A former journalist at the New York Times has spoken out after being forced out by “group-think” and “bias” against conservative writers.
James Bennet, who previously served as op-ed boss at the broadsheet, penned a 17,000-word essay describing how he was “chased out” of the paper after publishing an opinion piece by Grand Old Party Senator Tom Cotton.
Cotton wrote the piece, titled Send In The Troops, following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Staff at the daily newspaper instantly demanded harsher interventiones and claimed the piece “undermines” NYT’s commitment to protesters' safety.
The New York Times' masthead is displayed in front of the midtown headquarters on December 7, 2009
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Bennet said: “The publisher called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history; people were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting.”
He claimed he received a call from NYT’s publisher AG Sulzberger demanding his resignation just three days later.
Bennet, who now works as a columnist at the Economist, described the situation as the culmination of the publication pandering to a liberal “national movement”.
He even alleged one editor suggested attaching “trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives”.
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Ex-NYT op-ed editor James Bennet
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Bennet’s essay focused on when the NYT shifted from “liberal bias to illiberal bias”.
It argued “bias had become so pervasive” it was “unconscious”, including against conservative voices who opposed the rise of 45th President Donald Trump.
He added: “Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives.”
However, Bennet was also critical of the NYT’s failure to have a “single black editor” in its opinion department in 2016.
Copies of the New York Times sit for sale in a rack
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Addressing his central concerns, he wrote: “The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.”
Bennet, who claimed an opinion piece penned by Trump was canned due to edit concerns, added: “The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.”
Closing the piece, Bennet said: “Ejecting me was one way to avoid confronting the question of which values the Times is committed to.
“Journalism, like democracy, works best when people refuse to surrender to fear.”