Imagine yourself as a conservative walking into the newsroom of The New York Times. On the surface, it probably wouldn’t look any different than any other newsroom. But getting past the surface atmosphere would quickly disabuse you of the idea it was normal. Anyone with a point of view that wasn’t radically left-wing would be lost and probably friendless.
This is what former Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard writer Adam Rubenstein discovered when he began working as an editor in the opinion section of the Times. In The Atlantic article about Rubenstein, we discover he was hardly a flaming right winger. But the conservative point of view he sometimes inadvertently promoted was as unwelcome in the Times newsroom as the stink of dead fish.
Being a conservative—or at least being considered one—at the Times was a strange experience. I often found myself asking questions like “Doesn’t all of this talk of ‘voter suppression’ on the left sound similar to charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right?” only to realize how unwelcome such questions were. By asking, I’d revealed that I wasn’t on the same team as my colleagues, that I didn’t accept as an article of faith the liberal premise that voter suppression was a grave threat to liberal democracy while voter fraud was entirely fake news.
Admittedly, nothing was surprising in The Atlantic article about the radical left behavior of Times’ employees — except the shocking inside story of the controversy over the Op-Ed by Sen. Tom Cotton that was published at the height of the George Floyd riots
The background to the publication of Cotton’s op-ed urging Donald Trump to use the military to suppress the riots has been told by senior Times staffers before. But Rubenstein was on the front lines of the controversy, and what he went through after the publication of the op-ed is almost beyond belief.
There was an incredible effort to twist words and meanings to portray Rubenstein — and subsequently Cotton himself — in the worst possible light. After going back and forth with senior staff at the Times and Cotton’s staff on some of his edits to the op-ed, Rubenstein touched base with the photo editor to choose an image to be published with the copy.
I had one more task to take care of. Cotton’s office had emailed me several photos that they wanted to see published alongside the op-ed, showing times when the same legal doctrine had been invoked in the past. One was of U.S. troops enforcing the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962. I sent these to a photo editor, Jeffrey Henson Scales, and asked him to “consider” them. He wrote me back to say, “A false equivalence, but historical images are there now,” meaning he’d added them to the story file in the system. I thanked him and added a “confusion” emoji, in case he wanted to expand on what he meant. He replied by sending me the emoji of a black box, representing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
This is significant because after Cotton’s op-ed was published, the Times employees mutinied. The idiotic meme was widely disseminated that the publishing of the editorial somehow put black Times employees in danger.
Rubenstein fell victim to a favorite tactic of the radical left. The accusation was ludicrous but nearly impossible to rebut.
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Three days after the Cotton op-ed was published, a reporter on the business desk named Edmund Lee contacted Rubenstein. “We know from sources you were the principal writer,” Lee wrote him. Rubenstein was flabbergasted. His minor edits to the piece were now being painted as authorship.
Later that day, Lee published his own op-ed in the Times accusing Rubenstein of agreeing that the Cotton op-ed used “false equivalency” in comparing the rioters to other historical incidents of the army being deployed to restore order. But Rubenstein, in his discussion with the photo editor, had been referring to photos, not the substance of the op-ed. Reading the Slack channel exchange between the two would have made that obvious.
The charge stood. And it fed into a new narrative that posited Rubenstein as the actual author of the op-ed.
I watched as factitious accounts of the publication process and the op-ed itself made their way into the paper’s own coverage and beyond. A narrative had emerged on Slack: that I had gone rogue and published the article without any involvement of higher-ups. Of course this was false, but that untruth nevertheless became central to the story. I had followed all the rules, but I had the sinking feeling that not all of my colleagues felt similarly constrained.
The debate on Slack seemed interminable. Stephanie Saul, a Pulitzer Prize–winning education reporter, was one of the few people who expressed support for publishing a range of views on the op-ed page. Margaret Lyons, a television critic, countered: “We don’t run pieces where serial killers tell us murdering is actually fun and great.
There are no rules of debate. There are no rules of logic. There are no rules regarding germaneness, proportionality, or relativity. The left just makes stuff up as they go along and declare themselves the winner every single time.
I felt in those days like I was in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language and was on trial for a manufactured offense. I still thought that if I could only explain that the regular process had been followed, that the op-ed had called for protesters not to be harmed but instead protected, the situation could still be resolved.
I hope Rubenstein now understands the rules and will never put himself in that position again.