I'm Michelle Goldberg.

I'm Frank Rooney.

I'm Ross Douthet, and this is the argument.

We'd like to start today's show with an apology to all of you who wrote or called in to ask

what happened to last week's episode.

The answer is that we took an unexpected week off,

and we apologize for not giving our listeners a heads up.

Here's what happened.

Our department, the opinion section of The New York Times, was in turmoil.

The cause was an op-ed that we published by Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas.

It called for deploying the US military to end the riots and looting taking place in American cities around some of the Black Lives Matter protests.

Sometimes readers and sometimes reporters swiftly denounced the piece, arguing that it represented a tacit call for violence against protesters,

and that it endangered the lives of times reporters of color who were already at risk while covering the unrest.

In the wake of this controversy, the Times of Editorial Page Editor, James Bennett, our boss, resigned.

The paper published an editor's note on top of the original op-ed explaining that the essay fell short of our op-ed standards and shouldn't have gone out.

Because arguing is what we do, a number of op-ed writers have since weighed in, myself included.

I wrote a defense of publishing the piece, mistaken though I thought Cotton's argument was,

and a critique of what I see as the more activist direction that journalism and our paper seems to be taking in its coverage of American debates.

Today we're going to talk a little bit about the op-ed controversy, hopefully without too much New York Times naval gazing.

And then we'll talk about the debates, roiling our industry more generally, about objectivity versus truth,

about the press's duty to report multiple sides of a debate versus its duty to stand up for democratic values.

And then we'll also talk about the way the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired a reckoning with some of these questions,

...