Ousted NY Times editor James Bennet rips paper’s ‘bias,’ claims he was asked to add ‘trigger warnings’ to op-eds by conservatives
James Bennet – the former New York Times editorial page editor pushed out after running a column by a top Republican senator – said he was urged to attach “trigger warnings” to op-eds written by conservatives before he was dumped by the Gray Lady.
Bennet accused the so-called “paper of record” of having an “illiberal bias” in a blistering 17,000 word cover story for the Economist titled “When the New York Times lost its way,” which was published Thursday.
Bennet, who was forced to resign in 2020 following internal fury over the publication of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), blamed publisher A.G. Sulzberger for buckling under pressure from angry staffers.
In the scathing article, Bennet delved into the events that led to his exit following three years of reflection. He said the incident typified the Times’ “dangerous problem” that pervades its newsroom.
“The Times’s problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether,” wrote Bennet, currently a columnist and senior editor for The Economist.
He recalled that during his four-year tenure as Times editorial page editor — from May 2016 until June 2020 — many top editors displayed signs of their left-leaning bias.
“The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious,” Bennet wrote. “Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatize certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias.”
“James Bennet and I have always agreed on the importance of independent journalism, the challenges it faces in today’s more polarized world, and the mission of The Times to pursue independence even when the path of less resistance might be to give into partisan passions.
“But I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about The Times,” A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, told The Post in a statement.
Sulzberger described Bennet as a “valued partner,” but “where I parted ways with him is on how to deliver on these values. Principles alone are not enough. Execution matters. Leadership matters.”
The op-ed by Cotton that led to Bennet’s ouster argued that President Donald Trump should call out the US military to crack down on protests following the death of George Floyd. Many of the protests had devolved into violence against police and looting.
to resign amid backlash over the publication of the Cotton op-ed. Getty Images
Times staffers griped that by publishing the op-ed, the outlet appeared to be endorsing Cotton’s views, with some making the point that the screed endangered black colleagues.
Bennet said that he and then Times editor in chief Dean Baquet believed that Times readers should hear Cotton’s views, which were shared by many Americans — and that Sulzberger even “understood” why the piece was published.
Bennet said Baquet was frustrated and surprised by the backlash, asking aloud one day: “Are we truly so precious?”
But as anger bubbled up, both Baquet and Sulzberger began to change their tune — and Bennett soon realized that bias in the editorial ranks was eroding the paper’s professed objectivity.
In one meeting with Baquet, the top editor talked about how, as a black man, he was “vulnerable in ways a white man was not when he left his apartment wearing a hoodie and a mask, to ward off COVID.”
Bennet countered that while as a white man he had privilege, as a reporter he had been put in vulnerable positions in conflict zones. He added that he would like to have an open dialogue about his approach to the Cotton situation, but noted that nobody wanted to discuss it further.
Later, Sulzberger pressured Bennet into posting an “Editor’s Note” describing what was wrong with the Cotton op-ed, and to his surprise, when it was published, it went “far further in repudiating the piece than I anticipated, saying it should never have been published at all.”
The next day, Bennet received the fateful call from Sulzberger to resign.
“On Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation,” Bennet wrote. “I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.”
Bennet pointed out that Times writers feel danger from “vocabulary” as compared to the old days when reporters were pounding the pavement, Bennet said.
“They may know a lot about television, or real estate, or how to edit audio files, but their work does not take them into shelters, or police precincts, or the homes of people who see the world very differently,” he wrote.
He went on to add that the Times has spent too much time navel-gazing about “why so many Americans have lost trust in it” without facing up to “one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.”
“I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world ‘without fear or favor,'” he wrote. “And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.”
Bennet’s extensive takedown also took issue with the paper’s Trump coverage, noting that the Times was “slow to break it to its reader 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.”
He also said the line between opinion and news journalism was more blurry than at rivals like “The Wall Street Journal,” which features conservative voices in its opinion pages, but not let those pieces inform the news report.
“The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise,” Bennet concluded. “It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work.”
