Transcript: Harrison Lowman
My interview with the managing editor of The Hub
This week on the Lean Out podcast we are taking a look at the chaotic summer of 2020, and the impact of that unrest on mainstream journalism. My guest on the program has a new interview with the former opinion editor of The New York Times, James Bennet, who was famously ousted by a staff revolt. My guest says that now is a good time to think through how that historical moment and its activists have shaped our journalism.
Harrison Lowman is a Canadian journalist. He’s the managing editor of The Hub and a former producer of this podcast.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: We both follow the journalism world closely. For listeners who don’t know, we co-host a media criticism podcast with our colleague Peter Menzies at The Hub, where Harrison is managing editor. Harrison, I wanted to bring you on the show today to talk about a big podcast interview that you published earlier in the week with former opinion editor James Bennet, who was ousted from The New York Times in the summer of 2020 after publishing an essay from Republican Senator Tom Cotton calling for troops to quell rioting. Eric Wemple, when he was at The Washington Post, described this incident as one of the most consequential journalism fights in decades. I examine this incident in my new book that’s coming out later this year. To start today, give us a brief outline of that controversy and why it should matter to people who are outside the journalism world.
HL: Sure. And it’s so lovely talking to my former boss here, which Tara doesn’t mention because she’s too nice. But I owe a lot of my career to you, so I’ll just say that off the top. Okay. Seldom in journalism do we look back — especially at our own journalistic history — and parse through stuff that’s happened. We tell things in the moment, but we don’t often look back and say, “What could we learn from what the heck we did all these years ago?” In this case, six years ago, the summer of 2020. Tara, you remember, it was a wild time. People were reacting in the thousands during COVID to the killing of George Floyd, and out in the streets there were protesters marching for their rights. There were also folks that were taking advantage of those protests and looting stores and stealing, et cetera. Anyway, unrest on the streets. Then there was a gentleman by the name of Tom Cotton, a U.S. senator who wanted to float the idea of sending in the military to restore order, specifically when it came to those rioters.
A poll was done at the time and Americans generally supported this viewpoint. Cotton was someone who was quite influential — close to Trump in the White House — so he had some gravitas. This was seen as a mainstream opinion, or so we thought. Bennet publishes this viewpoint, being the editor of the op-ed section at The New York Times, and he’s told immediately that he has blood on his hands and that he’s putting New York Times journalists lives at risk. We can tell more chapters of the story, but it unleashes internal corporate hell fire within The New York Times and ultimately ends in him being forced quite aggressively to resign.
TH: An astonishing episode in journalism history. James Bennet wrote a lengthy piece for The Economist, where he’s now a columnist, a few years back. But he hasn’t talked about this controversy much in the media. Harrison, why did you want to speak with him? And why now?
HL: I feel like we see a lot of headlines about the pendulum swinging back and how things have changed. I’m interested in taking the pulse. We talk about it in the interview, the splintering of media, various different outlets emerging. Some of them — specifically, we could argue, on the centre-right — were born out of the ashes of events like these. Their modus operandi, their mission statement, is, “We feel like journalism became very illiberal and people went a bit wacky and we’re going to do the opposite.” Sometimes they’re going to show right-wing opinions. Sometimes you get people coming down the middle who are saying, “We are going to go back to the tried and true methods of objectivity.” I know this is a more recent historical phenomenon, which your book will tell readers, but getting back to listening to all sides, being curious as a journalist, finding a way down the middle, and telling the story fairly — instead of feeling like, “I need to not just have a pen in my hand but also a placard, I need to take sides here.”
TH: Yeah, and there’s some really very revealing places in this interview. You did a great interview with James Bennet. I want to go through some of the major points that he made. Starting with the paper’s response to its staff revolt. The paper affixed a lengthy editor’s note to the Cotton column. It’s actually too long to read on air.
HL: It’s like 300 words. [Laughs]
TH: It basically said that the essay fell short of editorial standards and should not have been published. It claimed that the topic was of life and death importance, as you pointed out in your interview with Bennet, and that the essay raised “factual questions.” I don’t know what that means. [It also said] that its tone was overly harsh and it claimed that “the editing process was rushed and flawed and senior editors were not sufficiently involved.” Adam Rubenstein, the editor who handled it, now deputy editor at CBS, has disputed these claims in The Atlantic, writing that “it wasn’t rushed,” that “senior editors were deeply involved” and that “there were no correctable errors.” Let’s take a listen now to what Bennet had to tell you about that famous editor’s note.
JB: We shouldn’t have published that editor’s note. The Times shouldn’t have published that editor’s note. There was nothing wrong with the editing process and that piece was totally in bounds, and it was an effort to mollify a newsroom that had risen in revolt against the publication of that piece — partly in an effort to show solidarity with the protests that were then sweeping America and a newsroom that said that publishing that piece had put it in danger. I say the newsroom, but it was really just the loudest voices in the newsroom. And then, as we saw, and I think we still see today, so many other people just get carried along because they’re either caught up in the moment or they’re afraid to stand up and risk being singled out by their colleagues as somehow a running dog of fascism.
TH: Harrison, what is it like for you listening to Bennet say that? How does that land for you?
