Reading your piece about the Palin libel trial, and it seems clear that Bennet just sucks as an editor. I'm a layperson as far as newspaper work goes, but I'd say the basic job of an editor is to vet articles and columns for publication and ensure they meet some standard of accuracy and coherence.
Obviously, you can't do any of this if you don't read the pieces yourself, so it seems like a gross dereliction of duty not to read Cotton's op-ed. Did Bennet think an op-ed by a senator demanding that we call out the troops against protestors wouldn't get noticed?
I'm pretty sure the exact opposite of the editor's job is to insert inaccuracies into a story!
My impression of the NYT OP-ED section is that none of it is being scrutinized for inaccuracy or gross errors of logic. I understand, broadly, why Nicholas Kristoff, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, and Bret Stephens are allowed to bloviate week after week with, seemingly, no guardrails or editorial pushback, but that doesn't mean the guy letting that happen is actually doing their job.
Why are we pretending that it's a grave injustice that the checked out hack, who lets all of that slide, is an essential talent? I guess that I broadly understand the answer to that, too.
"Twenty years ago, he hired me to be his No. 2 editor at Washington City Paper, and I ... learned a lot from him. We have had many discussions through the years about journalistic issues, and I find him to be unusually scrupulous and decent.": However, he's been at the WaPo for some time now. Perhaps he's gone native. His remarks on "l'affaire Cotton" strike me as redolent of the High Broderist tradition, which is to say, the particularly wooden-headed, pearl-clutching form of both-sides-ism so notably practiced by David Broder and his acolytes at the WaPo. (By the way, dubbing all this "l'affaire Cotton" naturally brings to mind "l'affaire Dreyfus". I hope Wemple didn't intend that. If he did, my opinion of him would sink a good deal lower. Tom Cotton is no Alfred Dreyfus, nor is James Bennet.)
"The Erik Wemple Blog has asked about 30 Times staffers whether they still believe their 'danger' tweets and whether there was any merit in Bennet's retort. Not one of them replied with an on-the-record defense.": Perhaps they, especially those "fractious Black members of the Times newsroom", are tired of demands to explain themselves to clueless and/or hostile white people. As many brown people have testified, those demands get very, very old.
"In the light of what the public knew then, let alone what everyone would witness later, the idea that Cotton was calling for a 'lawful act by the president' is absurd. He was calling for an escalation of official violence that was already out of control.": Exactly, and that's the crux of the matter. To fail to recognize and acknowledge as much is to reveal yourself to be clueless or disingenuous.
I expect they'll eventually lose everything, these stalwart defenders of "free speech" for people who don't believe in anything of the sort. That'll be cold comfort for the rest of us, though.
Thank you for being the only white guy to take these guys on
Reading your piece about the Palin libel trial, and it seems clear that Bennet just sucks as an editor. I'm a layperson as far as newspaper work goes, but I'd say the basic job of an editor is to vet articles and columns for publication and ensure they meet some standard of accuracy and coherence.
Obviously, you can't do any of this if you don't read the pieces yourself, so it seems like a gross dereliction of duty not to read Cotton's op-ed. Did Bennet think an op-ed by a senator demanding that we call out the troops against protestors wouldn't get noticed?
I'm pretty sure the exact opposite of the editor's job is to insert inaccuracies into a story!
My impression of the NYT OP-ED section is that none of it is being scrutinized for inaccuracy or gross errors of logic. I understand, broadly, why Nicholas Kristoff, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, and Bret Stephens are allowed to bloviate week after week with, seemingly, no guardrails or editorial pushback, but that doesn't mean the guy letting that happen is actually doing their job.
Why are we pretending that it's a grave injustice that the checked out hack, who lets all of that slide, is an essential talent? I guess that I broadly understand the answer to that, too.
"Twenty years ago, he hired me to be his No. 2 editor at Washington City Paper, and I ... learned a lot from him. We have had many discussions through the years about journalistic issues, and I find him to be unusually scrupulous and decent.": However, he's been at the WaPo for some time now. Perhaps he's gone native. His remarks on "l'affaire Cotton" strike me as redolent of the High Broderist tradition, which is to say, the particularly wooden-headed, pearl-clutching form of both-sides-ism so notably practiced by David Broder and his acolytes at the WaPo. (By the way, dubbing all this "l'affaire Cotton" naturally brings to mind "l'affaire Dreyfus". I hope Wemple didn't intend that. If he did, my opinion of him would sink a good deal lower. Tom Cotton is no Alfred Dreyfus, nor is James Bennet.)
"The Erik Wemple Blog has asked about 30 Times staffers whether they still believe their 'danger' tweets and whether there was any merit in Bennet's retort. Not one of them replied with an on-the-record defense.": Perhaps they, especially those "fractious Black members of the Times newsroom", are tired of demands to explain themselves to clueless and/or hostile white people. As many brown people have testified, those demands get very, very old.
"In the light of what the public knew then, let alone what everyone would witness later, the idea that Cotton was calling for a 'lawful act by the president' is absurd. He was calling for an escalation of official violence that was already out of control.": Exactly, and that's the crux of the matter. To fail to recognize and acknowledge as much is to reveal yourself to be clueless or disingenuous.
I expect they'll eventually lose everything, these stalwart defenders of "free speech" for people who don't believe in anything of the sort. That'll be cold comfort for the rest of us, though.