Star science reporter Donald McNeil’s most demode trait is not his belief that intention actually matters with respect to what you say. Rather, it is that the News Guild, the white-collar union to which he belongs, or at least belonged, exists to protect its own members.
The decorated veteran journalist has finally corrected the record since his ignominious departure from the New York Times. The only behavior in this sorry episode more shameful than that of the cowards running the New York Times and the woke trust-fund babies who set the stage for McNeil’s cancellation are his peers, who turned against their own.
In a three-part series on Medium, McNeil explains it all. He documents the 2019 trip he guided in Peru, during which his supposedly offensive remarks were made, sparking the New York Times investigation that initially cleared him of wrongdoing. He goes on to discuss the Daily Beast’s revival of the nontroversy earlier this year and how it led to his forced resignation.
Much of the story is predictable. McNeil did not, in fact, deem racism dead or white privilege a fantasy. And despite his boss’s concession that he meant absolutely no ill will, the New York Times management did effectively force him out of his job.
The revelations are McNeil’s misguided faith in the News Guild and his peers’ manipulation of the organization to bully rather than protect one of its members.
In the Washington Examiner magazine, Grant Addison has written before on what he has coined “guild bullying,” not just at the New York Times but also on campus. True believers like McNeil, a forceful champion of the News Guild in union negotiations, have discovered its woke iteration too late. Even though he figured that the Daily Beast was pursuing the story thanks to a leak, he did not forcefully defend himself in public because he retained his faith in the institutional workplace protections of the New York Times until it was too late.
After New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet told McNeil he “lost the newsroom,” McNeil writes in detail how he thought he would still be protected:
“What does he mean, I’ve “lost the newsroom?” I raged. “People won’t work with me? Since when do we get to pick and choose who we work with? That’s not in our contract. In fact, that amounts to racial discrimination — that’s illegal under federal law, under Times policy, under Guild tradition. You work with who they assign you. Photographer, producer, editor, whatever. What is this?”
I sent a note to two Guild officers about what had happened and started looking for a lawyer. I contacted several friends who knew about situations like mine, and learned something that came as a huge relief.
Since I had been investigated and punished in 2019, one explained, the Peru trip was a dead issue. As with criminal law, the principle of “no double jeopardy” applies to punishments meted out under union contracts. I could not be re-investigated.
But the Guild was split. Even though McNeil was legally protected in practice, Baquet and management made clear that he would be relegated to the rubber room equivalent of journalism, and in a meeting with exclusively black reporters, they asked anyone who had a problem with McNeil to come to them, which McNeil rightly diagnosed as “fishing for new charges to bring.”
So he resigned.
The woke insurgency may be left-wing, but it lacks the time for old-fashioned ideas, including worker solidarity. The Guild may explicitly offer legal protections, but what difference does it make when half of its members are actively leaking to the press or, worse, publicly shaming, defaming, and smearing the people who cut them a paycheck unless they punish the wrong-thinkers?
McNeil may be a liberal, but the Left is becoming as illiberal as they get. Workers of the world, get in line, or your peers will turn on you.
