The New York Times has stopped defending its Tom Cotton op-ed. Here's a statement from a company spox: 
My reporting indicates that the Opinions section of the newspaper is contemplating the slashing of up to one fifth of its daily output, the better to exert greater oversight over pieces like Cotton's.
In his statements on the topic, NYT editorial page editor James Bennet hasn't mentioned that he actually read the piece prior to publication. It would be hard for the top editor of such a section to read *everything* pre-publication, considering its prolific output.
That said, any process that failed to escalate this particular op-ed -- which advocated a military invasion of urban America -- to the top boss is a process that requires overhauling. The section showed no awareness of how drastic a proposal was at hand.
The Cotton episode thus cements the notion that Bennet has failed as a manager over and over as he pilots one of the most influential stretches of U.S. journo real estate.
A year ago, the section published an anti-Semitic cartoon, a failure that featured a statement from the newspaper that the editor involved was “working without adequate oversight” and that there was a “faulty process.” nytimes.com/2019/04/28/bus…
In two circumstances, the Opinions section hired staffers without apparently having vetted their social-media history. In one case, they had to fire the staffer after just hours on the job. The other instance was an embarrassment too.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of Bennet's poor management arose in the Sarah Palin incident of June 2017, when the editorial page pretty much accused her of inciting the murderous 2011 rampage of Jared Lee Loughner.
Testimony that surfaced through Palin's subsequent lawsuit revealed that Bennet hadn't done the most basic research before he inserted the offending language in the editorial. It was another instance of bad management.
It's remarkable that through all this, Bennet has -- or had -- remained a top candidate to succeed Dean Baquet as executive editor of the New York Times. See this comment from Publisher Sulzberger in a recent excellent @bterris piece: washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019…
@bterris In between the many breakdowns, I must say, I have found a lot of amazing work from Bennet and his colleagues, including a recent package on American cities: nytimes.com/2020/05/15/opi…
