After a staff uproar, New York Times says that Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” op-ed it published yesterday did not meet its standards

We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this. It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.

But that probably just sounds platitudinous, particularly at a fragile moment like this in our national life. And it doesn’t address specific concerns about our publishing this piece.

Well, at least they're self aware.

But, in this case, I worry we’d be misleading our readers if we concluded that by ignoring Cotton’s argument we would diminish it.

Cotton, a Republican and a combat veteran, serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence. He has a direct line to the White House, and he’s a likely presidential candidate in the future. What he thinks may very well become government policy, which means it demands interrogation.

But that response, again, only leads to a further criticism: That Times Opinion should have left it to the Times newsroom to write a news story about Cotton’s views. A news reporter, summarizing Cotton’s position, could add important context and juxtapose his views with those of others rebutting him.

That points to a general hazard for Times Opinion journalism, particularly in the digital era. While we aspire to convene debate, each piece goes out onto the internet as its own unit of argument, rather than contextualized within the running back-and-forth we are curating in aggregate. We try to overcome this problem by, for example, highlighting links among arguments that clash. We did this yesterday with Cotton’s piece by linking it to Stevenson’s and to the editorial. We’ve also added more detail to author identifications in hopes of providing further context for their views. I’ve started writing this newsletter in another effort to provide such context.

But when it comes to supplying context, none of that is as effective as a reporter’s ability to dispassionately present a range of voices, combined with other reporting, within a single article.

Seems decently competent I guess. The problem is that as pointed out by @moonbathers, it's a really fundamental contradiction of basic first amendment rights, and it's not like most protests are peaceful anyway.