Rubenstein’s account spans his tenure as editor from 2019 to the period following the murder of George Floyd when he was fired for allowing Cotton’s op-ed calling for harsher action against the rioters and looters engaging in violence across the nation.

The author starts by recounting an orientation session he attended in the first days of his employment. What he describes sounds more like a cultural sensitivity struggle session than a meeting to onboard new hires.

On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.

The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.

Rubenstein also discusses the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, an issue that left-leaning news outlets did their best to spin into a nothing burger. Apparently, the New York Times was no different. It was clear that internally, the news outlet was worried that the story could impact President Joe Biden’s chances of winning the 2020 election.

Or take the Hunter Biden laptop story: Was it truly “unsubstantiated,” as the paper kept saying? At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism. Nor is a vague unease with difficult subjects. “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable,” a colleague once told me. This was something I was used to hearing from young progressives on college campuses, but not at work.

In an interesting but not surprising moment, the author recounts his struggle to publish pieces expressing right-leaning viewpoints. He explained that submissions from right-of-center perspectives were subjected to “a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher-ups,” which was not the case when publishing left-leaning op-eds.

At the heart of Rubenstein’s critique lies his account of The Times’ handling of Sen. Cotton’s op-ed, which advocated for deploying the National Guard to intervene during the riots. He details the process by which the piece was published and the reaction coming from within The Times.

Immediately, the op-ed caused an outcry within the Times. Dozens of the paper’s employees retweeted an identical, or near-identical, statement, workshopped on Slack and rubber-stamped by the NewsGuild of New York, which represents the newspaper’s union (I was a member), claiming that “running this put Black @nytimes staff in danger.”

It was an outlandish claim but next to impossible to rebut—how can you tell someone who says they’re not safe that, in fact, they’re fine? Did they know that in some states, troops had already been deployed to protect public safety? Were we reading the same op-ed? Were they serious?

Leadership at the paper seemed to think so; the claim had the trappings of a workplace-safety and racial-justice issue. The Times Guild immediately started organizing against the op-ed and those responsible for it. “Is there something else we can do? I am behind whatever action we might take,” wrote Susan Hopkins, a newsroom editor who now helps run the front page, in the Guild Slack channel. By the end of the week, the Guild had a letter with more than 1,000 signatures demanding changes to the Opinion section. (When I pointed out to a Guild representative that its activism was in effect calling for one of its own members to face repercussions, he seemed surprised, and apologized, though the Guild did not meaningfully change its public tack.)

This was the piece that resulted in Rubenstein’s firing.

The author’s account reflects a troubling reality: The New York Times, along with other organizations, are unabashed propaganda outlets that exist to push a political agenda rather than inform their audience. Rubenstein’s story is likely the same at most other left-leaning organizations whose mission is the same: Make sure Democrats stay in power.