Yes, let’s take a look at that ideology through specific quotes in the article:

[The media] cannot remain neutral when [American] values are under threat from racialized authoritarianism.

Cotton’s op-ed doesn’t meet the Times’s standards, not only because it contains inaccuracies but because it reflects a worldview incompatible with the baseline small-l liberal values that make the Times’s work, and journalism generally, possible. That doesn’t just pose problems for the opinion side of the news business; it’s an even bigger challenge for the news side, which has been habituated to a notion of “objectivity” that makes telling the real story impossible.

“We don’t publish just any argument,” he said, “they need to be accurate, good faith explorations of the issues of the day.” Cotton’s op-ed did not meet either standard, accuracy or good faith.

To act with good faith in [a small-l liberal] model is to accept [a set of] shared values, rules, and norms and agree to compete within the boundaries of the playing field — to play by the rules. The marketplace of ideas only works if it is open to any idea that conforms to those rules and closed to ideas that reject them.

Minority rule is incompatible with full democratic participation. A revanchist movement meant to restore power to a privileged herrenvolk cannot abide shared standards of accuracy or conduct. Will to power takes precedent over any principle. By Sulzberger’s standard, the GOP is not acting, and cannot act, in good faith.

If a journalist makes the baseline assumption that a political act or expression was undertaken in good faith — as part of a contest held within the boundaries of democratic liberalism and its assumptions — then she will attempt to remain neutral, presenting it and its critics as equivalent positions in an open political dispute. Over years of relentless “working the refs,” bullying reporters and editors for more favorable coverage, conservatives have convinced journalists that the initial assumption of good faith is what it means to practice journalistic objectivity. One must accept every new claim as though recently dispatched from the turnip truck.

What would it mean to behave differently? Think of foreign correspondents, dispatched to other countries to cover politics. They are skeptical of everyone and, ideally, objective in a way only an outsider can be. But that objectivity does not result in an equal measure of good faith extended to everyone, or an equal measure of positive and negative coverage for all parties. Why would it? That’s not objectivity, that’s a very rigidly proscribed subjectivity, an imposition of symmetry on social dynamics that are rarely symmetrical. Indeed, it is precisely the objectivity of the foreign correspondent that allows her to learn from experience, identify those who are and aren’t abusing power, and call out guilty parties without fear or favor.

The rise of right-wing authoritarianism is the headline story of US politics, but the domestic mainstream media is prevented by its own anachronistic habits and norms from telling it. That’s because US journalists, under the funhouse-mirror version of objectivity that dominates mainstream media, are not allowed to learn anything about Republicans. Failing to extend the presumption of good faith to people who have betrayed it repeatedly for decades is “bias.” Covering too many of one side’s lies without ginning up some sort of equivalent negative coverage for the other side is “bias.”

Times editors might say the very fact that authoritarianism is a reasonably popular position (estimates put the hardcore Trump-loving GOP base at around 20 percent of the country) puts it in bounds. But that is tantamount to saying that there are no boundaries at all, that America is whatever the loudest and most powerful voices say it is, that any political movement is, from the perspective of the objective journalist, as good or bad as any other.

The media must begin to assert some agency over the stories it covers and how it covers them, based on its own values. In discussing journalistic objectivity, Rosen agrees that the media’s work should not be politicized, i.e., produced expressly to help one party/candidate or another. On the other hand, he says, media cannot help but be political. Modern journalism was meant to play a political role, to expose the truth and hold politicians accountable to the small-l liberal values that make liberal democracy possible. It cannot remain neutral when those values are under threat. Like other institutions — science, the academy, and the US government itself — its very purpose is to both exemplify and defend those values. Its work is impossible without them. The press should always be fair in the application of its values and standards, but doing so will mean making clear when there is an asymmetry.

The American public, by and large, does not understand this asymmetry and its implications. They do not understand that right-wing authoritarianism is perilously close to toppling US democracy because they are not able to pick that signal out of the noise of daily “balanced” news coverage, wherein everything is just another competing claim, just another good-faith argument to hash out through competing op-eds. The signal is too faint. … Even in the face of the inevitable pressure campaign from the right, even amid an information environment choked with conspiracies and nonsense, the press must boost that signal — it must tell the real story of what’s going on — before it is too late.

None of that sounds altogether “evil” or “extreme” to me. Mind explaining what’s extreme about reporting the truth instead of being a stenographer for the Trump administration?