After Tom Cotton's "Send in the troops" op-ed, NYT staff stages a rebellion

This article was co-produced with Press Watch, an independent site that monitors and critiques American political coverage. The New York Times' decision on Wednesday to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton — in which the Arkansas Republican called for the federal government to "Send in the Troops" to forcibly subdue the "rioters" who he claimed have "plunged many American cities into anarchy" — resulted in a remarkable public denunciation from readers and even the newspaper's own staff members. Times investigative reporter Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, using the Times's own ad slogan as a thematic device, posted a series of tweets that amounted to a devastating fact-check on Cotton's piece: Cotton wrote of "cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd's death for their own anarchic purposes." Political analyst Jared Yates Sexton tweeted: Sewell Chan, a former deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page explained on Twitter that he wouldn't have run the Cotton piece, which he noted "isn't original, or even timely." Karen Attiah, an opinion editor at the Washington Post, tweeted: Nozlee Samadzadeh, a programmer at the Times, tweeted: For good measure, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, called attention to the ludicrous in-line links in Cotton's op-ed: The editor's defense Bennet, the editorial page editor, also initially defended his decision on Wednesday, with a number of unctuous straw-man arguments.