Neither the official statement nor an email from publisher A.G. Sulzberger sent to staffers about the shake-up mentioned Cotton's editorial specifically. The latter stated, "Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing process, not the first we've experienced in recent years".

Bennet's four-year tenure as the editorial page editor for the New York Times included a Pulitzer Prize. He also was considered as one of a handful of potential successors to Executive Editor Dean Baquet, who has said he plans to step down in a few years.

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He also oversaw the section during a share of controversies, including one that led to legal action by Sarah Palin, who accused the paper of linking her to the 2011 shooting of Gabrielle Giffords (the New York Times issued a correction), and an op-ed by conservative columnist Bret Stephens, in which he seemed to compare a professor calling him a bedbug on Twitter to the Nazis' treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

The New York Times had reported that Bennet, despite his initial defense of the Cotton essay, did not read it before publication. Dao, his successor, told staffers in an internal Slack conversation that he had read the piece, and that it was fact-checked.