Fallout swift at NY Times after Cotton’s piece

NEW YORK — The New York Times’ editorial page editor has resigned after the newspaper disowned an opinion piece by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton that advocated using federal troops to quell unrest, and it was later revealed he hadn’t read the piece prior to publication.

James Bennet resigned and his deputy, James Dao, is being reassigned at the newspaper, the Times said Sunday.

The fallout was swift after the Arkansas Republican’s piece was posted online late Wednesday. It caused a revolt among Times journalists, with some saying it endangered black employees and calling in sick on Thursday in protest.

Following a review, the newspaper said Cotton’s piece should not have been published, at least not without substantial revisions.

Katie Kingsbury, a Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial writing who joined the Times from the Boston Globe in 2017, will oversee the opinion pages through the November elections, the Times said.

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said in a statement that he was grateful for changes Bennet had made to the paper’s opinion pages, including broadening the range of voices. Bennet, who was editor of The Atlantic before taking over the Times’ opinion pages in 2016, had received some heat for adding new voices, including conservative columnist Bret Stephens.

The publisher told a reporter from his own newspaper that he and Bennet “concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change required.”

It was the second high-level journalism job lost because of mistakes made in coverage of the nationwide protests about the treatment of blacks by law enforcement.

The top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stan Wischnowski, resigned Saturday after uproar over a headline that said, “Buildings Matter, Too.”

Bennet, who had revealed in a meeting Friday that he had not read Cotton’s piece before it was posted online, had defended it following the initial protests, saying it was important to hear from all points of view.