Nikole Hannah-Jones Runs the New York Times

By Isaac Schorr

Thursday, February 11, 2021

 

There is no rule of law in the workplace. Across all industries, star talent is treated differently — and allowed to get away with more — than your average employee. It’s true in the boardroom, in professional sports, and in the newsroom.

 

Yet even awareness of this truth is not enough to prepare you for the curious case of Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. Time after time, Hannah-Jones, creator and compiler of the Times’ 1619 Project, is allowed to publicly embarrass the paper in the public sphere with her juvenile behavior, and to sow discord within it by showing utter contempt for her colleagues. And time after time, she emerges from the turmoil untouched, leaving a trail of discarded journalists in her wake. Even more significant, her signature achievement and the worldview it represents have become the de facto governing documents and principles by which the Times makes personnel decisions.

 

Most recently, this power dynamic was exemplified by the Times’ firing of longtime science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. and its reaction to Hannah-Jones’s doxxing of Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium. McNeil was let go after a story about his use of a racial slur — ironically in the context of discussing when it should merit cancellation, not while using it maliciously — resurfaced. The “incident” occurred in 2019, and upon investigating it, the Times deemed it unworthy of punishment. In the new, post-1619 Project newsroom, however, McNeil needed to be expelled after more than four decades at the paper. According to Executive Editor Dean Baquet, the Times would “not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” And yet, Hannah-Jones had used the epithet on Twitter in the past, and she has been not just tolerated, not only celebrated, but venerated. When Sibarium reached out to Hannah-Jones for comment on this double standard, she posted his polite email request — which included his phone number — on Twitter in an attempt to shame him.

 

After posting Sibarium’s personal information, Hannah-Jones took her sweet time deleting the post containing it. The Times leapt to Hannah-Jones’s defense, explaining to the Free Beacon that “we received your message about the fact that one of our journalists inadvertently posted Aaron’s number when she tweeted an email she received from him. She’s deleted that tweet.” Unfortunately for the Times, Hannah-Jones had acknowledged the fact that she had posted Sibarium’s phone number in the replies to her doxxing tweet. The tweet remained up for nearly two days after said acknowledgment.

 

Hannah-Jones also reportedly played a role in orchestrating McNeil’s exit, and defended his firing by explaining that it “wasn’t necessary [for McNeil] to actually say the word.” Perhaps recognizing the poor optics of the situation, the Times has since retracted its “regardless of intent” standard, but not McNeil’s exit with it.

 

Although this latest embarrassment is perfectly representative of Hannah-Jones’s mendacity, viciousness, as well as the liability she is to the Times, it’s far from the only example.

 

Last year, Hannah-Jones helped the mob that chased Times opinion editor James Bennet out of the paper after he published an op-ed from Arkansas senator Tom Cotton arguing that the National Guard should be mobilized to deal with violent riots across the country. “As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this,” she tweeted. The Times rolled right over, adding a preamble to Cotton’s piece asserting that “the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published” and showing Bennet the door.

 

Hannah-Jones’s inability to handle criticism of the 1619 Project has been another source of embarrassment for the Times, or at least it should be. Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning lead essay for it had to be modified so as to at least qualify her outlandish claim that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery in North America. Moreover, she has oscillated between making the argument that America’s founding should be seen as having occurred in 1619 rather than 1776, and insisting “the #1619 Project does not argue that 1619 was our true founding.” As historian Phillip W. Magness documented in an article for Quillette, both Hannah-Jones and her employer repeatedly called 1619 America’s “true founding” when the project was first rolled out. But after the claim came under scrutiny, the Times wiped out any record of its having been made, while Hannah-Jones simply flat-out denied having made it. Poetically, Hannah-Jones responded to the controversy by accusing critics of her work of trying to “cover up” history.

 

And then there are the tweets. Hannah-Jones deleted most of her tweets, dating back to 2017, along with the ones containing Sibarium’s phone number. So most of the middle fingers, profanities, and other insults that have come to define her online life have been lost to time. Embedded in articles, though, some of her foolishness lives on. There was the time last summer when Hannah-Jones speculated that the government was setting off fireworks in New York City to disorient Black Lives Matter protesters. And the time she said that “it would be an honor” for riots targeting statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to be named after her project. She’s also said that “most white Americans have been and continue to accept egregious inequality against black folks. That’s just true.”

 

When Times columnist Bret Stephens critiqued the 1619 project, Hannah-Jones tweeted that his thoughtful piece “put me [Hannah-Jones] in a long tradition of [Black women] who failed to know their places.”

 

Contradicting this view of things was Dean Baquet’s statement on Stephens’s column:

 

Colleagues,

 

1619 is one of the most important pieces of journalism The Times has produced under my tenure as executive editor. It changed the way the country talked about race and our history. It has given millions of Americans a new framework and a new critical date, 1619, for understanding the nation’s past.

 

It has also generated a lot of debate. That’s no surprise. Work that boldly challenges prevailing views usually does. A column this weekend in our Opinion section took issue with The 1619 Project. As the editor who runs the newsroom, I do not oversee Opinion or the views of its columnists. I do welcome Opinion’s role in hosting a wide range of views, including those that challenge our work.

 

This column, however, raised questions about the journalistic ethics and standards of 1619 and the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones, who inspired and drove the project. That criticism I firmly reject. The project fell fully within our standards as a news organization. In fact, 1619 — and especially the work of Nikole — fills me with pride. Our readers, and I believe our country, have benefited immensely from the principled, rigorous and groundbreaking journalism of Nikole and the full team of writers and editors who brought us this transformative work.

 

Does Hannah-Jones seem like someone who has been muzzled, or belittled, or treated as though she didn’t know her place? It seems to me as though she wields enough power to force the executive editor of the most famous publication in the world to rebuke some of his employees, fire others, and issue obsequious statements showering her and her shoddy work with praise. If Baquet were to resign from the Times tomorrow, he would have the same amount of authority over Nikole Hannah-Jones that he has today. It doesn’t matter how many times Hannah-Jones embarrasses the paper. She will not be reprimanded, much less removed from her position, even though the likes of Donald McNeil, James Bennet, and to a certain extent Bari Weiss have all been cast out for far less (in Weiss’s case, nothing) than what she is guilty of. The backlash would be far too great.

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones runs the New York Times, and the 1619 Project is its constitution. The Times has made its bed; now it must lie in it.