James Bennet (journalist)

Based on Wikipedia: James Bennet (journalist)

The Editor Who Got Fired for Publishing an Opinion

In June 2020, James Bennet held one of the most powerful positions in American journalism: editorial page editor of The New York Times. Within a week, he would be gone—forced out not for fabricating stories or committing ethical violations, but for publishing an opinion piece by a sitting United States Senator.

The essay in question argued that federal troops should be deployed to American cities experiencing violent riots. It was written by Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas. And it ignited a firestorm that would consume Bennet's career and expose deep fractures within the newspaper that calls itself the paper of record.

But to understand why this moment mattered—and why Bennet's story continues to reverberate through American media—you need to understand who he was before that fateful week.

A Family of Public Servants

James Douglas Bennet was born in Boston on March 28, 1966, into a family steeped in American political life. His father, Douglas J. Bennet, was a political official who would go on to serve in the State Department and lead National Public Radio. His mother, Susanne Klejman Bennet, had survived the Holocaust as a Polish Jewish refugee before emigrating to the United States. She would eventually teach English as a second language to other immigrants in Washington, D.C.

When the elder Bennet joined the staff of Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, the family relocated to the nation's capital. James attended St. Albans School, an elite preparatory institution that has educated generations of Washington's establishment—senators' children rubbing shoulders with diplomats' kids, all being groomed for lives of influence.

At Yale University, Bennet found his calling. He earned a bachelor's degree and, more significantly, became editor-in-chief of The New Journal, a student magazine known for long-form journalism. It was an early glimpse of the path he would follow.

His older brother Michael chose a different route to prominence. Michael Bennet would become a United States Senator from Colorado in 2009, a position he still holds. This would later create an unusual situation: when Michael ran for president in 2020, James—then running the opinion section of the most influential newspaper in the country—had to recuse himself from all coverage of the race. Imagine having to tell your staff they cannot write about your brother's bid for the White House.

Rising Through the Ranks

Bennet's journalism career began in the traditional way: internships, small publications, unglamorous work. He interned at The News & Observer in North Carolina and The New Republic in Washington. From 1989 to 1991, he worked as an editor at The Washington Monthly, a small but influential magazine known for cultivating young talent.

Then came The New York Times.

He joined the paper in 1991 and steadily ascended. He covered the White House. He ran the Jerusalem bureau, one of the most demanding and consequential foreign postings in journalism. Reporting from Israel and the Palestinian territories requires navigating a conflict where every word choice carries political weight, where the distinction between "terrorist" and "militant" or "security fence" and "separation wall" can earn you accusations of bias from all sides.

After returning from Jerusalem, Bennet wrote a memorandum on the proper usage of "terrorist" and "terrorism"—a document that became something of a style bible for Times editors grappling with these fraught linguistic decisions. It was the kind of behind-the-scenes influence that shapes how millions of readers understand the world, even if those readers never know the name of the person who set the policy.

Reinventing The Atlantic

In 2006, Bennet was preparing for his next Times assignment: Beijing correspondent, covering China's explosive rise. He never made it.

David G. Bradley, the publisher of The Atlantic, was searching for a new editor-in-chief for the venerable magazine. Founded in 1857 in Boston by a group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Atlantic had published some of the most important writing in American history. It had serialized Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It had been home to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." But by 2006, like many print publications, it was struggling to find its footing in the digital age.

Bradley consulted with eighty journalists across the country before settling on Bennet. The selection process was exhaustive, almost theatrical—a sign of how seriously Bradley took the task of reviving a publication that, despite its illustrious history, had lost money for years.

Bennet took over as the fourteenth editor-in-chief and promptly made news by putting Britney Spears on the cover in April 2008. This was The Atlantic, the magazine of ideas, the journal of the American intellectual class—and there was the troubled pop star gazing out from newsstands.

The issue bombed. Newsstand sales were dismal.

