I Was a Heretic at The New York Times

On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.

The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.

As far back as I can remember, my parents have subscribed to the Times. As a kid, I’d run out to grab the newspaper from the driveway most mornings, and we’d do the crossword puzzle together on the weekends. When I got a job in the Times Opinion section in 2019, they were thrilled—the last time someone in my family had had anything to do with the paper, it was for my grandmother’s run-in with the law in 1986. In an act of civil disobedience, she had chained herself to her hot-dog cart in Houston after city officials refused to give her a food-vendor license. (She ultimately beat the ticket.)

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I was glad that someone like me—with a background writing for right-of-center publications—was welcome at the paper of record. After college, I’d landed a fellowship on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and then a writing job at The Weekly Standard. The Standard was conservative yet unrelentingly anti–Donald Trump, and happy to pick fights with Republicans. The story I’m most proud of writing there was one exposing the racist remarks of then-Representative Steve King of Iowa.

James Bennet, the Times’ editorial-page editor, and James Dao, the op-ed editor, were committed to publishing heterodox views. From my time at the Standard, I had contacts on the political right and a good sense of its ideological terrain. The Times had hired me to provide research for columnists and to solicit and edit newsy, against-the-grain op-eds. I brushed off my discomfort about the office politics and focused on work. Our mandate was to present readers with “intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion,” as the Times’ founder, Adolph Ochs, put it in 1896. This meant publishing arguments that would challenge readers’ assumptions, and perspectives that they may not otherwise encounter in their daily news diet. I edited essays by the mayor of a small city in Kentucky, a New York City subway conductor on her work during COVID, a military mother on improving life on bases. I also sought out expressly conservative views.

Ochs was not, of course, calling for publishing just any opinion. An op-ed had to be smart and written in good faith, and not used to settle scores, derive personal benefit, or engineer some desired outcome. It had to be authentic. In other words, our goal was supposed to be journalistic, rather than activist.

This, I learned in my two years at the Times, was not a goal that everyone shared.

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.

Or take the Hunter Biden laptop story: Was it truly “unsubstantiated,” as the paper kept saying? At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism. Nor is a vague unease with difficult subjects. “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable,” a colleague once told me. This was something I was used to hearing from young progressives on college campuses, but not at work.

There was a sense that publishing the occasional conservative voice made the paper look centrist. But I soon realized that the conservative voices we published tended to be ones agreeing with the liberal line. It was also clear that right-of-center submissions were treated differently. They faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher-ups. Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list. Then we would all discuss it. But many of my colleagues didn’t want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments, and early-to-mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publication. After senior leaders in the Opinion section realized that these articles were not getting a fair shake, the process evolved. Articles that were potentially “controversial” (read: conservative) were sent directly to the most senior editors on the page, to be scrutinized by the leadership rather than the whole department.

The tension between journalistic and activist impulses existed in newsrooms before the spring of 2020. But it deepened after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the protests and riots that gripped America in the subsequent weeks. The account of how the Times came to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to quell riots, and of the controversy that followed, has been told in many places, most recently by Bennet, my former boss, in a lengthy essay for 1843, The Economist’s magazine. I was the primary editor of that op-ed, under the direction of my more senior colleagues.

I was working remotely from Los Angeles at the time and remember walking down Fairfax Avenue a few days earlier. Everything was trashed. Gang signs had been scrawled on the walls of stores; graffiti on a bank branch read hang bankers; stores with Black Lives Matter signs had been ransacked. Police cars and some stores had been burned nearby, and I could smell the ash in the air. Notably, 1,000 National Guardsmen had been called in to Los Angeles to restore calm.

The Times editorial board weighed in on the Black Lives Matter protests, articulating complete support for their mission:

Not all of the demonstrations were peaceful. Police stations in Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, were set on fire. Police cars were firebombed in New York City, and officers were shot in St. Louis. Many people felt that things were spiraling out of control.

