"Seeing the brutality of a white power structure toward its poor black citizens [on the streets of Ferguson], and at its rawest, helped shape the way a generation of reporters..."

"... most of them black, looked at their jobs when they returned to their newsrooms. And by 2014... Twitter...  offered a counterweight to their newsrooms, which over the years had sought to hire black reporters on the unspoken condition that they bite their tongues about racism. Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.... The fights at The Times are particularly intense because Mr. Sulzberger is now considering candidates to replace the executive editor, Dean Baquet, in 2022, the year he turns 66. Competing candidates represent different visions for the paper, and Mr. Bennet had embodied a particular kind of ecumenical establishment politics. But the Cotton debacle had clearly endangered Mr. Bennet’s future. When the highly regarded Sunday Business editor, Nick Summers, said in a Google Hangout meeting last Thursday that he wouldn’t work for Mr. Bennet, he drew agreement from colleagues in a chat window.... Mr. Sulzberger... told me... 'We’re not retreating from the principles of independence and objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective about things like human rights and racism.'"

Writes Ben Smith in "Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms/Staff members’ demands helped end the tenure of James Bennet as Opinion editor of The New York Times. And they are generating tension at The Washington Post. Part of the story starts in Ferguson, Mo." (NYT).

We’re not retreating from the principles of... objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective....

"The New York Times announced Sunday that Editorial Page Editor James Bennet is resigning — amid reports of anger inside the company over the publication of an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton..."

"... about the George Floyd unrest last week. Bennet, the brother of 2020 White House candidate Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., had apologized late last week after previously defending the piece, titled, 'Send in the Troops.' Cotton, R-Ark., called for the government to deploy troops as a last resort to help quell riots and looting that emerged amid the anger over Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody last month. The publication sparked a revolt among Times journalists, with some saying it endangered black employees. Some staff members called out sick Thursday in protest, and the Times later announced that a review found the piece did not meet its standards.... 'Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we've experienced in recent years,' [Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote]. 'James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.'"

Fox News reports.

ADDED: NYT writer Bari Weiss has some very useful commentary at Twitter:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.  The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption. The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it "safetyism," in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.

It's interesting that people who made safety so overwhelmingly important would accept rioting and vehemently oppose government's protecting citizens from the forces of chaos.