Welcome back to In The Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

In tonight’s email, news and notes on a Timesian melodrama for the ages: James Bennet’s damning and extremely discursive indictment of his former employer, and his now-public battle with A.G. Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher, over L’Affaire Cotton and the Times’ commitment to liberalism.

But first…

🏰 Trouble in the Kingdom: “This is so fucking personal,” a veteran Hollywood executive told me this week, after news broke that former Disney executive Jay Rasulo had joined Nelson Peltz’s proxy battle against Bob Iger, vilifying the C.E.O.’s performance and nominating themselves for board seats in the process. Rasulo, of course, was Disney’s widely respected chief financial officer and onetime parks chief who left the company in anger and despair after Iger elevated Tom Staggs, a far more polished and political operator, to C.O.O. and heir apparent. (Of course, the immovable Iger would later pass Staggs over as well, among others.) Now, after eight years in the L.A. Philharmonic board director wilderness, Rasulo has returned alongside Iger’s nemeses Peltz and Ike Perlmutter, the former Marvel chairman, to force a change and cause trouble. “The Disney I know and love has lost its way,” Rasulo said in his statement.

This is a very significant escalation, to be sure. And, notably, Peltz and Rasulo are employing tactics that get to the heart of Iger’s psychology as a leader. They note that Iger has already sold the vast majority of his ownership stake, or “more than $1 billion of Disney stock” (he now has about $17 million worth of shares). The clear implication here is that he’s no longer got skin in the game, and thus isn’t as aligned with shareholder interests. Your move, Bob.

⚾ Speaking of the Disney diaspora: Ben Sherwood, the former Disney Television chief who inevitably pops up on the shortlist for every media C.E.O. vacancy, has sold his youth sports venture, Mojo, to the sports software management firm TeamSnap, a rare exit at an extinction-level moment for many tech start-ups. Sherwood will join TeamSnap’s board, but the relevant news here is that he’s once again a free agent some four years after leaving Disney. On a related note, Sherwood, an occasional novelist, is getting the film treatment: a movie based on his book The Man Who Ate the 747 will be produced by Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort and Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps.

⚖️ Kotick cleared… In late-breaking news on Friday night, the California Civil Rights Department has withdrawn its accusations against Bobby Kotick’s Activision Blizzard, which claimed that the video game maker had fostered a culture of sexual harassment against women. Kotick spent years beating back these claims about his company, even as it became a running narrative in the media, and most notably in The Wall Street Journal. Andrew Ross Sorkin, who broke the news, calls it “a stunning about-face.”

🤝 More deal heat: Punchbowl, the instantly influential congressional news media start-up launched by Politico alumni Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer, John Bresnahan and Rachel Schindler, has acquired the legislative data tracker Electo Analytics and will use it to offer a four-figure premium tier for its most dedicated Capitol Hill insiders. The deal, first reported by the Times, values Punchbowl at more than $100 million. … Meanwhile, over in the nonprofit media world, Mother Jones has merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Now, on to today’s main event…

After Howell Raines, the obstreperous and pedantic executive editor, was defenestrated in humiliation amid the Jayson Blair scandal, in 2003, he responded with a 21,000-word piece in The Atlantic raking his old boss, Arthur Sulzberger, over the coals. One gets the sense, judging from Jill Abramson’s aggressive public criticisms of the paper—which continue to this day, almost a decade after her departure in 2014—that she’s still smarting over her termination as well. In any event, few seem to leave that Renzo Piano building without going full Patrizia Reggiani. I guess it’s a testament to the power of the place.

For the last three years, James Bennet, the undeniably brilliant former New York Times Opinion editor, has been tormented by his own tenure at the Gray Lady, which infamously came to an end in June 2020 after the paper published Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed calling for military intervention to quell the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd. That op-ed, you’ll no doubt recall, led to extraordinary backlash from the Times’ more liberal readers and staff. After initially backing Bennet, the Times Company’s leadership backtracked, and fast. A few days after publication, A.G. Sulzberger, heir to the aforementioned publisher, forced Bennet’s resignation.