On June 1, Tom Cotton, a former Army officer and the junior senator from Arkansas, was advancing the argument—in exchanges with President Trump and on his Twitter feed—that the president should invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy, “if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” The “no quarter” element caused alarm—did Cotton mean “leave no survivor,” as the phrase’s use in a military context could suggest? “A no quarter order is a war crime,” the conservative commentator and former Army lawyer David French responded. Cotton clarified, tweeting: “If you say that someone was given no quarter, you mean that they were not treated kindly by someone who had power or control over them,” with a link to that definition in a dictionary. Not everyone was convinced.

The next day, Cotton’s office pitched me an op-ed about Twitter threatening to lock his account if he didn’t delete the original tweet. I sent the pitch to Dao, the op-ed editor. Rather than focus on the side issue of Twitter’s content-moderation policies, Dao replied, Cotton’s essay should be about the actual substance of his argument: In this case, does the president have the authority to invoke the Insurrection Act? Should he? Other editors who were consulted on the pitch found that argument worthwhile. I conveyed the reformulated idea to Cotton’s office, and his staff filed a draft early the next morning. We also had plans, as was our custom, to run arguments against Cotton’s view. And we already had.

I was given the job of fact-checking and line-editing. Among other edits, I inserted a line making clear the distinction between peaceful protesters and law-breaking looters. I deleted several objectionable sentences and cleared up factual questions: all pretty standard in the work of an op-ed editor. In addition to my own edits, I incorporated edits conveyed by Bennet, Dao, and the deputy op-ed editor, Clay Risen; then a copy editor went over the essay. Over the course of this process, I went back and forth with Cotton’s staff several times, and we exchanged multiple drafts.

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.

At about 2 p.m. on Wednesday, June 3, Cotton’s office signed off on the article. Risen and Dao then approved publication.

Immediately, the op-ed caused an outcry within the Times. Dozens of the paper’s employees retweeted an identical, or near-identical, statement, workshopped on Slack and rubber-stamped by the NewsGuild of New York, which represents the newspaper’s union (I was a member), claiming that “running this put Black @nytimes staff in danger.”

It was an outlandish claim but next to impossible to rebut—how can you tell someone who says they’re not safe that, in fact, they’re fine? Did they know that in some states, troops had already been deployed to protect public safety? Were we reading the same op-ed? Were they serious?

Leadership at the paper seemed to think so; the claim had the trappings of a workplace-safety and racial-justice issue. The Times Guild immediately started organizing against the op-ed and those responsible for it. “Is there something else we can do? I am behind whatever action we might take,” wrote Susan Hopkins, a newsroom editor who now helps run the front page, in the Guild Slack channel. By the end of the week, the Guild had a letter with more than 1,000 signatures demanding changes to the Opinion section. (When I pointed out to a Guild representative that its activism was in effect calling for one of its own members to face repercussions, he seemed surprised, and apologized, though the Guild did not meaningfully change its public tack.)

A diplomatic correspondent, Edward Wong, wrote in an email to colleagues that he typically chose not to quote Cotton in his own stories because his comments “often represent neither a widely held majority opinion nor a well-thought-out minority opinion.” This message was revealing. A Times reporter saying that he avoids quoting a U.S. senator? What if the senator is saying something important? What sorts of minority opinions met this correspondent’s standards for being well thought-out? In any event, the opinion Cotton was expressing in his op-ed, whatever one thinks of it, had, according to polling cited in the essay, the support of more than half of American voters. It was not a minority opinion.

Soon a new channel was created on Slack to discuss the op-ed. In a matter of hours, more than 1,500 employees had joined it, and there were thousands of messages plotting next steps and calling for a retraction, an editors’ note, firings.

Many colleagues wrote to me directly to express their anger. A few offered support. “Hey fwiw I disagree with Cotton but I think that piece was a traditional op-ed from the other side. Hope you’re OK,” a senior staff editor told me.

