By Chris Satullo

Today I’m going to revisit an old brouhaha and try to repay a lingering debt.

Let’s go back to the summer of 2020. George Floyd has just been murdered by Minneapolis police. Across a pandemic-stricken America, peaceful mass protests against this atrocity are happening side by side with arson, looting and violent attacks on police (who often attack back). The situation is not good.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has something to say about all this. The New York Times Op-Ed page grants him space to share his message with the paper’s large, mostly liberal audience: It’s time for President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy federal troops to restore order to riot-plagued cities.

Now, Tom Cotton is not a guy I’d ever vote for. I don’t agree with the position he staked out pungently in this Op-Ed piece. But he was (still is) a U.S. senator and the stance he took was both plausible and representative of the views of about half the country.

Printing pieces like this is part of the raison d’etre of an Op-Ed page. Op-Ed is both a literal description of the page’s location in a printed newspaper – opposite the Editorial page, where the paper expresses its own opinions – and a figurative description of a key piece of its mission: providing a dedicated space for the expression of varying opinions from around a diverse and contentious nation.

Publishing a piece by a sitting senator taking issue with the Times’ own position on a leading controversy of the moment…well, that should have been just another day at the office for the Times’ opinion journalists working for then-Editorial Page Editor James Bennet.

Instead, it quickly turned into the last day in the office for Bennet and the beginning of the end for Adam Rubinstein, the young assistant Op-Ed editor who did the close editing on Cotton’s essay. Because the Times’ news staff – you know, the folks who are supposed to report multiple sides of every issue accurately and dispassionately, “without fear or favor” – lost their ever-loving minds over the publication of Cotton’s piece. 

Internal Slack channels used by Times news staffers erupted in denunciations, caterwauling about how Cotton’s essay had no business appearing in “their” newspaper and how it “made them feel unsafe.” Reporters who supposedly work on the other side of a high wall of separation from the opinion side felt entitled to call for the heads of those who had the audacity to greenlight a piece with which they did not agree.

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in a craven moment that shouldn’t be forgotten when his obituary gets written, caved to this wrong-headed activism by a news staff that had forgotten both their professional responsibilities and the mission of a serious national newspaper. He indulged the news staff’s hyperbolic outrage, ordered an apologetic – and inaccurate – editor’s note to be tacked onto the digital version of the piece, then cashiered Bennet when he refused to apologize for doing his job. Rubinstein followed his boss out the door a bit later.

Late last year, Bennet published a very long but very well-done postmortem on his defenestration in The Economist’s magazine. If you have the time and interest, it’s well worth plowing through for his sharp analysis of some subtle but powerful trends in American newsrooms. These have led journalists to conspire in their own demise by concluding that half their potential audience is both outside their concern and beneath their contempt.

Now, the Atlantic – one publication that definitely understands and sticks to its old-fashioned mission of candor, courage and balance – has given the hidden victim here, Rubinstein, his say. His piece, posted this week, is also worth reading. It’s fascinating not just for the slap-your-forehead revelations about the bad faith and ridiculousness with which several Times journalists behaved here, but also for his dead-on conclusions about what is lost when a great newspaper abandons real journalism for groupthink activism:

“If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.”

Perhaps you’ll allow my claim to some special insight into this mess because for 14 years I ran the opinion pages of another major newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, including its Op-Ed page. Facing headwinds similar to what Bennet and Rubinstein describe, I struggled – not always successfully or wisely – to make that page an accurate mirror of the range of views in our contentious nation and, in particular, the Inquirer’s purple region.

Many a time, an Inquirer reporter would stride forcefully past the elevators and the wall of Pulitzer plaques that separated News and Opinion in that old, white tower on Broad Street, plop down in the chair on the other side of my desk and scold me for “embarrassing” the newspaper by publishing some opinion piece he/she disagreed with.  

It never seemed to occur to these reporters that, never having worked on the Opinion side of the street and (often) never having spent a day as an editor, they might be just a little less qualified than me to decide what the Op-Ed page’s true mission was. They also, like many Times reporters in 2020, had a hard time distinguishing things they just happened to disagree with from things so obnoxious or false they didn’t deserve to be published.

With lots of distance now from those days and some distance from the fevered summer of 2020, a few further thoughts re: the case of The Times newsroom vs. Cotton:

— It’s true that American conservatives were the first constituency to abandon the ideal of fair-minded journalism, instead building themselves a comfy information silo where their preconceptions and biases would never be questioned. But now it also seems clear that many progressives have decided the best way to respond to this strategy on the right is to emulate it. 

It isn’t. Doing that just leaves your own “team” in a state of self-righteous delusion that loses its elections, while driving the people whose opinions and values you no longer deem worthy of your notice into the arms of toxic charlatans like Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens.

— The role that internal Slack channels played in this furor, converting smart journalists into a howling digital mob, offers a lesson not to be ignored. Social psychology research suggests that when you put like-minded people in a closed environment, the views of the group tend to migrate toward those of the most extreme, angry person in the group. Slack can be such a hothouse. One constant job of the journalist is to question runaway groupthink, to oppose the triumph of self-interested narrative over inconvenient fact. But what happens when – as is all too common – groupthink infects the newsroom? Resistance is vital, if uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous to job security.

— Again, I think Cotton’s argument for deploying regular military troops against American citizens went too far. But I wonder: Did any of the Times’ journalists

who ran James Bennet out of the building notice the irony when, a scant six months later, their paper was running investigative pieces exploring – and opinion pieces deploring – how Donald Trump failed to deploy the National Guard to protect the Capitol against the Jan. 6 insurrectionists?

— Granted, the sudden, depressing transformation of one of our traditional political parties into a cult that worships a serial liar and fraud – and attacks (sometimes physically) anyone who calls him on his lies – poses thorny challenges for old-fashioned, report-both-sides journalism. But again, as Bennet and Rubinstein argue and I agree, the solution is not to abandon journalism for activism. It is not to genuflect before progressive slogans and shibboleths instead of seeking the truth “without fear or favor,” even if that upsets the people you have dinner with on weekends.

Peaceful protest is one thing; rioting, burning, looting and assault are different things. Rage can be righteous, but this doesn’t mean every action that rage drives people to commit is justified or helpful. Distinctions such as that must be made, insisted upon and (are you listening, A.G.?) defended when the going gets tough.

—  I knew back in 2020 that publishing the Cotton op-ed was the right thing to do, and the Times newsroom mob was wrong. But I didn’t write that here or elsewhere, in part because I was trying to be a good guest in this space where my host, a great journalist and good friend, had taken a different position. But my failure of nerve has always bothered me. When Bennet published his piece last year, I wrote him a personal note apologizing. This is my public version of that mea culpa. You make mistakes, you take stock, you learn, and you try to be better.  

I hope that, reflecting on the Bennet and Rubinstein pieces, the Times, a great institution that America sorely needs, will do the same.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia