'It Was Like a Maoist Struggle Session': NYT Staff Writer on Freakout Over Tom Cotton Op-Ed
“I absolutely loved working at the New York Times,” said former Times writer Shawn McCreesh. “But that was just the weirdest day in the almost five years I worked there.”
Many journalists and media mavens remember the week of June 3, 2020.
It was the week The New York Times published an op-ed written by US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) headlined: “Send in the Troops.”
This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.
New York City suffered the worst of the riots Monday night, as Mayor Bill de Blasio stood by while Midtown Manhattan descended into lawlessness. Bands of looters roved the streets, smashing and emptying hundreds of businesses. Some even drove exotic cars; the riots were carnivals for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements.
Outnumbered police officers, encumbered by feckless politicians, bore the brunt of the violence. In New York State, rioters ran over officers with cars on at least three occasions. In Las Vegas, an officer is in “grave” condition after being shot in the head by a rioter. In St. Louis, four police officers were shot as they attempted to disperse a mob throwing bricks and dumping gasoline; in a separate incident, a 77-year-old retired police captain was shot to death as he tried to stop looters from ransacking a pawnshop.
Cotton was responding to the riots across the nation that had erupted following the death of George Floyd, who had died at the hands of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin two weeks before. Chauvin would eventually be convicted of murder for his role in Floyd’s death, but after months of lockdowns, the country wasn’t in the mood to wait for justice.
Cotton’s op-ed was clumsy and poorly reasoned, in my opinion. The riots were destructive, deadly, and disgraceful, but they hardly called for the presence of the US military. State and municipal governments had plenty of force at their disposal to keep the peace, though many seemed to lack the will to do so.
That said, Cotton’s op-ed was just that: an opinion, albeit a controversial one.
Apparently that was too much for staffers at the New York Times. Days after the op-ed was published, the respected opinion editor James Bennet, who approved the piece, had resigned, a casualty over the outrage the op-ed had sparked. (A month later, the talented journalist Bari Weiss would also resign from the Times, which proved to be a surprisingly great career move.)
That Times staffers had experienced a kind of meltdown over the op-ed was no secret. The event prompted a barrage of media articles, as well as some soul searching—public and private—from journalists on what was happening to news rooms.
New details have emerged as to just how profound the meltdown was.
Writing in the New York Post, veteran journalist Steve Krakauer—author of the new book Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People—pulls back the current a little further on the hysterical reaction to Cotton’s op-ed.
Krakauer spoke to Shawn McCreesh, a reporter at the Times during the period in question who now works at New York magazine. McCreesh, who compared staffers’ reaction to a Maoist struggle session, said it’s a day he’ll remember for the rest of his life.
Below is an excerpt of his conversation with Krakauer.
“I absolutely loved working at the New York Times,” he told me. “But that was just the weirdest day in the almost five years I worked there.”
He told me everything “snowballed really quickly,” largely organized on Slack — the chat tool many in the media use to dish with colleagues while theoretically working.
“There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” he told me. “And all these angry, backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on Slack. And the leadership was so horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve.”
Picture a giant media organization — but everyone is at home, spending their time on Zoom and Twitter, afraid to go outside because of COVID, angry about the Floyd killing. And then — the Cotton op-ed drops a bomb into the virtual newsroom.
“Before we knew it, we were in all these series of town hall meetings basically watching James Bennet defend himself before the Star Chamber, and it was awful,” McCreesh said. “James is a really great guy. We all really respected him, and you can have arguments about the op-ed or whether it should have been run or the editing process. This was something else. It was like a Maoist struggle session.”
For those who don’t know what struggle sessions were, you can read more about them here in this article I wrote for Newsweek in June 2020. (The article was published one day before James Bennet was forced to resign. The date, I imagine, is no coincidence.)
Some may think that McCreesh is exaggerating when he compares the meltdown to a Maoist struggle session. I don’t. I remember the summer of 2020 too well. Americans were coming unhinged over a combination of lockdown captivity, COVID fears, and racial tension.
Are we better now? I have my doubts.
Though tensions have eased—2020 was an abnormal year for many reasons—many of the same problems exist today, and not just in news rooms. I hope I’m wrong.