One columnist suggested that I “take notes.” I did.

On Thursday, June 4, a reporter on the business desk named Edmund Lee contacted me. “So, we’re reporting out the Cotton Op-Ed,” he wrote. “We know from sources you were the principal writer.” I reached out to Dao for advice on how to handle this ludicrous claim, and did as he suggested. “I’ll have to send you to corp comms,” I wrote to Lee. “Off the record: I can categorically tell you that I did not write the Op-Ed.”

Later that day, the Times published a story by Lee and two other reporters. “The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein,” the article said. It devoted five paragraphs to my interaction with the photo editor, who had, against company policy, shared with the reporters some of our Slack messages.

The full exchange made clear that I had been talking about the photos; presented this way, many read it as a confession that I believed the article was drawing false equivalences. Indeed, after this account came out, The Washington Post described me as having “shrugged off accuracy issues.”

That wasn’t the only issue with Lee’s story. As Bennet noted in his essay for 1843, the article claimed that Cotton advocated suppressing “protests against police violence.” The op-ed didn’t argue that. If it had, we would not have published it. In fact, Cotton’s essay was explicit in distinguishing between protests and the undeniable violence and looting: “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.” (When asked for comment by The Atlantic, Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokesperson, pointed to the op-ed’s language calling for a show of force to “deter lawbreakers.” She wrote, “‘Lawbreakers’ would have included people marching without permits, refusing to disperse and blocking the streets. A fair reading of that suggests that he was in favor of military intervention against those breaking curfew or refusing to disperse as well as looters and rioters.” At the time, police cars were burning in glass-strewn streets. I assure you, when Cotton wrote “lawbreakers,” he wasn’t talking about curfews.)

At first the paper’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, had defended the choice to publish Cotton’s op-ed, though he added that he was listening to everyone’s concerns “with an open mind.” By that night, he’d caved and was claiming that a review had been conducted that found that “a rushed editorial process” was responsible for an op-ed that “did not meet our standards.” For the record, I—the editor on whom the paper had pinned responsibility—was never interviewed as part of any formal review.

Later, after poring over the Slack channels, I realized something more surprising: Rachel Abrams, one of Lee’s co-authors on the article, had been a vocal internal critic of Cotton’s op-ed. “How can they be sending us emails telling us they’re keeping us safe and care about our physical and mental well-being and then publish this,” she had posted on Slack, later adding, “I think it’s good that a lot of us will put our names on a strong condemnation.” (She later stated that, as a media reporter, she should not have said this, but that there was no issue with her factual reporting for the story.)

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.”

On the morning of June 5, the company assembled for a virtual town hall. As Bennet wrote in 1843, this was an opportunity for him to apologize (he didn’t), and for Sulzberger and Dean Baquet, then the Times’ executive editor, to get ahold of the ship (they didn’t). Afterward, one reporter, Liam Stack, wrote to colleagues, “This rhetoric of ‘a moment of deep reflection and listening’ is just making people more angry.” The pressure on management would not relent.

That night, an editors’ note was appended to the op-ed. The note contains many errors, among them that the editorial process had been “rushed,” that “senior editors were not sufficiently involved,” and that facts in the article weren’t quite right. Never mind, of course, that it wasn’t rushed, that senior editors were deeply involved, and that there were no correctable errors. The note criticized Cotton’s claim that “radicals like antifa are infiltrating protest marches,” alleging that it had “not been substantiated.” But the attorney general was on the record saying that antifa had done just that—a fact the Times eventually confirmed for itself.

“A more pathetic collection of 317 words would be difficult to assemble,” Erik Wemple, the media critic of The Washington Post, wrote a few years later about the editor’s note.

The next morning I got a call from Sulzberger. I warned him that every action he was taking—the town halls, the public statements, the editors’ note, and the Times’ own erroneous reporting—was putting me, my colleagues, and Sulzberger himself in a worse position. He apologized for the mess, and for my being caught in the middle of it, and said he’d “stew on” what he could do.

