On June 3, 2020, during the height of the nationwide riots following the death of George Floyd, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called for restoring order in a piece titled “Send in the Troops,” published at The New York Times. As many of you will recall, that column triggered hordes of employees at the Times, many of its readers, and other progressive commentators. And the blowback happened despite the fact that the paper had previously published numerous pieces by actual authoritarians, from Muammar Qaddafi to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin. Top brass caved to the woke mobs, eventually issuing an editor’s note that spanned five paragraphs, claiming the essay “fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” Now, one of the editors the paper named as being responsible for publishing the controversial piece, Adam Rubenstein, is speaking out about what really happened, categorically disagreeing with what the Times claimed in the editor’s note. There was no rushed editing process, higher ups were involved, and there were no errors in the piece that needed correcting. But based on what happened when he was first hired in 2019, perhaps the writing was on the wall.
Rubenstein says he was excited to be offered the job with the Times’ opinion section given his previous work at “right-of-center” publications.
“I brushed off my discomfort about the office politics and focused on work,” he said in a piece published at The Atlantic. “Our mandate was to present readers with 'intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion,' as the Times’ founder, Adolph Ochs, put it in 1896. This meant publishing arguments that would challenge readers’ assumptions, and perspectives that they may not otherwise encounter in their daily news diet.”
He soon learned this value was not widely shared at the paper, describing being a conservative there as a “strange experience.”
Indeed, on one of his first days he got a taste of what that meant when he learned that even his chicken sandwich preference could get him chastised.
On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.
The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed. (The Atlantic)
Rubenstein said that even when the Times does publish "conservative" he quickly realized they were only voices that tended to agree with liberal positions and even still, the pieces were "treated differently," facing a "higher bar for entry," more editing, and "greater involvement of higher-ups."
Not surprisingly, Rubenstein left the Times not long after the Cotton saga.
"It had been made clear to me, in a variety of ways, that I had no future there," he said.
NYT sounds like a fun place to work pic.twitter.com/UKr2Cc4E6h
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) February 27, 2024
