Argument against Tom Cotton's 2020 op-ed was he'd been calling for "no quarter," which would mean state violence against protestors, and NYT shouldn't promote that.
After 3.5 years, we learn the reason wasn't the oft-stated "Cotton didn't call for that," but that NYT changed the piece so it didn't.
This is a far bigger journalistic scandal than people accusing an anecdote of being fake on Twitter. Did a Senator propose invoking the Insurrection Act against peaceful protestors and the Times softened his language?
The Cotton op-ed fallout went through culture war distortion, as if an editor who got fired was sacked exclusively because he published Cotton and people complained, and it had nothing to do with the fact the editor admitted he hadn't read it before ok-ing, nor any behind-the-scenes workplace stuff.
But still, whatever the reason for the firing, the argument for publishing Cotton's call for govt force was that it's important to know what a US Senator thinks, no matter the substance. If NYT editors changed some substance—because they, correctly, thought it sounded bad—that defeats the purpose.
Somebody's lying, and it's either the editor, or Cotton himself, who claimed, after the editorial was published, he wasn't calling for "protestors" to be fired on. Everybody seems to either be making themselves look as good as possible, or making other people look as bad as possible.
