Adam Rubenstein, who was an opinion editor for the Times, has written a lengthy article in The Atlantic that describes in vivid detail how his own colleagues turned against him. He became a hated target, he wrote, because he was involved in publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton that called for military troops on the streets to stop race riots across the country.
It was June 2020 and riots in American inner cities were in full swing after the death of George Floyd. Reacting to the violence and chaos, Cotton wrote an opinion piece that suggesting then-President Trump should use the Insurrection Act to “restore order to our streets.”
The public saw what happened next: The Cotton op-ed was slapped with a 300-word “Editor’s Note” that said it “fell short” of the newspaper’s standards and should not have been published.
Rubenstein, however, describes a tedious back-and-forth process among several Times editors in which the staff debated Cotton’s claims and edited portions of the article. The newspaper staff discussed those changes with Cotton's Senate staff before agreeing to publish it. He also describes how a Times story, published to describe the Cotton op-ed controversy, unfairly fingered him as the culprit responsible for publishing the article.
Curtis Houck, of the Media Research Center, tells AFN the Rubenstein article pulls the curtain back on a radical, left-wing dogma that has besieged the Times.
“It just goes to show that The New York Times is as bad as we think it is,” Houck says. “It is cartoonishly evil and also infantile in its inability to accept diverse viewpoints.”
Rubenstein quit the Times months after watching his boss, editorial page editor James Bennet, step down in July 2020 just weeks after the Cotton op-ed published.
Bennet described his ouster in a December 2023 article published in The Economist, where he was hired as senior editor.
“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,” Bennet wrote.
Before those articles from Rubenstein and Bennet, the atmosphere in the Times newsroom was famously described by Bari Weiss, a liberal editorial page editor. She quit in protest at about the same time Bennet was forced to resign.
“The paper of record is, more and more,” Weiss wrote in her resignation letter, “the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”
In her letter, Weiss describes being too Jewish and too-little liberal to remain there.
She has since created an Internet newsletter named "The Free Press."
