‘Left’ out! Ex-NYT op-ed big dishes

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. — Ex-Times editor James Bennet

James Bennet — the former New York Times editorial page editor pushed out after running a column by a top Republican senator — said he was urged to attach “trigger warnings” to op-eds written by conservatives before he was dumped by the Gray Lady.

Bennet accused the socalled “paper of record” of having an “illiberal bias” in a blistering 17,000-word cover story for The Economist, titled “When The New York Times Lost Its Way,” published Thursday.

Bennet, forced to resign in 2020 after internal fury over the publication of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), blamed Publisher A.G. Sulzberger for buckling under pressure from angry staffers.

In the scathing article, Bennet delved into the events that led to his exit following three years of reflection. He said the incident typified the Times’ “dangerous problem” that pervades its newsroom.

“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 debate down altogether,” wrote Bennet, now a columnist and senior editor for The Economist.

He recalled that during his four-year tenure as Times editorial page editor, many of his colleagues had a left-leaning bias. “Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives,” Bennet wrote.

Cotton wrote that Donald Trump should call out the military to crack down on protests after the death of George Floyd.

Bennet said he and thenTimes Editor-in-Chief Dean Baquet believed readers should hear Cotton’s views, which were shared by many Americans — and Sulzberger even “understood” why the piece was published.

Baquet was frustrated and surprised by the backlash, asking aloud: “Are we truly so precious?”

“I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about The Times,” Sulzberger told The Post

Ex-editor James Bennet (left) says he got pushed out after publisher A.G. Sulzberger (near right) caved in to internal lefty hysteria over a GOP senator’s op-ed piece that was accepted by editor-in-chief Dean Baquet (lower right).