On Thursday’s broadcast of Fox News Radio’s “Guy Benson Show,” Fox News host Howard Kurtz said that the backlash over Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) New York Times op-ed “is so revealing about the culture” at the paper and that the outrage over them running the piece “strikes me as almost anti-journalism, that if you’re not on the train, if you don’t agree with our view, you’ve got to apologize, you’ve got to take it down, you’ve got to delete.”
Kurtz said, [relevant exchange begins around 9:00] “This is so revealing about the culture of the New York Times. … I mean, if you read the editorial page and the op-ed pages…it’s overwhelmingly anti-Trump and overwhelmingly liberal. And even the conservative columnists are fiercely anti-Trump. So, unless you want to be a completely one-sided propaganda sheet, the idea of a — whole — the idea of an op-ed page is to foster some kind of debate.”
He added, “I don’t begrudge the right of anybody who works at the New York Times to criticize it, but the sense of outrage, one writer saying she was ashamed that the paper ran this, as if Tom Cotton couldn’t get his message out any other way.”
Kurtz further stated, “I understand the sensitivity for black journalists who work at the New York Times. And I don’t want to muzzle them either, but the idea that there’s some kind of outrage to publish an opposing piece by a United States senator who actually has some influence on policy…just strikes me as almost anti-journalism, that if you’re not on the train, if you don’t agree with our view, you’ve got to apologize, you’ve got to take it down, you’ve got to delete.”
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