The New York Observer’s longtime restaurant critic revealed on Tuesday that he resigned from the publication last week after it chose to endorse Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump.
“For the last three years, I’ve been the restaurant critic for the New York Observer, a weekly paper in the upper minor leagues of metropolitan newspapers,” Joshua David Stein wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian.
He continued, “Last week, after the paper endorsed Donald Trump for president of the United States in a bizarro editorial, I resigned.”
Stein claimed the Observer’s editor Ken Kurson had “assured its readers — and writers — that the paper would remain neutral” in the 2016 election cycle.
But that neutrality disappeared, Stein contended, when the paper endorsed Trump, describing him as a candidate who’s “giving millions of disillusioned Americans a renewed sense of purpose and opportunity.”
“I could have carried on writing about crudités and borscht. But taking money from a shill for Trump implicated me in his hate,” Stein wrote.
“His danger lies not just in his policies — which, hitherto, had been rather moderate – but in his demagogic summoning of our worst angels,” the former food critic said of Trump.
“To stand with Trump is to stand with hate; what I ate, and what I thought about it, is small beer compared with that,” Stein added.
As noted by Stein in his op-ed, the Observer is owned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Last month, the paper came under scrutiny when it was revealed that Kurson had assisted Trump in writing a speech he later delivered at the annual American Israeli Public Affairs Committee conference.
Ross Barkan, a political reporter for the Observer, also resigned last week over the publication’s endorsement.
“I expected our newspaper, given our deep ties, or assumed naively that we would perhaps remain neutral,” Barkan told CNN’s Brian Stetler, adding that he was “blindsided by the endorsement.”
