The New York Times’s Internal Mob Takes Down Another of Its Own

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Saturday, February 06, 2021

 

Earlier this week, I wrote at length about the growing tide of illiberalism in the United States. This morning, I was forwarded an email sent out by the management team at the New York Times that illustrates precisely what I was talking about. For sake of clarity, I will quote the whole thing, starting with the preface:

 

———- Forwarded message ———

From: NYT Mail <*@nytimes.com>

Date: Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 4:31 PM

Subject: A Note From Dean and Joe

To: All Company Employees <*@nytimes.com>

 

Colleagues,

 

We are writing to let you know that Donald McNeil Jr. will be leaving the company. Donald joined The Times in 1976 and has done much good reporting over four decades. But we feel that this is the right next step.

 

We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent. We are committed to building a news report and company that reflect our core values of integrity and respect, and will work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.

 

Every person in leadership at The Times is dedicated to building a culture where each of our colleagues feels supported and respected. It’s vital that we get this right. To those of you who have reached out to us with your honest and sometimes painful feelings about this incident, we thank you.

 

Donald has offered a statement to his colleagues, which is below.

 

— Dean and Joe

 

Based solely upon the information included here, one might think it plausible that McNeil had been let go for a good reason. There is nothing wrong per se with organizations trying to create a work culture in which their employees feel “supported and respected,” and it is not impossible to imagine circumstances in which “racist language” would impede that goal. To read McNeil’s “statement to his colleagues,” however, is to be immediately disabused of that suspicion:

 

To the staff of The Times:

 

On a 2019 New York Times trip to Peru for high school students, I was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur.

 

To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.

 

I should not have done that. Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended.

 

I now realize that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful. The fact that I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgement. For that I apologize.

 

To the students on the trip, I also extend my sincerest apology. But my apology needs to be broader than that.

 

My lapse of judgment has hurt my colleagues in Science, the hundreds of people who trusted me to work with them closely during this pandemic, the team at “The Daily” that turned to me during this frightening year, and the whole institution, which put its confidence in me and expected better.

 

So for offending my colleagues — and for anything I’ve done to hurt The Times, which is an institution I love and whose mission I believe in and try to serve — I am sorry. I let you all down.

 

Donald G. McNeil Jr.

 

Andrew Sullivan suggests that this reads like “a confession procured by the Khmer Rouge,” which is correct but understates the case. In order to extract its “confessions,” the Khmer Rouge used grotesque instruments of torture and hung the ever-present threat of the killing fields over those they were trying to control. The New York Times, by contrast, has . . . what? In Cambodia, the fact that the apologies were extracted under duress made the willingness of the targeted to acquiesce understandable, and, by extension, made it less likely that anyone watching would believe that the tortured really meant what they said. And in Manhattan . . . ? At one level, I am disinclined to blame the victim here. At another, though, I am absolutely appalled by McNeil’s failure to stand up for the truth, and for himself. At some level, at least, he must know that he is dealing with witch-hunting lunatics who, having entered themselves into a never-ending frenzy of self-righteousness, have lost their capacity to reason. At some level, he must know that there is a profound difference between using a racial epithet in the course of a discussion about that racial epithet’s use, and using a racial epithet to diminish or to wound someone. At some level, he must know that it is not only acceptable to ask in what context a word was used, but that if one wishes to comprehend what happened during a given incident, it is imperative. Or, put another way: At some level, the 67-year-old Donald G. McNeil Jr. must know that he has done absolutely nothing wrong.

 

And yet he won’t say it. Instead, he writes, “Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended. I now realize that it cannot.” But of course it can. We are human beings, not robots trained to search indifferently for malicious words. To assert “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent” is, in practice, to assert that “we” are automatons without judgement. There is an enormous difference between a History professor’s discussing Jim Crow abuses and the repeating of those abuses themselves, just as there is an enormous difference between the casual use of derogatory terms and the text of Huckleberry Finn. What “Dean and Joe” are telling the world is that they, and those who are egging them on, are morons. What McNeil is telling us by caving to them is that he is prepared to be led by morons. McNeil suggests that “the fact that I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgement.” But the only “poor judgement” here is his own — for indulging this guff. I love my colleagues at National Review dearly, but I can tell you this much: If, tomorrow, they started insisting that 2+2 was 5, I would not consider that a vote had been taken and that I was consequently in need of reeducation. I would tell them to go to hell.

 

Alas, instead of doing just that, McNeil chose to take the complaints at face value and, in so doing, made everything worse — not only for himself, but for the next person who is targeted by this madness. Surely, it can not have gone amiss on him that he was being canceled after using a word for asking why someone else was canceled after using a word? And on spins the vortex.

 

McNeil suggests that his:

 

lapse of judgment has hurt my colleagues in Science, the hundreds of people who trusted me to work with them closely during this pandemic, the team at “The Daily” that turned to me during this frightening year, and the whole institution, which put its confidence in me and expected better.

 

In reality, of course, McNeil’s innocent question has “hurt” nobody. But, even if it had, what about the rest of us, who still have our senses about us? What of his readers? He mentions the Times as “an institution I love and whose mission I believe in and try to serve.” Well, what of that mission? Is this now it: to sacrifice sexagenarian journalists for trying to understand the world around them?

 

I have seen a few people trying to explain why McNeil decided to fall so abashedly on his sword, rather than to fight. Among them are that doing so was a condition of his severance package; that doing so was a play for future work elsewhere; and that, having worked for the Times for so long, he had in effect been institutionalized into considering it the final arbiter of truth. It is possible that one of these is correct, but, if it is, it says nothing good about the New York Times and its ilk. If McNeil was, indeed, bullied into this pose under threat of losing a pension or a redundancy package, then what is the point of the Times‘s famous union? If he felt that self-abasement would prove to be the price of readmission, then journalism as we have known it is dead. And if he considers the New York Times to be the final word on truth . . . well, then he shouldn’t be writing for the Science section.

 

“Dean and Joe” submit that their newspaper exhibits the “core values of integrity and respect.” I would submit that, over the last couple of years, their newspaper has demonstrated that it has no values whatsoever. Its staff is febrile and brittle, its editor is fearful and impotent, and its loyalties, insofar as they exist at all, lie with the latest fads and nothing else besides. Once, we feared that the barbarians would arrive the gates. Little did we know that our preeminent institutions would welcome them in, add them to their Slack channels, and give them free rein to hunt down the inquisitive, the heretical, and the free.