The New York Times is expanding on its “1619 Project,” which inverted American history and drew withering criticism over accuracy from historians across the political spectrum.
The New York Times said Tuesday it would be adapted into a number of television series and films, in partnership with Oprah Winfrey and Hollywood studio Lionsgate. That despite criticism of the project, conceived of by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, particularly over the claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a major reason the colonies rebelled against British rule.
Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the “1619 Project,” which in part asserts that America’s founding was premised on the institution of slavery and that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve the practice. Hannah-Jones argues that American history should begin in 1619, the year the first slaves reached the then-British colonies, rather than 1776.
The publication of Hannah-Jones’s essays led to an outcry from a number of experts on American history, saying the work contained numerous factual errors along with questioning the underlying thesis. Groups of historians, ranging from Marxists to conventional liberals, wrote letters critiquing the New York Times and demanding retractions or edits.
Princeton University’s James McPherson said he was “disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.” Hannah-Jones, along with the New York Times, resisted the calls from historians to overhaul the piece significantly. Months after its initial publication, the New York Times added an editor’s note on the bottom of the essays.
“A passage has been adjusted to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them,” it reads.
Ultimately, the controversy surrounding the “1619 Project” hasn’t stopped the news outlet from cashing in on one of its most popular and divisive collections of essays in years. Not only will textbook publishers work with Hannah-Jones to help incorporate the project into public school curricula, those in the business end of the New York Times see a lucrative opportunity in marketing the work of its journalists as entertainment.
“We know 10 million [digital subscriptions by 2025] is our goal,” said New York Times Magazine Labs Editorial Director Caitlin Roper in an episode of The Weekly, a television docu-series about the inner workings of the paper. “Off-platform expressions of journalism are a way to reach that audience.”
On Tuesday, the outlet known as the country’s paper of record announced a number of new television series adapted from past stories to be available on numerous streaming services and cable channels.
According to Axios, the New York Times has 10 scripted television series in development and another three documentaries airing this year. The aggressive strategy of pivoting away from traditional news for growth and into entertainment comes as the paper faces internal turmoil over its editorial direction.
Last month, staffers at the paper revolted after Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed calling for the federal government to send in the military to cities buffering from rampant rioting and civil unrest. The decision to run that piece, which polling shows represented the viewpoint of a substantial segment of the electorate, led to the resignation of the paper’s opinion editor.
“As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact checking operation and reducing the number of op-eds we publish,” a New York Times spokeswoman said at the time.
On Tuesday, opinion editor Bari Weiss left the paper, and in an open letter, accused her employees of making her “the subject of constant bullying.”
“They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,'” she wrote. “Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in.”
