The culture at The Times frowns on intramural criticism.
Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) We've received your submission.Sen. It’s a subsidiary of the crisis that has the country on fire.Senator Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed was published on Wednesday. Would you like to receive desktop browser notifications about breaking news and other major stories? It’s an idea that appalls many military leaders.As James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, made clear in his Many people at The Times, including several in the Opinion department, reacted to the Cotton Op-Ed by tweeting, “Running this puts all black people in danger, including @nytimes staff members.” That took courage. That makes his perspective relevant at this particular moment,” a Times spokeswoman argued in response to outrage over his Op-Ed in February.A similar case could be made for hearing from Cotton, an enemy of liberal democracy who has the president’s ear.
How should opinion pages respond to the right’s authoritarian turn?Before Donald Trump became president, most newspaper op-ed pages sought to present a spectrum of politically significant opinion and argument, which they could largely do while walling off extremist propaganda and incitement.
The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.
“They’ve only prostrated themselves in front of their young children who are acting like children.”Cotton insisted there was no “rising up in arms” at the paper “It just goes to show you the moral rot inside some of our media and academic institutions, that they don’t get outraged about the Taliban but they do get outraged about conservative opinion,” Cotton said.Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, previously said that the paper going forward will consider long-term and short-term changes to the editorial review process. presented very different views on how the Republican Party should handle debt going forward during a private lunch, which The Washington Posts suggests may have been a brief preview of the 2024 GOP primary.. Cruz warned his colleagues against spending too much on the next round of coronavirus relief funding, claiming voters could rebel … Cotton, by contrast, is calling for what would almost certainly amount to massive violence against his fellow citizens: an “overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”In a racist inversion, he equates his fantasy of soldiers putting down an uprising triggered by police brutality against black people with previous presidents using the military to enforce desegregation.His argument is frequently slippery and dishonest. The journalism industry is in free-fall, and working here often feels like being on the last boat out of a burning harbor. But if they’re honest about what they’re thinking, it’s usually too disgusting to engage with.
But as I’ve seen my colleagues’ anguished reaction, I’ve started to doubt my debating-club approach to the question of when to air proto-fascist opinions.Putin and Haqqani, after all, weren’t given space in this newspaper to advocate attacks on Americans during moments of national extremis. All across America in the last week, peaceful protesters and journalists have been brutalized by police officers in the name of law and order.Anyone who has ever seen a military occupation up close should know how much uglier it can get. Acting editorial page editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote about the decision to publish our writers’ responses to the Tom Cotton Op-Ed in Friday’s edition of our Opinion Today newsletter.
This creates a crisis for traditional understandings of how the so-called marketplace of ideas functions. Thanks for contacting us. But should it have been?