I'd argue that NYT has fallen into the latter, with dissenting voices stifled internally, example Bari Weiss:
https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2020/breaking-down-the-c...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/07/14/bari-weiss-r...
If that was the “one time there was a dissenting opinion” in the NY Times, what do you call Ross Douthat’s and Brett Stephen’s columns about that incident that the NY Times also ran?
The NYTimes op-ed section has plenty of dissenting opinions and/or conservatives... just not ones calling for violence.
That aside, he's a public representative of the highest order (a Senator). He needs to be heard whether we like it or not. I've not seen any public representative being censored in the country I'm from, that including opinion pieces from extremist parliament members on both sides. This is clearly a US thing.
And to achieve that you're going to force businesses to host content that hurts their bottom line (the loss of income from the advertisers that will pull out from working with a company that hosts such content).
> This is clearly a US thing.
In the country where you live all news organizations are forced to publish everything a politician says?
NYT makes more money from subscriptions than from ads (60% vs 30%), and as a (formerly) paying subscriber I'd like to think it lends them some independence. That aside, many other news sources would find Sen. Cotton's opinions pretty mainstream (certainly these opinions may have even had majority across the general public) and publish such views just fine, without advertisers pulling out.
>> In the country where you live all news organizations are forced to publish everything a politician says?
Of course not. They publish on their own accord, and extremists get an outsized exposure because they are interesting to read (just like click baits, right?). It's how I'd have expected most news organizations to work, you know: reporting on the unusual and unexpected. For me, NYT stopped being a news organization the moment it decided some opinions are forbidden from being published: not because they are fringe (a significant part of the American public agreed with Cotton), not because they come from fringe sources (he's a Senator after all), but because they are contrarian.
Cotton was just 7 months too early.
an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers
Also, Cotton pre-emptively disagrees with your characterisation also:
This [law] doesn’t amount to “martial law” or the end of democracy, as some excitable critics, ignorant of both the law and our history, have comically suggested