But Bennet wasn't playing for newsstand sales. He was building a digital audience. Under his leadership, The Atlantic dramatically increased its web traffic. By 2010, the magazine recorded its first profitable year in a decade. He had figured out something that many legacy publications still struggle with: how to translate print prestige into digital success.

Return to the Times

In March 2016, The New York Times announced that Bennet would return to the paper as editorial page editor. This is a peculiar position in journalism. The editorial page editor does not oversee news coverage—that falls to the executive editor. Instead, the editorial page editor controls the opinion section: the unsigned editorials that represent the paper's institutional voice, the op-eds from outside contributors, and the regular columnists.

It is, in theory, a position of tremendous influence. The opinion pages of The New York Times are read by presidents and policymakers, CEOs and diplomats. An editorial endorsement can help make a candidacy. A well-timed op-ed can shift the terms of a national debate.

Bennet made an immediate splash. One of his early hires was Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist coming over from The Wall Street Journal. Stephens's first column for the Times questioned the certainty with which climate change predictions were being made. Reports emerged of subscription cancellations. The hire signaled that Bennet intended to publish voices that would challenge the paper's predominantly liberal readership.

This philosophy—that a great newspaper should expose its readers to arguments they might find uncomfortable—would prove to be his undoing.

A Lawsuit and an Apology

Before the Tom Cotton affair, there was Sarah Palin.

In June 2017, after a gunman opened fire on Republican congressmen practicing for a charity baseball game, the Times editorial page published a piece attempting to draw connections between political rhetoric and political violence. The editorial linked the shooting to the 2011 attack in Arizona that wounded Representative Gabby Giffords. It cited a map published by SarahPAC—Sarah Palin's political action committee—that had placed crosshairs over certain congressional districts, including Giffords's.

The problem was that the editorial implied a direct connection between the map and the Giffords shooting that didn't exist. The gunman who shot Giffords had never seen the SarahPAC map. The editorial had made a factual claim that was simply wrong.

The Times issued a correction. But Palin—the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee—sued for defamation. In American law, defamation of a public figure requires proving not just that something false was published, but that it was published with "actual malice"—meaning the publisher knew it was false or showed reckless disregard for whether it was true.

The lawsuit dragged on for years. It was dismissed in 2017, reinstated in 2019, and finally went to trial in early 2022. Bennet testified, taking full responsibility for the errors. On February 15, 2022, a jury rejected Palin's suit. The Times had made a mistake, the jury concluded, but not with the malicious intent required to prove defamation.

It was a vindication of sorts. But by then, Bennet had been gone from the Times for nearly two years.

The Week That Changed Everything

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd pleaded that he couldn't breathe. The killing, captured on video, sparked the largest protest movement in American history. Millions took to the streets in cities across the country and around the world.

Some of those protests turned violent. There was looting. There were fires. Debates erupted about the proper response. Should police crack down? Should they stand back? Was the violence undermining the message of the protests, or was it an understandable response to generations of injustice?

The New York Times opinion section published multiple perspectives on the protests in early June. Some argued for more demonstrations. One called for abolishing the police entirely. And on June 3, the paper published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton titled "Send in the Troops."

Cotton's argument was that the military should be deployed to cities experiencing violent riots—not to suppress peaceful protests, which he explicitly distinguished from the looting and destruction—but to restore order where local authorities had lost control. He invoked the Insurrection Act, a law dating to 1807 that has been used by presidents including George H.W. Bush to deploy federal troops during civil unrest.

The reaction was immediate and furious.

Michelle Goldberg, a liberal columnist at the Times, called the piece "fascist." Dozens of Times reporters—not opinion writers, but news reporters who are supposed to maintain neutrality—posted identical messages on Twitter: "Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger." It was an extraordinary public rebuke of the paper's own editorial judgment by its own journalists.

Bennet initially defended the decision. The opinion section, he argued, was supposed to publish opinions that readers might disagree with. That was the whole point. A senator had made an argument; readers could evaluate it for themselves.

The Unraveling

The next day, June 4, the Times published a news story about its own opinion section. The headline: "New York Times Says Senator's Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards." The paper was reporting on itself, announcing that the Cotton piece should not have been published.