I never heard from him again.

The same day, Sulzberger asked Bennet to resign. “Wow,” Meghan Louttit, who is now a deputy editor in the newsroom, wrote on Slack. “James’s resignation makes me somewhat … Hopeful?” and added that the firing, in her view, represented “a first step.”

But a first step toward what? During an Opinion all-hands meeting, a liberal columnist asked Sulzberger about the precedent that firing Bennet set: Will you stand by me if people around here and on Twitter don’t like one of my columns?

Every now and then, the group that handles security for the Times would check in on me to make sure I was safe. Ever since the paper had named me as the person responsible for publishing Cotton’s op-ed, I had been receiving alarming threats.

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.

Maybe I should have seen this all coming. A few months earlier, my former colleague Bari Weiss had predicted that Bennet wouldn’t last long: “He is doing what they claim to want but they don’t want it,” she told me. Once Bennet resigned, a new regime came into Opinion. Dao was reassigned to the national desk. Clay Risen moved to Politics, then to Obituaries. New policies were enacted. A “See something, say something” rule was affirmed, and a Slack channel called “op-sensitivity” was created, in which editors were encouraged to raise concerns about one another’s stories. By December, I had decided to leave the paper. It had been made clear to me, in a variety of ways, that I had no future there.

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In the years preceding the Cotton op-ed, the Times had published op-eds by authoritarians including Muammar Qaddafi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Vladimir Putin. The year of the Cotton op-ed, it also published the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Regina Ip’s defense of China’s murderous crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, Moustafa Bayoumi’s seeming apologia of cultural and ethnic resentments of Jews, and an article by a leader of the Taliban, Sirajuddin Haqqani. None of those caused an uproar. Last year, the page published an essay by the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City, and few seemed to mind. But whether the paper is willing to publish conservative views on divisive political issues, such as abortion rights and the Second Amendment, remains an open question.

I’m not sure the relative calm can be attributed to the new leadership or new policies; more likely the cause was enough blood having been let, and Donald Trump having left office (however unwillingly). On January 6, 2021, few people at The New York Times remarked on the fact that liberals were cheering on the deployment of National Guardsmen to stop rioting at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the very thing Tom Cotton had advocated.

(In a statement, Rhoades Ha, the Times spokesperson, told The Atlantic that the Opinion section’s “commitment to publishing diverse views—including those that are unpopular, controversial or heterodox—is unwavering.” She doubled down on the Times’ claims that the Cotton op-ed “did not hold up to scrutiny” and that senior leaders weren’t involved enough. “None of that,” she added at the end, “was Adam’s fault. As a junior member of the team, he deserved better editorial support and oversight.” Please. What I and others really deserved were leaders who didn’t buckle under pressure and sacrifice their own to placate a loud and insurgent group at the paper.)

All of this happened in the first five years of my career. In the worst of those days, I was attacked not only by colleagues, but also by acquaintances and friends. One friend contacted my girlfriend of seven years, asking whether she would take a stand against “Adam’s role in promoting fascism.” She—the tough-as-nails daughter of Peruvian immigrants who grew up hearing stories of her parents fleeing the Shining Path—ignored it, and some eight weeks later, we were engaged.

As painful as it was in my mid-20s to think that my journalistic career would end as a result of this episode, it’s even more painful to think that newsrooms haven’t learned the right lessons from it. If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.

By telling the story the Times told about Cotton’s op-ed, the paper seemed to avoid confronting the tough reality that despite many staffers’ objections, the article was well within the bounds of reasonable discourse. What did it mean for the paper and its coverage that Times employees were so violently opposed to publishing a mainstream American view?

It was clear to me then and it’s clear to me now that the fight over Cotton’s op-ed was never about safety, or the facts, or the editing, or even the argument, but control of the paper and who had it. In the end, all that mattered was that an example had been made.