It was Wednesday of last week, and there was footage from cities across the country

showing violent police officers shoving, beating, and otherwise assaulting peaceful protesters.

Just two days earlier, President Trump had threatened to deploy active duty troops to combat the protest.

The Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, had said he didn't think using the military was the correct action.

The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort,

and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.

We are not in one of those situations now.

And meanwhile, in the New York Times' opinion section, the United States Senator was given

a platform to call for, quote, an overwhelming show of force to quash the protests.

The outcry over Tom Cotton's opinion piece was sharp

and swift, not only from readers, but from the newspaper's own employees. The paper's opinion

editor, James Bennett, at first defended the piece, writing that it would, quote, undermine

the integrity and independence of the Times if we only published

views that editors like me agreed with.

Then it came out later in the week that Bennett hadn't even read the piece before publishing

it.

He resigned over the weekend.

David Roberts writes for Vox, and in a piece this week he argued that the New York Times has a responsibility to uphold, not undermine, fundamental democratic values.

And also, by the way, not to publish misinformation.

If you just read the column, you would have thought that there were squadrons of radical,

anti-fah, domestic terrorists hovering around all these demonstrations and protests, and there

just wasn't.

...