take sides on issues in public forums.
In addition, more than 800 staff members had signed a letter by Thursday evening protesting the Op-Ed’s publication. The letter, addressed to high-ranking editors in the opinion and news divisions, as well as New York Times Company executives, argued that Mr. Cotton’s essay contained misinformation, such as his depiction of the role of “antifa” in the protests.
Mr. Sulzberger said at the Friday town hall meeting and in his note on Sunday that a rethinking of Opinion was necessary for an era in which readers are likely to come upon Op-Eds in social media posts, divorced from their print context next to the editorial page.
Marc Tracy covers print and digital media. He previously covered college sports. @marcatracy
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