And some other shit too. The problem is that once you publish the other shit, it is harder to know which is the fitshit.
NYT has several different categories of “opinion”: Editorials, Columnists, Guest contributions, Letters. Their model is that only the Editorials (and the lead “Today’s Opinion”) represent the newspaper’s position, and the rest is balance, but sectioned off in sneer quotes so the reader won’t take it as seriously.
This model obviously doesn’t work, in part because we don’t always access content in the paper the way people used to (where this categorization was more obvious), and in part because we also understand that what gets into the other sections is also, obviously, a matter of newspaper policy.
The Cotton thing was a bad call on the part of the paper. I think I understand why they did it: reading it gives some insight into how a functioning human being might conceivably support this kind of military action, something that mainly seems unthinkable to me. I also don’t think that it in any way reflects some secret NYT complicity in authoritarian policy; all their ‘real’ editorials (and almost all of their guest contributions) have been adamantly opposed to such action.
However, it was divisive and inflammatory at a time when that’s what we absolutely do not need. They should have waited until after things were settled, and maybe run an article where a reporter interviews Cotton (instead of giving him the soapbox) and asks him, “what the fuck were you thinking?” That would have been just as informative, without feeding the beast.
