A Call for Military Crackdown on the 31st Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre
By: Marie Eberle
Tags: Military, Trump, BlackLivesMatter, Racism, Politics

Yesterday evening saw the ninth consecutive night of marches, protests and unrest over police brutality across the United States. Tensions are at an all time high and no credible solution is in sight yet. On the same day, the New York Times decided to publish an opinion article titled “Send In the Troops.” The Op-Ed was written by Tom Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas, and argued in favour of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would enable the federal government to deploy the military to put an end to protests across the country.

Cotton used the platform to peddle the theory that the controversial antifascism movement “antifa” had infiltrated the protests — a theory critically examined and proven wrong just two days earlier by the same newspaper.

The backlash was swift and overwhelming.

Besides a huge barrage of opinion articles from other news outlets and readers on Twitter disagreeing with Cotton’s claims to support his argument, an unusual revolt took place at the NYT. Dozens of other staff members took to Twitter to express their anger and tweet: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”

Even the the NewsGuild of New York, a journalist union that represents many Times journalists, released a statement condemning the Op-Ed for promoting hate and invoking state violence that disproportionately hurts Black people.

However, as is almost always the case nowadays, there was a backlash to the backlash. Many people also argued that the NYT should not have been prevented from publishing the piece. Let’s quickly run through the biggest argument here.

Photo by visuals on Unsplash

Should the New York Times never publish opinions the majority of their staff or readers disagree with?

Of course not, but that’s a disingenuous representation of what actually happened with the piece. But let’s dig into this argument a little deeper, since this is also the line argued by James Bennet, the NYT editor who published it. While defending his decision, he used Twitter to argue:

“Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy. We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton’s argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.”

So, are we preventing public debate on the Insurrection Act by arguing against the NYT spreading Tom Cotton’s views on it? No, and here’s why: first off, the NYT did not allow public comments on the op-ed, proving that they were never interested in public debate in the first place. There is literally no way to debate it, despite Bennet’s reasoning. Furthermore, it would have been very easy to just publish a news article, not an Op-Ed, detailing Cotton’s views in an objective manner and then also listing some counter arguments in an objective manner. Instead, they choose to just let Cotton argue his piece without additional commentary. The NYT didn’t simply report on an opinion that many people on the left disagree with for instigating more violence and repression. Instead, they handed the microphone to an already very powerful man without offering any factual criticism or context.