In Dumping James Bennet, The New York Times Took a Page Out of Trump’s Playbook

I’ve always felt the worst thing Donald Trump has done to our country is to lower standards of many Americans. By using Twitter to churn out lies and distortions, he prompts responses by Americans of a better nature to sink to his level. He represents a president of the lowest common denominator.

Nowhere is this more currently evident than in journalism where some staff members of The New York Times castigated opinion editor James Bennet, and forced him to resign for publishing a piece by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

I don’t know James Bennet personally, although I respect his work. And I certainly don’t agree with Senator Cotton. He’s a Republican right winger whose views simply feed red meat to President Trump’s base.

In his piece that ran last Wednesday headlined “Send in the Troops,” Cotton advanced a dubious justification for deploying the military to help local police quash Americans protesting the death of George Floyd. Even the nation’s most esteemed military leaders didn’t agree with the Senator.  

However, as a journalist and editor, I defend Bennet’s publication of Cotton’s views and the Senator’s right to air them wherever he chooses.

I agree, of course, that Bennet should have read the piece before he published it. He said he didn’t. The column was written by a prominent supporter of President Trump at a volatile time in our nation’s history. In truth, though, I challenge any editor anywhere to tell me that she or he has read every story published in their daily newspapers.

Bennet’s action deserved a reprimand. But his resignation under pressure from the newspaper’s staff and a representative of the family that owns The Times sets a terrible precedent, particularly since Cotton’s piece ran in the Opinion section of the paper. In taking this action, I think The New York Times lowered its standards.

One thing I always tried to do as an editor making decisions about which stories should be placed on page one was to keep matters that seemed of great importance in perspective. When big news broke, I always tried to step back and question whether something considered “new” and “dynamic” in the rush of the moment had happened before. And, if so, what did the historical context teach me about the decision I had to make.  

As I read of Bennet’s fate, I thought of historical parallels that Americans should keep in mind before anyone rushes to judgment about Bennet, Cotton, or the important issues that now face the nation.

I worked for nearly three decades at the Chicago Tribune whose history is tied to Colonel Robert McCormick. Colonel McCormick was an eccentric isolationist conservative publisher whose views and journalistic practices I sometimes found as reprehensible as Tom Cotton’s.

However, one decision Colonel McCormick made is as relevant to today’s controversies as it was when he made it in the late 1920s. At the time, Colonel McCormick challenged a local government’s efforts to squash the views of J. M. Near, a vile publisher of a paper called The Saturday Review. Near was anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-labor.

Near reveled in the yellow journalism of his day, a brand of newspapering with diatribes similar to some found on the internet today among Trump-friendly media. He published trash. To silence Near, government officials passed a gag law designed to put him out of business and ban his right to publish his reprehensible views.

Colonel McCormick, who was no flaming liberal, didn’t agree with Near and his bigoted views. But he spent a considerable amount of his time and personal resources to challenge any government’s right to censor Near and his small publication. In fact, his efforts single-handedly forced the newspaper industry to take the Near case to the United States Supreme Court. Eventually Colonel McCormick and the industry won a victory that, in effect, prohibited American governments of all sizes from enacting gag laws.

The case remains a landmark victory for the First Amendment, the legal foundation for freedom of the press, religion, speech, and the right to assemble peacefully to engage in protests like the ones we see in the news every day.

Of course, there are not exact parallels between the Colonel’s actions and the situation with James Bennet. The issues of police violence and systematic racism that involved Bennet’s fate are different and carry enormous implications that must be addressed. Also, in the Near case, a government unit wanted to censor him. In Bennet’s case, the people want to muffle views that are not popular with many members of the public, including some journalists.

But there are some parallels. Both situations involve the right of the public in a democracy to hear or witness unpopular views. And the Near case also started in the same state where George Floyd was killed. The caption on the case? Near versus Minnesota.

—James O’Shea