1. What the hell is happening at the New York Times? I think the larger crisis, going well beyond the argument over the Cotton op ed, is the crack-up of the elite consensus that dominated from 1939 until 1991 (and had a strong afterlife until around 2014).
2. The Times, along with other elite media, has long practiced a highly specialized form of objectivity (or rather, faux-objectivity): both-sidesism. Based on the narrow USA 2-party system, idea is that neutrality means giving articulation to competing elites (Dem & GOP).
3. Faux-objectivity & both-sidesism always ran into problems with politics expanded beyond elite quarrels and started to include the broader public (as in the 1960s and in our current age of protests).
4. One curious feature of the current strife between the newsroom & the opinion section is that both sides are smart enough to realize the age of faux-objectivity & both-sidesism is over. They just have different solutions to the problem.
5. As @benyt's excellent article from yesterday made clear, the newsroom solution to faux-objectivity has come from a cohort of mostly African-American reporters battle-hardened at Ferguson who have pushed for an end to old euphemisms and evasions in writing about racism.
6. The newsroom solution is greater bluntness and diversity of experience (i.e. bringing marginalized groups into the writing of stories), then the op ed solution was expansion of political spectrum (good) combined with hot take nihilism (the source of trouble)
7. I want to be clear here that I'm not a hater. There's much that happened in @JBennet tenure as opinion editor that I admired (notably bringing on board Jamelle Bouie & @michelleinbklyn). Bennet was smart enough to know the old elite consensus was dead & need to move beyond it
8. As an example of what Bennet's genuinely helpful expansion of the political spectrum inside the Times, it's hard to imagine the pre-Bennet Times running @Vinncent Vincent Bevins's piece on how the liberal world order is built on blood 
9. But Bennet has had a harder time expanding with right-wing voices, in part because it is harder to find Trumpists who can write non-batshit stuff (one exception is @ToryAnarchist, who the Times has been running). So paper settled back to Never Trumpists, mainly.
10. More broadly, I think the break-up of the elite consensus has led Bennet into a kind of epistemological nihilism. The attitude seems to be "since we can't convince each other with arguments, we can at least entertain each other with hot takes & trolling." Hence Bret Stephens
11. In short, the fracturing of the New York Times is symptomatic of the larger fracturing of America (or rather the reality of a fractured America becoming more obvious in an age of protests). More thoughts here: thenation.com/article/societ…
