BY BILL JUNEAU
Born in 1851, the New York Times is a powerful institution in the United States. Its armchair editors have an agenda, and the Hollywood crowd and others with aristocratic rank, wave its front page enthusiastically and in preference to Old Glory.
Likes and dislike of the old Gray Lady run the gamut. Hollywood elitists and high society folk with security fences around their estates, wallow in praise of the New York paper which supposedly provides to a grateful nation "all the news fit to print."
Other Americans are offended at its lack of journalistic objectivity and fairness, and its candid abhorrence of President Trump and his Republican administration. One popular conservative author has called the paper a "seditious rag," and President Trump labels the Times as a master of "fake" news and has discontinued its delivery to the White House.
Lately, the Times has encountered a new pebble in its big liberal shoe. His name is Thomas Cotton, the popular United States senator from Arkansas. This conservative ex-infantry officer, and combat veteran and lawyer, has one-upped the Times with a tough essay which found its way onto the paper's exclusive opinion pages. His essay endorsed the use of active duty soldiers to end widespread street rioting and violence which has been the outgrowth of the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a white policeman in Minneapolis.
In the Op-Ed, the feisty, first-term senator noted that rioters have plunged cities "into anarchy, recalling widespread violence of the 1960s." In New York, he wrote, Mayor de Blasio "stood by" as midtown manhattan descended into lawlessness.
With authority under the Insurrection Act, Cotton wrote that soldiers are effective in bringing peace to the streets when police have been told to stand down by mayors and governors and let violence, arson and looting run its course. . Bands looted, fire bombed cars and businesses and even a police station. One retired Black police captain was murdered in St. Louis and some 800 policemen have been injured. Some elites excused the orgy of violence as an "understandable response" to the wrongful death of George Floyd. It was sort of a "carnival for the thrill seeking rich as well as other criminal elements," Cotton fired off in his editorial.
The Times had let it be known that it opposed the use of active duty soldiers to calm protests, but Cotton submitted his essay and editorial page editor James Bennet and Bennet's deputy Jim Dao polished it a bit with the senator's okay, and even wrote the headline, "Send in the Troops." It was published on June 3, a Wednesday, and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger reportedly gave it his nod.
In the following days, Times' staffers and other fans addicted to the paper and its liberal bend and its loathing of anything Republican, complained to Sulzberger that Cotton's opining had no place on the sacred Times opinion page.
In the face of grumbling and the in-house consternation, the Times did a double flip and announced that the editorial by Sen. Cotton should never have been in the Times. The editorial was "unnecessarily harsh" and inaccurate and the very headline (which the Times editor wrote) was "incendiary."
The Times regrets that it published Cotton's opinion piece, and has blamed it on a "rushed editorial process." To make the point, Publisher Sulzberger, who got that position in January, 2018, fired the trusted opinion page editor, James Bennet, and demoted Bennet's deputy, Jim Dao, who provided oversight of the written word. Dao, said Sulzberger, will be "stepping off the masthead" for reassignment to the newsroom.
In the discourse that followed, Bennet, 54, apologized for his mishandling of Cotton's essay. He had been editorial page editor since 2016, and is the younger brother of U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat from Colorado.
While the Times heard many complaints, hundreds of which came from staffers who signed a letter objecting to the running of the senator's opinion piece, conservative voices have praised Cotton for his demand that rioting and violence and the attack and injuries to policemen be stopped, one way or another, and there is heavy support (based on surveys) for bringing soldiers into the streets when the activity qualifies as an insurrection.
America is still the greatest country on the globe where freedom of expression and debate are welcomed. Senator Cotton raises points which deserve to be debated, and the Times needs to put aside its biases and and political agenda and get back to reporting the news in a fair and professional way.
xxx
"
No comments:
Post a Comment