Tom Cotton’s Dunk on The New York Times

Sen. Tom Cotton participates in an economic panel last July.

Yes, Tom Cotton owned the liberals at The New York Times.

The Arkansas senator’s “Send In the Troops” op-ed on June 3, calling for the American military to quell violent protests in our own country, left the great East Coast newspaper with egg on its face and the editorial page editor without a job.

James Bennet’s resignation was part of a larger reckoning in journalism as Americans marched by the hundreds of thousands against police brutality. The country is edgy, haunted by the image of George Floyd’s last breaths under the knee of a white police officer. With that backdrop, media workers are challenging management, and being heard.

Bennet has new company on the unemployment line. Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, quit after a staff walkout, having overseen a “Buildings Matter, Too” headline that seemed to equate bricks and mortar with “Black Lives.” Christine Barberich, editor and co-founder of the women’s lifestyle publication Refinery29, stepped down in New York after black former employees described a toxic workplace.

Bon Appétit editor Adam Rapoport resigned after reports from aggrieved staffers and the emergence on social media of a photo of him in brownface.

But The Times swirled most prominently in the sea of outrage. After collaborating with Cotton on his piece, The Times published it and defended it, then reviewed it, then finally disowned it.

The tumult signaled an overdue re-evaluation of the debate-club approach papers have taken to op-ed publishing for decades. Critics like David Roberts of Vox argue that good-faith debate relies on a common reverence for facts, as well as “values that transcend partisan advantage.” As Roberts put it, “the GOP no longer feels bound by any such principles.”

As a former Times news editor, I was stunned by Bennet’s admission that he never bothered to read Cotton’s bombshell commentary before greenlighting it. The editing, it turns out, was assigned to a 25-year-old.

The Times now says Cotton’s essay was rushed into publication and didn’t meet its standards. And it’s hard to imagine a better outcome for Cotton, who took the opportunity to ridicule The Times for kowtowing to “a mob of woke children.”

As an Army lieutenant in 2006, Cotton “advocated locking up New York Times journalists for reporting on how the government was tracking terror financing,” columnist Max Boot wrote Tuesday in the Washington Post. The senator is now “returning to his authoritarian instincts as he bids to become Trump’s successor,” he added.

Tweets from Times staffers, who face newsroom restrictions on internet posts, signaled the beginning of a social media rebellion shortly after the piece went online.

“Running this puts black @nytimes staff in danger,” was a common refrain, and a reasonable worry considering that heavily armed troops might escalate already significant violence against journalists. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter Tony Holt was hospitalized after being struck by an object at a Little Rock protest — more on that next week — and journalists nationwide have been shot with rubber bullets, hit with nightsticks and arrested while doing their jobs.)

Newspapers, like other companies, proclaim a goal of cultural change in hiring more minorities. Now they’re facing the fact that more voices can mean more dissent, and the realization that they’ll be called hypcritical if they fail to listen.

The entire op-ed approach — seeking views opposite the official editorial stance — sprang from a noble quest for more variety in opinion. But remember, this isn’t a free speech issue, as many suggest. Cotton has the right to say whatever he wants, but he has no more right to space in The New York Times than somebody off the street has to claim space in your company newsletter.

Freedom of the press leaves decisions on what to print to the owners of the press. And that’s the American way.