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When the Tom Cotton "send in the guard to kill all the black people" op-ed blew up at the New York Times, you got the usual dumb defenses, many of which were premised on the notion that the editorial page editor is not a real job requiring the exercise of editorial judgment, but instead a person that just hits "publish" on everything that flows into their inbox.

In reality, everything put in the opinion pages of the Times is blessed as quality work (as determined by the editorial page editor) and deserving of a hearing (as determined by the editorial page editor). That's what s/he ges paid for and that's what subscribers pay for!



The same people would defend this, of course, for the same reasons.

In 1986, the New York Times published an op-ed by William F. Buckley Jnr. that called for people with AIDS to be tattooed on their arms and buttocks.

That's in my lifetime. https://t.co/ES2wHm3ASc pic.twitter.com/iMEEqlf5nM

— Mic Wright (@brokenbottleboy) February 17, 2023

Arguably it's news when an important person (president, key senator, though not a self-appointed Chief Clown like Buckley) says something, but they don't have to be given additional space for advocacy.