The NYT again in a kerfuffle involving staff versus management

Well, here’s a surprise: the Wall Street Journal reporting on a kerfuffle at the New York Times! You may have heard of the kerfuffle, as it involves an NYT article that’s one of the few to give a sympathetic hearing to Israel in its war with Hamas: an article about how Hamas weaponized sexual violence against Israeli women in its October 7 attack. As far as I know, the data in that article have been confirmed, even by the UN itself, which pronounced that Hamas did that in at least three separate locations.

But apparently the report of sexual violence inflicted on Israeli women didn’t go down well with some Times staffers, and someone leaked the contents of the article to the staff before those contents were going to be made into a podcast. The podcast was canceled, and the staff (which of course doesn’t like article sympathetic to Israel) rebelled.  I’m not sure about all the details, for not even the WSJ makes them clear.

Click to read, or, if paywalled, you can find it archived here.

I’ll be short here. First, let’s review the two other instances in which Times machers got fired because of staff revolts (all quotes from the WSJ)

The current dynamics at the Times stretch back to 2020, when a seed of employee activism took root in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. In June of that year, the staff staged a rebellion after the publication of an op-ed piece by Republican senator Tom Cotton, “Send In The Troops,” that suggested the U.S. military should quell riots. Some staffers said it made them feel unsafe.

Within days the Times had parted ways with Editorial Page Editor James Bennet. In a recent account of those events in the Economist, Bennet said Sulzberger supported the decision to publish it, and said he was forced to resign. Sulzberger has said he disputes Bennet’s narrative.

The company said it conducted a review after publishing the op-ed and found “the piece itself and the series of decisions that led to its publication did not hold up to scrutiny,” said a Times spokeswoman.

The “unsafe” complaint, one frequently made as a synonym for offended, makes me laugh. If staffers clearly thought that Cotton’s article made them feel unsafe, they need therapy. And you’ll remember this one:

In 2019, Donald G. McNeil Jr., a star science and health reporter, was investigated internally over allegations he had used racist language during a Times-sponsored trip to Peru for high-school students. Two years later, in a Medium post recalling the events, McNeil said he repeated the N-word while speaking to a student about a classmate’s use of the slur. Then-editor Dean Baquet told the staff that while McNeil “showed extremely poor judgment” he was given a second chance because “it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.” After 150 staffers protested, the Times and McNeil ultimately parted ways.

“Donald was reprimanded in 2019 and his eventual departure involved more than one issue,” said a Times spokeswoman.

That, too, was risible. McNeil did nothing wrong, as his use of the n-word was in a discussion of whether it was used on a previous occasion.

This takes us to the main point: Times staffers are starting, by the account of editors, to let their personal views dominate their reporting. A few quotes:

Employees were making their voice felt at the Times. At the same time, some editors and reporters were growing concerned that some Times journalists were letting their personal views dictate which stories to pursue—or not pursue.

One way to counter that trend was with the creation of a new beat for reporter Michael Powell to cover issues around free speech and expression. Powell created the beat in coordination with then-Deputy Managing Editor Carolyn Ryan, who had been tasked with safeguarding independence in the newsroom.

One thing Powell noticed, he said, was that coverage that challenged popular political and cultural beliefs was being neglected. Powell’s work includes a story on MIT’s canceling of a lecture by an academic who had criticized affirmative action, and another examining whether the ACLU is more willing to defend the First Amendment rights of progressives than far-right groups. [That lecturer at MIT was my Chicago colleague Dorian Abbot, who was radicalized by this experience into becoming a hard-core free speecher. The lecture he was scheduled to give had nothing to do with the “sin” for which he was deplatformed, which was to put up a couple of videos questioning DEI.]

“We kind of both had a nagging sense that we needed to write in a much more systematic way about these third-rail issues, of identity, gender, speech,” said Powell of his early conversations with Ryan. “The fact that I had all this territory was not a good sign.”

and this:

The publisher of the Times, 43-year-old A.G. Sulzberger, says readers’ trust is at risk, however. Some journalists, including at the Times, are criticizing journalistic traditions like impartiality, while embracing “a different model of journalism, one guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction,” Sulzberger wrote in a 12,000-word essay last year in Columbia Journalism Review.

I’m not keen on that “different model of journalism”, as it’s a direct outgrowth of the woke “lived experience.”  That cannot be allowed to trump “impartiality”.  But it’s because the Times is hiring young reporters who have suckled at the teat of wokeness in college and journalism school. If you don’t think professors propagandize students, even at my own university, you need to do some investigation. But I digress; let’s proceed.

But these tensions have particular resonance at the Times, which has long prided itself as a standard-setter in American journalism. Newsroom leaders, concerned that some Times journalists are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests to coverage decisions, are seeking to draw a line.

[Executive editor Joe] Kahn noted that the organization has added a lot of digital-savvy workers who are skilled in areas like data analytics, design and product engineering but who weren’t trained in independent journalism. He also suggested that colleges aren’t preparing new hires to be tolerant of dissenting views.

“Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past,” he said, adding that the onus is on the Times to instill values like independence in its employees.

And this is why FIRE detracts points from a college’s free-speech rating when a large number of students say that they feel inhibited about discussing their views on “hot button” issues with others. (This is why my own school dropped from the top four to #13—a tepid “above average” in just a year or so.) If you think only one kind of opinion is tolerable, then that’s the opinion you’ll keep expressing when you go to work for a place like the NYT.  It works regardless of which side you’re on:

Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has become particularly fraught at the Times, with some reporters saying the Times’s work is tilting in favor of Israel and others pushing back forcefully, say people familiar with the situation. That has led to dueling charges of bias and journalistic malpractice among reporters and editors, forcing management to referee disputes.

“Just like our readers at the moment, there are really really strong passions about that issue and not that much willingness to really explore the perspectives of people who are on the other side of that divide,” Kahn said, adding that it’s hard work for staffers “to put their commitment to the journalism often ahead of their own personal views.”

The lesson: colleges should encourage students to not only learn about free speech from their first year in school, but also to apply what they’ve learned.

But I was amazed to learn that a paper rife with internal dissent and so flagrant in its reportorial biases is doing well:

The Times is the envy of much of the news-publishing world, with more than 10 million paying subscribers and a growing portfolio of products like cooking and games apps. But while its business hums along, the Times’s culture has been under strain.

In many ways, it is a story familiar to companies big and small across America, as bosses struggle to integrate a new generation of workers with different expectations of how their jobs and personal lives should mesh—and whose evolving social values can sow discord in the workplace.

I subscribe because, overall, I still think it’s the best (or at least the most readable) paper, but I find myself drawing more on the WSJ’s own news (not their reliably right-wing op-eds), or on the Free Press, which publishes stuff that the NYT would see as “heterodox,” and, for honest news about the war between Hamas and Israel, on the Times of Israel, which is a reliable source for what’s going on.