Internal drama at the New York Times always tends to attract more attention than the publication is worth. But there’s a reason for this: Many see the New York Times’s disputes as a snapshot of a bigger cultural feud between the old order and the new generation of young, woke, college-educated adults.
At the New York Times, the young and very un-liberal leftists are winning, and the publication is suffering as a result.
The latest example of this occurred a few weeks ago when the New York Times fired longtime science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. after comments he made in 2019 resurfaced. McNeil had been engaged in a discussion with high school students about race at the time and was asked whether the use of a racial slur should merit cancellation. He reportedly mentioned one such slur during this conversation as a point of reference and was chastised by the students he was with. After investigating the incident in 2019, the New York Times let the matter go because it was clear McNeil had intended no malice. But two years later, the New York Times has retracted its initial defense of McNeil and fired him after another publication wrote a new report about the incident.
This came about because a group of New York Times reporters decided he was a racist, complained to management, and added pressure by leaking the complaint. Dozens of them hosted a call about McNeil and said his use of a racial slur, though harmless, made them feel unsafe. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has even used the epithet in question on Twitter to describe certain situations, just as McNeil did, was a part of the call. She later defended McNeil’s firing, saying that it “wasn’t necessary [for McNeil] to actually say the word.”
The New York Times management also defended its decision to fire McNeil, saying that the publication would “not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” In other words, even though McNeil had not used the racial slur in an intentionally offensive way, he still deserved to be fired for even uttering it.
The New York Times’s explanation immediately drew criticism, since intent obviously matters a great deal when judging what someone says. Very few things in this world are black and white, and intention is what helps define the gray.
It seems the New York Times realized how absurd and dangerous its “regardless of intent” standard was because it has since retracted this explanation. McNeil, however, remains out of a job.
The divide among New York Times staffers is a microcosm of a larger debate over cancel culture and woke-ism, both of which are being pushed hard by young millennials who were educated in the safe spaces of left-wing universities. This is my generation, and it has brought its hypersensitive social justice ideology with it to “the real world,” to corporations and industries. And now, they’re forcing it upon everyone else.
Nowhere has this played out more perfectly than in the newsroom of the New York Times. Time after time again, younger staffers eager to push the paper toward leftist conformity have used internal strife to push dissenters out — even dissenters who agree with them on everything but process. We saw this late last year when James Bennet, the former Opinions editor of the New York Times, was fired for publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton that angered the New York Times’s news desk. We’re seeing this play out again with McNeil’s firing.
It does not matter that both Bennet and McNeil hold mostly the same political beliefs and goals as the rest of the New York Times’s masthead. The younger cohort, led by the likes of Hannah-Jones, will not tolerate anyone who dares to question its motives or methods. The problem with Bennet was not that he published a controversial op-ed but that he dared to defend doing so after staffers demanded he retract it. The problem with McNeil was not that he used a racial slur within the context of a conversation about race but that he dared to push back when the students he was with defended cancel culture.
Any hint of dissent or disapproval and the woke mob pounces. This is what it was created to do.
In the end, either the New York Times editors will give in completely to the social justice warriors who have already taken away control of the paper’s editorial policy, or they will decide to stop trying to appease the mob, leading to further public drama but also restoring at least some of the newspaper’s credibility.
The rest of the country is going to face a similar choice soon: whether to defend core liberal values, such as freedom of speech, tolerance, and civic equality, from a young mob of leftists who have been trained to hate all of these things. What the New York Times decides to do won’t affect much else outside its company. But eventually, the New York Times’s reckoning will become our own.
