The lead reporter behind the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project appears to have deleted tweets that shared posts from an account pushing an unfounded claim that government forces were secretly attacking “Black and Brown communities” under the guise of fireworks demonstrations.
“Read this,” Nikole Hannah-Jones said in screenshots of the now-deleted tweets.
The tweet thread Hannah-Jones shared alleged that the sound of fireworks heard in Brooklyn during recent nights was actually “a coordinated attack” by government forces aiming to “disorient and destabilize the Black Lives Matter movement.”
“This could also be the police attempting to retaliate against our calls to defund/abolish the police by creating the circumstances for a continuous public nuisance and then purposely failing to respond to it,” the user said in separate twitter posts.
And now, the conspiracy theories?
No reporting to speak of. No evidence. Just naked speculation about malevolent racist plots.
Does the Times commitment to ‘ethical journalism’ extend to Twitter? Is there no bottom? pic.twitter.com/fzXbyOERh7
— Kmele (@kmele) June 21, 2020
After several critics slammed Hannah-Jones for sharing the thread with her more than 350,000 followers, she deleted her tweet.
The 1619 Project aimed to reexamine the impact of slavery in America. Publication of the series was timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia.
Some historians have argued that the project is based on a flawed premise: that colonists revolted from England with the goal of keeping slavery legal in America.
Hannah-Jones was recently critical of the New York Times after it published an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, who voiced support for the deployment of the National Guard to quell civil unrest following the death of George Floyd.
“Many of us journalists said, ‘There should have just been a news article where his views were aired but in a way that was factual,'” she said of Cotton’s op-ed. “Because we know we are struggling with Americans getting misinformation, and our role as journalists is to give people correct information so they can make decisions.”
