Newly resigned New York Times reporter James Bennet wrote a scathing tell-all about his time at the liberal outlet.
Bennet, now a reporter for The Economist, accused the NYT of being guilty of "illiberal bias" in an op-ed titled "When the New York Times lost its way."
In a 16,000-word article, Bennet told his side of the story of his June 2020 exit from the Times, claiming the outlet has shifted away from what Bennet describes as traditional journalistic principles.
Bennet detailed how the NYT was quick to place trigger warnings to conservative news, specifically ones that covered former President Trump.
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. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatize certain colleagues or what it would say to the world about the Times's own bias. I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world 'without fear or favor.' And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left. The Times's problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut the debate down altogether.
In June 2020, Bennet was forced out of his position at the Times over a published op-ed written by Trump-ally and Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). In the op-ed, Cotton advocated activating the military to protect Americans against rioters and looters who were terrorizing and destroying communities amid mass unrest over the death of George Floyd.
Bennet explained how the paper shifted away from its old liberal embrace of inclusive debate and gave little tolerance for those who thought differently from the mainstream minds.
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