The New York Times Shows How Principled It Really Is

By Becket Adams

Sunday, October 29, 2023

 

The New York Times has put itself in the incredible position of having to defend its decision to rehire a journalist well known for being a fan of Adolf Hitler.

 

If you think that’s a wild sentence, just wait. There’s more.

 

The paper’s usually outspoken junior staffers have not banded together to air their collective disgust on social media over the rehiring of Palestinian videographer Soliman Hijjy. Nor have they gone to human resources or attempted to bully senior management into forcing the resignation of an employee whose views one might assume they find objectionable. In fact, the paper’s junior employees have said practically nothing at all about the fact that they now share their bylines with a Hitler devotee, which is strange considering they previously had no problem bringing their opposition to managerial decisions, as well as their disgust for fellow employees, to the public’s attention. This silence over Hijjy’s rehiring suggests that the rot at the New York Times runs from the top straight to the very bottom.

 

From 2018 to 2021, Hijjy’s work as a videographer was featured in the New York Times. In 2022, his old social-media posts began to circulate. One, from 2018, showed a picture of Hijjy with the caption, “in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust.” Another, from 2012, featured artwork showing Hitler posing for a “selfie,” with a caption that read, “How great you are, Hitler.”

 

When Hijjy’s stated admiration for Hitler became a matter of public knowledge, the New York Times squirmed a bit, but not too much, since the freelance journalist was not working for the paper at that moment.

 

A few days after the savage Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 of this year, the New York Times rehired Hijjy, specifically to cover the war between Israel and Hamas.

 

Hijjy’s byline has appeared in print almost every day since October 12.

 

Presented with the matter of having hired a known fan of Hitler to cover Israel’s war against Palestinian terrorists, the New York Times told NPR that they had reviewed those “problematic” Facebook postings when they came to light in 2022 and had taken the necessary steps “to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards.” Hijjy has done so, the statement said, and “has delivered important and impartial work at great personal risk during this conflict.”

 

Former New York Times opinion-page editor James Bennet and former New York Times health and science reporter Donald G. McNeil should be furious. Both men were forced to resign for offenses nowhere near as grave and indefensible as public statements made in support of Adolf Hitler. Former New York Times op-ed staff editor and writer Bari Weiss, who resigned from the paper in 2020, alleging a pattern of harassment and mistreatment by her more “progressive” colleagues, must likewise have a thousand questions for the paper’s management. It couldn’t make a better effort to create a welcoming environment for Weiss, a Jewish woman, but it has the energy to rehire and defend a known Hitler supporter?

 

Recall that Bennet was fired — sorry, resigned — in 2020 after he approved the publication of an opinion article authored by Republican senator Tom Cotton. In the op-ed, the GOP lawmaker recommended the use of federal troops to support police districts overwhelmed by that year’s anti-police riots.

 

“As a black woman,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the paper’s resident historical revisionist, proclaimed on social media, “as a journalist, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.”

 

Junior Times staffers echoed her sentiments, pitching fits of their own. Employees of the paper took to social media to say of the op-ed that it “puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”

 

“We saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” publisher A. G. Sulzberger said later in a statement announcing Bennet’s ouster. “James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.”

 

Shortly after Bennet’s exit, Adam Rubenstein, the New York Times staffer who edited Cotton’s article, likewise “resigned” over the op-ed’s publication.

 

None of those who claimed they were endangered by Cotton’s op-ed have voiced an opinion over the paper’s hiring of a Hitler fan. Hannah-Jones has not yet informed the public one way or another whether she is ashamed that her employer has hired an outspoken admirer of the author of the Final Solution.

 

In the case of McNeil, he was forced to resign in 2021 over the utterance of a racial slur. Of course, McNeil didn’t use the slur, as in directing it in hate, anger, or even mockery at any one person. Rather, he simply spoke the slur when asking a student for more context regarding her specific question about uses of that exact slur.

 

But the details of what had happened, and the context in which McNeil, a 30-year veteran of the paper, uttered the slur, didn’t matter to his colleagues. They sent a letter to management, which later “leaked,” demanding the paper take action against him. Top brass responded by giving higher priority to the feelings of young staffers than to the facts or to McNeil’s record. Indeed, as executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn explained in a subsequent internal memo, “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”

 

And just like that, the New York Times forced a resignation from its top pandemic reporter amid the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving the task of covering the worldwide outbreak to inexperienced junior reporters with a tenuous grasp of viral diseases (and journalism, for that matter). And all because some low- and mid-level staffers bullied management into accepting the hard line that any utterance of a slur, even in the context of asking for more context, is a fireable offense.

 

Curiously, the same people who pushed for McNeil’s ouster have not demanded that the Times desist from using Hijjy’s work. There has been no intra-newsroom revolt. No one declaring that his or her life is now in danger.

 

Likewise, and contra Weiss’s experience, Times employees have not yet logged onto social media to pop off about their distaste for a co-worker who might correctly be called a “bigot.”

 

The New York Times is free to hire whomever it pleases — but what was all that nonsense about the dangerous Tom Cotton op-ed? What of the paper’s intolerance of racist language “regardless of intent”? Where is the outrage from the newsroom staffers over Hijjy’s wide-awake daydreams of Hitler and the Holocaust?

 

The dirty secret is: There are no larger principles at work here. There never were — not in the Bennet case, not in the McNeil case, and not in the Weiss case. It’s no more complicated than senior management submitting to the whims of junior staffers. It’s no more complicated than junior staffers lashing out at things they find personally offensive.

 

And what they find personally offensive, it turns out, begins at Tom Cotton and stops short of Adolf Hitler.