HL: “A running dog of fascism.” He uses powerful language. But you know that in response to this — he was on a Zoom call with two thousand New York Times employees in the worst-timed corporate town hall in journalistic history — they were using equally emotional language. You have blood in your hands, you should feel ashamed. The idea being that New York Times journalists who are minorities could end up on the street and then soldiers would kill them in these protests. I guess that being the idea; that’s many steps to get to that point. But this is like a dagger to the heart of an editor, right? He truly believes, and from everything I’ve seen [it’s true], that all the right steps were taken in terms of putting this out there. It’s been fact-checked. It’s a mainstream opinion. We know the lengths something goes through to get in The New York Times. And yet, a capitulation in the form of an editor’s note.
I don’t know, maybe this is a stretch, but I see it as … You remember, at the time you had to send signals of solidarity with this activist side, whether it was changing your profile picture or putting out statements of supports and tweets. And God forbid, Tara, if you didn’t, you were a horrible person who was racist and immoral. So, you had to raise your flag. Similar to changing your profile pic, that day The New York Times in a way changed their profile pic and basically said, “Let it be known that we support this side.” Also, a point that people don’t really understand is it’s not just the journalists. Bari Weiss talks about this — the hiring of young folks, whether they be journalists or support staff. People at The New York Times who weren’t journalists were coming together en masse and asserting that they knew what was best when it came to approaching these topics as journalists. Which I think is a bit rich. But yeah, Bennet faced a tidal wave and he got swept up in it and pushed out as a result.
TH: Let’s just talk about what this argument was. There’s another interesting moment when you’re talking to Bennet and he tries to unpack the logic of Times staffers who claimed that he had put their lives in danger. Let’s listen to that.
JB: We weren’t able to have the conversation. I tried in the moment to sort through the logic of that claim, Harrison. Because when you think about it, how could that op-ed have put them in danger? The reasoning would have to be that by publishing that idea — telling the readers that Tom Cotton favoured the use of troops where police were overwhelmed, to stop rioting and looting — that publishing that piece would put pressure somehow. Times readers would be convinced by Tom Cotton’s argument. They would then put pressure on their elected representatives to put pressure on Donald Trump to call out the troops. There would then be troops in cities where the police were overwhelmed and those troops would then commit violence against the New York Times reporters. There’s so many levels of condescension in that argument. On the one hand, that readers can’t be trusted with this information. [And] American troops can’t be trusted not to shoot reporters. But it’s also just illogical. I mean, if Tom Cotton was trying to reach Donald Trump, he’d go on Fox News or he’d call Donald Trump on the telephone. We were informing Times readers that this was an active debate in Washington. If anything we were contributing, we were arming — unfortunate metaphor in this context, arming — we were preparing Times readers to engage a debate over whether it was right or not to use troops. Alerting them to the fact. Giving them the opportunity to organize and resist this idea if they wanted, or indeed argue in favour of it if they didn’t. But it just doesn’t make … I’m not sure if you understand what I’m saying, it just doesn’t make any sense.
TH: You can hear the frustration in his voice [over] this idea that readers can’t be trusted with information. What did you make of the argument that Bennet is making, the counterargument to the Times staffers?
HL: Like you said, you still hear it in his voice six years later. I feel bad that he still … The idea, too, that he thought he could make this argument on that Zoom call and make it work. Again, things were so heated, people were so emotional at the time. I think it will be hard to even convey to folks — my kid or people who weren’t there — what this moment was like. It was hard to make rational arguments. The idea at the time was that if you put this argument in The New York Times, you have poisoned the pages of the newspaper of record. Like, “This idea does not belong here even if it is held by the president.” Some people saw the newspaper as the sword to fight against the president, so how could you dare let him creep in and get into the house and foul our lefty nest here?
Think about now. We just watched two people be killed by ICE agents in Minnesota. I haven’t followed what’s happened at The New York Times in the months leading up to that, but I think it would be important to, even in this case, have the proposal from one of Trump’s acolytes put in the pages. Isn’t it better to know ahead of time and debate these ideas, put them out into the open? These are ideas held by the administration. Debate them there. Understand the case for and against. Newsflash — Bennet does not think that ICE agents should have been sent to Minnesota. This is a different case.
Are there looters and disruptors of the peace there, and are there thousands of unregistered migrants in Minnesota that warrant ICE being sent there? Let’s discuss it and let’s, as journalists, figure out if the numbers are there to warrant it, if there’s truth to what the administration is saying. And if there isn’t, uncover it, reveal it, debate it, call them out. I’m not sure we’ve had that over the last few months. But it’s interesting to see in some ways parts of history repeat itself in the second Trump administration.
TH: This [2020] era and this [activist] climate we’re talking about — you and I have talked about this a lot before and we’ve tried to unpack it and understand it. Let’s listen to how Bennet describes what was going on in journalism during that era.
JB: At the same time, particularly in the Democratic Party, identitarian politics was taking over. The same idea really, I think, was contaminating journalism. Contaminating, in my view, because it’s so contrary to the fundamental, humble, curious, empathetic spirit that journalism is supposed to be conducted in. And the deep suspicion — these ideas came raging out of the academy over the course of the last 10 to 15 years. [There was] deep suspicion, or even opposition, to the idea that the struggle towards objectivity was anything other than a cover for power.
TH: It’s a striking comment. Harrison, when we think about why this feeling — the sentiment against objectivity — caught fire, what’s your most charitable reading? Why do you think this idea gained so much popularity?
