Recent internal strife at the New York Times has been framed through the lens of cancel culture. But we would have cast the controversies in much simpler terms prior to the Great Awokening. Insofar as the impetus behind the fracas is indeed an illiberal embrace of cancel culture, the real problem with the New York Times is simply that its management has fostered a toxic, hostile work environment.
The latest drama at the New York Times came after some staffer (presumably) leaked word of a 2019 incident involving (now former) star science reporter Donald McNeil. McNeil said the N-word while leading a company trip for privileged high school students, in the context of asking how this slur had been used by someone else.
Everyone knew, and the New York Times originally determined, that McNeil had not used the term as a slur. But in the words of Executive Editor Dean Baquet, McNeil “lost the newsroom” and, as a consequence, had to go.
The rules of the Guild, the union that theoretically protects New York Times journalists, state that McNeil couldn’t be subjected to a second investigation under the principle of “no double jeopardy” and that his colleagues could not refuse to work with him. But despite McNeil’s long-standing loyalty to his colleagues and the obvious nonracist intent when he used the word in question, members of the Guild turned against him.
The consequentialist campaign to divorce words, stories, and art from their intentions is already manifesting itself in the most illiberal and disturbing of ways. Woke mobs topple statues of abolitionists because they didn’t subscribe to the precise tenets of contemporary critical race theory. A generation of schoolchildren will suffer the void of book-burning. This is as much a crisis of liberalism as it is of education.
But just as salient as this injustice is the Marxist Left trading in worker solidarity for intraclass warfare.
When the New York Times published its much-maligned op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton last summer, the management didn’t stand with the editors who had seen the process through. Instead, they fired James Bennet, effectively demoted Jim Dao, and publicly blamed the incident on Adam Rubenstein. That’s a multibillion-dollar company throwing a 25-year-old under the bus because a piece written by a sitting U.S. senator annoyed the New York Times’s favorite social media trolls and MSNBC guests.
In her stellar and disturbing resignation letter to the New York Times, former opinion editor Bari Weiss wrote how she was subjected to comments lamenting that she was “writing about the Jews again” and watched management ignore her colleagues openly berating her and posting ax emojis next her name. Can you tell the difference between woke cancel culture and anti-Semitic workplace harassment? How could anyone?
Perhaps the pandemic has deprived too many people of the normal workplace camaraderie. But other newsrooms don’t seem to be suffering this problem so acutely. When Wall Street Journal journalists had an issue with the opinion page’s standards, they issued a single open letter asking the publisher to make a clearer distinction between the two. They didn’t call for censoring anyone’s opinion or firing anyone. Even the more left-leaning Washington Post seems like a perfectly lovely place to work. The opinion page manages to publish even Trump-supporting columnists such as Marc Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt without causing a workplace revolution.
In contrast, the culture at the New York Times really has that Stalinist feel of the contemporary college campus. This is setting up a contest between the rights of workers doing their jobs on one side and the rights of the wokes not to be offended by differing opinions on the other.