Over the last several months, Bennet has been engaged in what sources close to him described as a tortuous, emotional, and even physically exhausting process of pouring his feelings about his forced resignation—and what he sees as the Times’ broader drift toward a closing of the liberal mind—into a personal essay of sorts in The Economist, where he took up residence in 2021. His opus, which was published Thursday and comes in at 17,000 words—somehow shorter than Raines’ contribution to the canon—is a case study in how a profoundly urgent and thought-provoking thesis can be stifled by a lack of editorial discipline. The courageous reader who submits to this work of nonfiction will need to do so in multiple sittings, much the way Scorsese fans plodded episodically, despite the director’s intention, through The Irishman. The essay, titled When the New York Times Lost Its Way, needed an editor, or a therapist.

Since Bennet’s ouster, Sulzberger has pushed the narrative that the Cotton controversy was a failure of editorial process, and, more subtly, that Bennet’s ouster had to do with his longstanding managerial shortcomings, rather than any equivocation at the Times about publishing conservative viewpoints. If Bennet had only been more diligent in overseeing the Cotton op-ed, and previous controversial op-eds, the argument goes, all this could have been avoided. In response to Bennet’s essay, Sulzberger released a statement defending the Times’ commitment to independence, citing both its news reporting and its opinion section, which, he said, now includes “more conservative and heterodox voices, than ever before.” Then he added the dagger that conveyed his true feelings about Bennet’s management: “Principles alone are not enough. Execution matters. Leadership matters.”

Of course, Bennet’s account of the events of June 2020 raise questions about where the true failure of leadership occurred. In taking over Opinion, Bennet had been given a mandate to expand the range and diversity of voices, most notably conservative voices. In the process, he garnered some predictable controversy, sure, and also had his fair share of missteps, most notably when he edited a factual error about Sarah Palin into an editorial, giving the former governor of Alaska license to bring a libel suit against the paper that she continues to appeal. Inside the Times, Bennet inspired mixed feelings among Opinion staff—which is not a euphemism: Some people loved him, some people didn’t, some were ambivalent.

In any event, the Cotton op-ed ostensibly aligned with Bennet’s mandate: an opinion by a sitting U.S. senator and possible presidential candidate that reflected the views of both the White House and a majority of the Senate. And, according to Bennet’s account, there was no failure in the editorial process that actually rendered the piece unfit for print in the Times pages. Indeed, Sulzberger himself sent Bennet a note after publication in which he wrote, “I get and support the reason for including the piece”—a view he would abandon just days later amid unprecedented public criticism.

Without a more thorough explanation from Sulzberger about the implied editorial failures that took place, the best available evidence suggests that, when the moment came to defend the principles of liberal plurality that both he and Bennet ostensibly stand for, he instead caved to pressure from his employees. Moreover, Sulzberger’s subsequent effort to fault Bennet over editorial process and managerial ineptitude feels like an elaborate rationalization for that decision, and one that borders on self-deception. Because even if you believe that Bennet was a bad leader—hell, a toxic leader—who failed to execute on the Times mission, it doesn’t explain Sulzberger’s decision to disavow the publication of an op-ed that he had initially endorsed, that reflected the sentiments of the president and the Republicans in the Senate, and that, despite the protests of liberal Times staffers, did not only not put anyone in harm's way, but instead fostered a public debate that led to greater opposition toward the controversial proposition Cotton had made in the first place. And of course, if you distill Bennet’s biblically long screed down to its essence, that is exactly the point: The more we debate, the more we progress.

Indeed, every institution of American corporate life has changed during the past 15 years, but few have been altered as profoundly as the Times. The financial crisis threatened to cripple the company, whose balance sheet had become increasingly vulnerable after a decade of gonzo investments and stifled innovation. Waves of rolling layoffs seemed inevitable as a generation of lifers left the building every few quarters.

And then, after Carlos Slim’s $250 million loan, the Times appeared to make all the difficult choices wisely—slimming down areas of the newsroom in favor of investment in product and marketing. Over time, and especially during the Trump years, a mojo returned. Bennet, for his part, contributed mightily to this resurgence. But the Times had also become an affinity brand among the thinking liberals of the world. A.G. Sulzberger can write CJR pieces about heterodoxy all he wants, but the Times is and will always be a liberal institution, just as the sky is blue. Bennet deserves credit for his quixotic goal of trying to widen the aperture in the Opinion section, but like many institutions, the Times effectively belongs to its employees and its readers—and now they’re paying subscribers.

Is Bennet’s screed a form of catharsis? A book proposal submitted into the open market? An intellectual provocation for our time? Whatever the case, he is the latest high-ranking former Timesman who devoted much of his life to the institution only to find that you never quite quit the Times.