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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

Tom Cotton is a sitting US Senator. Denying him op–ed space is in no way tantamount to "silencing" him.

Also they didn't deny him anything. His idiotic vomit ran above the fold online. The Times admitted the opinion editor didn't even read the piece, they just ran it automatically out of deference to the senator.

Also worth noting that Bennett actually reached out to Cotton to write the piece

And Bennett lost his position because of it.

because of the article? Or because the entire process for handling it failed to meet NYT process standards for op-eds, and because Bennett himself was at best misleading and at worse lying about his own role and behavior in that process?

There are 100 Senators, chosen by the same types of processes that put Donald Trump in the White House, why is being a Senator an automatic qualification for publishing in the NYT? Such a famous newspaper should be more exclusive than that.

Neither was publishing it an endorsement. Nor was it an endorsement when they published an editorial from an ISIS leader or going back some ways, Hitler. It’s important to know what politicians think.

He could have easily Had it published in the Federalist or Breitbart, but the average nytimes reader would never have had the opportunity to read it. Filter bubbles are a big problem, and getting Cotton on record in the paper of record is a valuable service.

The editor was fired

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