Journalist Matt Taibbi said Tuesday that Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) controversial op-ed in The New York Times was “nowhere near” the line of what shouldn’t be allowed in public discourse.
Taibbi told Hill.TV that he disagrees with Cotton’s opinion stating that the nation should respond to the protests over police brutality and the killing of George Floyd with increased military action and an “overwhelming show of force.”
The op-ed was titled “Send in the Troops.”
“I think we all can agree that there is a line somewhere and certainly what we’re dealing with in this controversy is a wide disagreement over where that line is,” he said. “I think this Cotton piece, which I disagree with, is nowhere near that line.”
Taibbi said the argument is over “two fundamentally different ways of looking at what the role of the newspaper is.”
He said that not including content like Cotton’s op-ed will cause readers to have to go to Fox News or other outlets to see “what one side of the aisle is thinking.”
“What it really accomplishes is it puts your readers in the dark about what a huge segment of the country is thinking, and that defeats the mission to me of the news in general,” he said.
The Times said the op-ed “did not meet our standards” after its publication, the editorial page director James Bennet resigned.
Several employees at the Times condemned the publication of Cotton’s op-ed, saying it endangered black lives.
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