Another NYT writer resigns in lieu of being fired

Another writer for the New York Times, one who had accrued numerous accolades, resigned after having signed her second petition staking out a political position. As the NYT itself reported below, its Magazine writer Jazmine Hughes decided to resign from the paper after discussions with management. (She would have been fired had she not left.)

Click to read:

An excerpt from the article:

Jazmine Hughes, an award-winning New York Times Magazine staff writer, resigned from the publication on Friday after she violated the newsroom’s policies by signing a letter that voiced support for Palestinians and protested Israel’s siege in Gaza.

Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, announced Ms. Hughes’s resignation in an email to staff members on Friday evening.

“While I respect that she has strong convictions, this was a clear violation of The Times’s policy on public protest,” Mr. Silverstein wrote. “This policy, which I fully support, is an important part of our commitment to independence.”

Mr. Silverstein said Ms. Hughes had previously violated the policy by signing another public letter this year. That letter, which was also signed by other contributors to The Times, protested the newspaper’s reporting on transgender issues.

. . . The petition Ms. Hughes signed about the Israel-Hamas war was published online last week by a group called Writers Against the War on Gaza. The group, which describes itself as “an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people,” denounced what it described as Israel’s “eliminationist assault” on Palestinians as well as the deaths of journalists reporting on the war. It was signed by hundreds of people, including other well-known journalists and authors.

Hughes, who had won a National Magazine Award, was warned after she signed her first petition that doing it again would bring about her termination.  Although the NYT Guild (a union) did try to fight the call to resign, they failed.  If you want to read about all the minutiae involved in this resignation, click below to go to an archived Vanity Fair article describing it:

The creation of journalism policies against signing petitions or making political social-media posts is, of course, intended to preserve the appearance of a reporter’s objectivity, and has intensified during the racial and political turmoil of the past few years.  I’m in favor of such restrictions, as it helps keep the news unbiased—or at least helps keep readers from thinking that the news is biased by a reporter’s politics:

The October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and monthlong war in Gaza has led to heated clashes across college campuses and social media. It has also renewed debates inside media companies over staffers expressing personal views in a public setting, a point of tension that has flared before around issues of racial justice and abortion. Some news organizations, including Vanity Fair parent Condé Nast, have recently sent emails reminding staff of their social media policies. Publishing giant Hearst Magazines went a step further last week with a new social media policy that “warns staffers that even ‘liking’ controversial content could result in their termination, and encourages telling on colleagues who post content that could violate the rules,” according to The Washington Post.

Now, as we learned the other day in a discussion about James Bennet, another NYT staffer who was fired (this time unjustly), there is no leeway for straight news reporters to express political opinions in public, a little more leeway for op-ed writers, and magazine writers are somewhere in the middle:

At one point, according to two sources familiar with the conversation, Hughes asked Silverstein about severance, citing the union contract provision that says there is a severance package if it is a mutual resignation. Silverstein said this did not apply to her, according to a source familiar. Hughes learned she would not receive any severance, and only walked away with her paid time off and health care extended through the end of the month. Hughes emailed a letter of resignation a few minutes after 5 p.m. on Friday. Within the hour, she received a call from a Times media reporter, who was writing an article about her resignation.

Hughes wasn’t an opinion writer, in which case, according to the Times’s own editorial standards, she would have “more leeway than others in speaking publicly because their business is expressing opinions,” though opinion writers are still expected “to consider carefully the forums in which they appear and to protect the standards and impartiality of the newspaper as a whole.” But she was a magazine writer who, as opposed to a straight news reporter, could be expected to inject a point-of-view or first-person perspective into her work. Hughes, who is Black and gay, has tackled race and identity in her work; she won an award from the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists for a Times magazine story revisiting her experience coming out. [Hughes is black and gay.]

While there is no such stated provision for Times magazine writers, Times staffers I spoke to noted that writing in the magazine has by nature been more open to commentary than the news pages. “But it’s still part of the Times paper and ultimately still answers to Joe Kahn,” as one puts it. The executive editor and his deputies have made it clear to staff that it is not acceptable to publicly align with an advocacy group or criticize colleagues’ work. “Under this current masthead,” another Times staffer notes, “there has never been less tolerance for this.” Especially at this moment, when the Times has been under a microscope for anything related to the Israel-Hamas war. “The context here is huge,” a third staffer says, “and that letter took a direct swipe at the Editorial Board.”

The “direct swipe at the Editorial Board” is probably not just her signing the petition, which makes no bones about supporting Palestine, but also that the petition both mentioned the NYT as complicit in biased reporting and encouraged other writers to sign on:

At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”. . .

. . . We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.

Had Hughes not signed a petition that accused her employer of whitewashing Israel, she probably wouldn’t have been fired. But she knew exactly what she was doing and what would happen to her.

In my view, anti-petition-signing and social-media policies are valuable for venues that purport to do objective reporting, for without them any remaining trust in journalism would be lost. As for the NYT, these policies should apply to both news reporters and magazine writers, and not necessarily to op-ed writers, whose job is, after all, giving their opinions.

h/t: Enrico