Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Wednesday that The New York Times is “lying” about the contents of Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton’s recent opinion piece, Politico reports.
“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 remarks made on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”
He added, “The Times itself began lying about what Sen. Cotton had said. The paper’s own Twitter account has claimed he called for a crackdown on peaceful protests when he specifically distinguished them from violent protests."
The Times’ editorial page editor, James Bennet, resigned after receiving criticism for publishing Cotton’s piece on the protests over the killing of George Floyd, which claimed that “nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.”
Cotton’s piece now has an editor’s note stating that the “essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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