New York Times editor wanted to attach TRIGGER WARNINGS to conservative op-eds to placate woke staff, says journalist forced out over piece which called for Army intervention in BLM riots

• Former opinion editor of the New York Times, James Bennet has slammed the paper for what he terms ‘illiberal bias’
• He said the Times has descended into an environment of ‘enforced group-think’ where editors are afraid to say the wrong thing
• He claims conservative voices were ‘despised’ with one editor even suggesting they attach ‘trigger warnings’ to conservative pieces  

Former op-ed boss of the New York Times, James Bennet has slammed the paper for its ‘environment of enforced group-think’ where conservative voices were ‘despised’.

In a 17,000-word essay, Bennet described how he was ‘chased out’ of the paper after publishing an opinion piece by Republican senator Tom Cotton in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

He says it was the culmination of the publication pandering to a liberal ‘national movement’ under which he claims one editor even suggested attaching ‘trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives’.

Cotton’s piece – titled ‘Send In the Troops’ – called for the army to be used to tackle criminal rioting across the US.

It sparked an instant backlash, with staff at the Times saying that by calling for harsher interventions, the piece ‘undermines’ the paper’s commitment to protestors’ safety – Bennet said some staff even quit over it. 

James Bennet says he was forced out of the New York Times after publishing an op-ed by Republican senator Tom Cotton 

The op-ed called for military intervention to stop criminal rioters in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020

He said: ‘The publisher called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history; people were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting.’

Then three days after the piece ran, Bennet says he received a call from the Times’ publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, demanding his resignation. 

‘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 now works as a columnist at the Economist. 

His article looking at ‘when the New York Times lost its way’ focuses on what he sees as the Times’ shift from ‘liberal bias to illiberal bias’ – moving favoring ‘one side of the national debate’ to ‘an impulse to shut debate down altogether’.

At one point in his tenure as Opinion Editor at the Times, he said the ‘bias had become so pervasive’ it was ‘unconscious’. 

The paper shifted away from ‘fostering diverse and inclusive debate’, he claims, and entered an ‘environment of enforced group-think’ where ‘conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised’. 

He said: ‘Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives.’ 

On another occasion, he said he congratulated a left-wing columnist on writing a piece criticizing the democrats, saying they should do more pieces like it, only for the columnist to reply: ‘I know, but Twitter hates it.’ 

Staff at the New York Times revolted over the piece, as Bennet claims some even quit over it

He also criticized the paper for failing to live up to its ‘claim to value diversity’, saying in 2016 the opinion department ‘did not have a single black editor’. 

But his main criticism was of the ‘creep’ of bias into what was or was not reported. 

The fear of saying the wrong thing was so deep, he said, that ‘editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns.’

He said: ‘The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.’

He added: ‘The Times was slow to break it to its readers 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, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.’ 

He said they ran very few conservative op-eds, and even when Trump himself submitted one, they didn’t run it, saying ‘we could not raise it to our standards – his people would not agree to the edits we asked for.’

Closing the piece, Bennet said: ‘Ejecting me was one way to avoid confronting the question of which values the Times is committed to.

‘Journalism, like democracy, works best when people refuse to surrender to fear.’

DailyMail.com contacted the Times for comment.  

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