Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a scathing criticism of the New York Times and its decision to apologize for an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton that called for using the U.S. military to restore order following riots in several U.S. cities.
“One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said in a Senate floor speech on Wednesday.
The New York Times removed Cotton’s op-ed from the print edition and added an editor’s note to the online version after some of its staff protested the piece, which was headlined “Send in the military.”
The editor’s note said, among other things, that the headline “was incendiary and should not have been used.”
The protests over the Cotton op-ed also prompted the ouster of James Bennet, the New York Times’s opinion page editor.
McConnell, in his floor speech, warned that it would be dangerous for the same mentality to pervade other parts of society, such as the university system.
“The far-left cannot write angry emails to a university president or a publisher to get him fired,” McConnell said of Cotton, an Arkansas Republican. “He cannot be silenced by professions of outrage or the use of magic words like ‘problematic.’ His only bosses are his constituents. But this broader left-wing obsession with banning heretics from the public square will be poison for this country if it persists.”
