How ‘bloodthirsty’ New York Times employees turned against their own
Steve Krakauer is a veteran journalist and media critic who has worked at CNN, Fox News, NBC and TheBlaze. In this except from his new book, “,” he reveals how New York Times employees went crazy after the op-ed section ran a column by Sen. Tom Cotton:
On 🅺May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed while in custody by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, who was later convicted of murder.
The shocking video of Floyd, who was black, and Chauvin, who is white, came into the public consci൲ousness as the COVID pandemic was heating up.
Many▨ people had ba🔯rely left their houses in two months. What came next was a wave of outrage and protest. Social justice marches were all over America, as were some instances of violence, looting and arson.
It was a particularly perilous time in the country — one that also happened to be a mere five months before a presidential election that could determine whether the country would have four moreꦡ years of Donald Trump.
This context is important because context is always important — but also because on some level, it helps explain the bizarre and extremely concerning actions that were to come, from a journalisti🍬c perspective.
Into this cultural firestorm came an opinion column in the New York Times by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), originally headlined “Send in the Troops,”♛ and shortly after publication changed to “Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops.” In it, Cotton noted the “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 ꦇof miscreants,” while concluding, “One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”
I find the column to be mostly 🔯uncompelling, and fairly obvious — is it♑ any surprise that Tom Cotton would write a column like this?
Many of the most vocal New York Times employees were outraged. Dozens of staffers, former staffers and friends of the paper shared a screenshot of the headline while tweeting, “Running this puts Black New York Tim🍎es staff in danger.”
The next day, New York Times opinion editor James Bennet responded on Twitter: “Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy. We undeꦗrstand that many readers find Senator Cotton’s argument painful, evཧen dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.”
Inside the New York Times, it was even more chaotic and hysterical after the publication o𒐪f the column than it appeared to those watching from the outside.
Shawn McCreesh, now of New York magazine, was an opinion staffer at the New York Times at the time the Cotton op-ed ran. He told me it was a day he will never forget. “I absolutely🔴 loved working at the New York Times,” he told me. “But that was just the weirdest day in the almost five years I worked there.”
He told me everything “s♑nowballed really quickly,” largely or🔯ganized on Slack — the chat tool many in the media use to dish with colleagues while theoretically working.
“There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” he told me. “And all these angry, backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers🃏 and then a handful of people who wrot🌃e for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on Slack. And the leadership was so horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve.”
Picture a giant media organization — but everyone i♔s at home, spending their time on Zoom and Twitter, afraid to go outside because of COVID, angry about the Floyd killing. And then — the Cotton op-ed drops a bomb into the virtual newsroom.
“Before we knew it, we were in all these series of town hall meetings basically watching James Bennet defend himself before the Star Chamber, and it was awful,” McCreesh said. “James is🌠 a really great guy. We all really respected him, and you can have arguments about the op-ed or whether it should have been run or the editing process. This was something else. It was lღike a Maoist struggle session.”
“The worst part was that a lot of the people who were stabbing James in the front were the ones that he hired and brought to the newspaper,” said McCreesh. “It was like Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate or something … I remember closing my laptop and pouring a huge glass of wine even though it was at like noon. Because I was so f–king freaked out by what we had just witnessed. Most of the adults in the room figured that what we were witnessing would pass, and it was just sort of this weird moment where everybody kind of had to get all the s–t out of their system and we’d move on. Very few people realized that what we were witnessing in real time was like a murder. And it was gross.”
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By the next day, the Times announced the op-ed “did not meet our standards” and, among other actions taken as a result, the paper would be “reducing the number of op-eds we publish.” The day after that, a lengthy editor’s note was added to the top of the 💖column, which noted, in part, that “the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.”
Two dayꦦs after that, the hammer: Bennet “resigned” as the editor of the opinion section. He apologized internally days earlier, but he “declined to comment” to his own paper as it wrote about his demise. McCreesh said the “murder” had a long-lasting effect, and that for a lot of people at the Times, “the morale never fully rebounded” after the Bennet incident.
But the big sticking point to me was the way the orchestrated campaign against Bennet went public — to describe it as a “danger.” It amplified the severity by a significant margin, without 🎐a doubt. Did dozens of journalists really believe that? There’s no doubt some did. Others likely felt a pressure to conforﷺm — to support their colleagues and be a proper ally.
Amy Chozick was a New York Times reporter for close to a decade who reported on Hillary Clinton and others on the campaign trail. Shꦺe remains a “writer at large” for the outlet but was not involved in the 2020 Tom Cot🏅ton discussions personally.
“What was interesting about that, and I think is legitimate … as we contemplate a media future, is that there is a generation of young kids who believe that objectivity is akin to white supremacy,” Chozick told me. “I’m not saying I disagree with them, or I agree with them. I’m saying there is a real debate here happening … You put out that fire, whether it was James Bennet getting ousted or corrections or apologies or whatever … [but] that’s still a debate. But I don’t know if anyone is ready to have or knows how to settle it.”
Ben Smith was the media columnist for the New York Timeꦜs when the Cotton op-ed was published. He thinks the fallout was a symptom of the time, but had long-lasting ramifications.
“A lot of companies and government entities were trying to figure out how to deal with theirཧ employees who we☂re suddenly really animated about racial justice, and also was this incredibly strange time in the middle of a pandemic. It’s a little hard to separate from that moment in time. Which isn’t to say it didn’t have a really lasting impact on the brand, and how people saw the brand,” he told me.
The promise by the Times to publish fewer op-eds came to an absurd conclusion the next year, in April 2021, with the announcement that there ꦛwould be no more op-eds at all published by the media outlet. Instead, they would be renamed “guest essays” — a designation that would “appear prominently above the headlಞine.”
It’s hard not to see this action as a direct result of the Cotton fallout. It’s not just that it’d be publishing fewer columns in general. Now it’s found a term to put an even greater distance between the opinion and the paper. Look, this person is just a guest here. If you don’t like what they say, please don’t blame us!
It was the embarrassin꧟g degradation of a once-great institution — that still does some great work. But now everyone is on notic🦂e. You step outside the bounds of acceptability, you try to introduce some thought-provoking opinion into the intellectual ecosystem, and you cross the kids in the newsroom? You might be next.
Excerpted from “” by Steve Krakauer (Copyright 2023). Used with permission from Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