Bennet objected to something in that news story. It claimed that Cotton's op-ed had "called to send the military to suppress protests against police violence." But Cotton had distinguished between peaceful protesters and violent rioters. The news story, Bennet felt, was mischaracterizing what the op-ed actually said.

It didn't matter. On June 7, 2020, the Times announced that Bennet had resigned.

The word "resigned" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In the peculiar vocabulary of high-profile departures, people rarely get fired; they resign to pursue other opportunities or spend time with their families. Bennet's departure was clearly not voluntary.

The Reckoning

For three and a half years, Bennet said little publicly about what had happened. Then, in December 2023, he published a remarkable 16,000-word essay in The Economist—the British news magazine where he had landed after his ouster.

The essay drew on extensive email correspondence to tell a story that challenged the official narrative. According to Bennet, he had received private support for publishing the Cotton op-ed from the Times's leadership, including publisher A.G. Sulzberger and executive editor Dean Baquet. They had backed the decision before the staff revolt, then abandoned him when the backlash intensified.

Bennet's account portrayed a generational conflict within the newspaper. Older journalists who valued "fairness, pluralism and political independence" had capitulated to younger colleagues who wanted to use the paper to promote liberal viewpoints and marginalize conservative ones. The Times, in his telling, had abandoned its founding mission of presenting unbiased reporting and viewpoints from across the political spectrum.

In a separate piece on Semafor, a news website, Bennet was even more direct about his former boss: "He set me on fire and threw me in the garbage and used my reverence for the institution against me."

Sulzberger has disputed Bennet's account. The full truth of what happened in those chaotic days may never be known. What is clear is that the incident became a symbol of something larger: debates about newsroom culture, political diversity in journalism, the role of opinion pages, and who gets to decide what ideas are acceptable for public discussion.

After the Fall

In January 2021, The Economist hired Bennet as a "visiting senior editor" for a one-year stint. He never left. By July 2022, he had become a permanent senior editor and taken on a significant responsibility: writing the Lexington column.

Lexington is The Economist's column on American politics, named for the Massachusetts town where colonial militiamen fired on British soldiers in April 1775, sparking the American Revolution. It's one of several geographic columns the magazine maintains—Bagehot covers British politics, Charlemagne covers Europe, and so on. Each is written anonymously, in keeping with The Economist's tradition of institutional voice over individual bylines.

Bennet became the first American to write Lexington. There's a certain irony in this: an American journalist, pushed out of the leading American newspaper for publishing an American senator's opinion about American policy, finding his voice again in a British publication explaining America to the world.

The Larger Questions

James Bennet's story raises questions that extend far beyond one man's career.

What is the purpose of an opinion page? Is it to publish ideas the editors believe are correct, or to publish ideas that contribute to public debate, even—especially—when they're controversial? Can a newspaper that refuses to engage with arguments held by millions of Americans still claim to represent the national conversation?

What happens when a newsroom's staff can effectively veto editorial decisions through public pressure campaigns? Does that represent a democratization of institutional power, or does it replace the judgment of editors with the passions of the moment?

And what does it mean that Tom Cotton's argument—that federal troops might be needed to restore order during violent unrest—was deemed too dangerous to print, while an argument for abolishing police departments entirely was not?

These are not questions with easy answers. Bennet has his view; his critics have theirs. What's undeniable is that his departure marked a turning point—a moment when the internal culture of elite newsrooms became a matter of intense public scrutiny, and when the boundaries of acceptable discourse seemed to shift overnight.

In his personal life, Bennet married Sarah Jessup in a civil ceremony in 2001. They have two sons. He is now in his late fifties, still writing, still arguing, still convinced that the best thing a newspaper can do is expose its readers to ideas they might not want to hear.

Whether that makes him a principled defender of free inquiry or a man who doesn't understand how the world has changed depends, perhaps, on which ideas you think deserve a hearing—and who you think should decide.