For decades, the New York Times editorial page has featured some of the dullest prose in American journalism. Elsewhere in the paper, one typically finds vivid and fluent writing. The ideological biases can be insufferable, but the writing is mostly superb. Except on the editorial page—and particularly in the paper’s unsigned editorials. Nearly every day, on otherwise riveting topics, the typical Times editorial seems perfectly calculated to make a reader stop reading after the second or third paragraph.
It’s understandable, therefore, that Times’ editorial-page editor, James Bennet, would try to hire a writer capable of expressing edgy, abrasive opinions—someone who could give those sleepy editorials a bit of life. What they came up with was Sarah Jeong, a 30-year-old technology writer for the Verge.
The Times, no doubt assuming Jeong’s status as a good liberal made it impossible for her to express retrograde opinions, evidently neglected to search her social-media history. A scroll through her Twitter page quickly revealed plenty of unsavory stuff. Among her charming declarations on the subject of race: “basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture.” “White men are bullshit.” “[O]h man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” “Dumbass f—ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” In short, Jeong can get pretty nasty behind a keypad.
Her explanatory statement on these and similar remarks is self-exculpatory but not totally unconvincing. “As a woman of color on the internet, I have faced torrents of online hate,” she writes, supplying a couple of sinister remarks directed at her. She goes on: “I engaged in what I thought of at the time as counter-trolling. While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns. I can understand how hurtful these posts are out of context, and would not do it again.”
Maybe she’s not the bigot her meta-satirical tweets suggest, but her apology doesn’t explain her malicious tweets about police officers: A sampling: “F— the police.” “If we’re talking big sweeping bans on sh— that kills people, why don’t we ever ever ever ever talk about banning the police?” “[C]ops are a—holes.”
Surely Jeong would have to go from the self-proclaimed Paper of Record, right? After all, only six months ago the same editorial board offered a job—presumably the very same job—to the libertarian tech writer Quinn Norton and, upon discovering a few mildly surprising statements, unhired her.
Norton’s use of Twitter was far less seriously amiss than Jeong’s. A quick rehearsal: Norton had in one instance merely retweeted a tweet by libertarian activist John Perry Barlow that ham-handedly attempted to satirize racism by using what we all now call the N-word; in another she referred to other people’s use of the term fag. Worst of all, Norton defended an imprisoned hacker and referred to him as a “friend,” despite his avowed Nazi affiliation. She utterly rejected his ideology but insisted that dialogue was better than shaming.
But, with a terse statement from Bennet, she was gone. “Despite our review of Quinn Norton’s work and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us. Based on it, we’ve decided to go our separate ways.”
Sarah Jeong’s significantly more egregious activity, by contrast, drew from the Times’s editorial board a sympathetic statement explaining why she will keep her job. The sheer mendacity of the board’s justification has to be read in full to be appreciated:
Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She sees now that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, and The Times does not condone it.
We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history. She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times and we are confident that she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.
Too bad for Quinn Norton. If she had been another orthodox grievance-obsessed liberal instead of a tough-minded libertarian, she would have gotten the editorial board’s magnanimous understanding instead an ungracious dismissal.
Bennet is right to search for editorial writers capable of something better than the dreary boilerplate of the typical Times editorial. He enlivened his op-ed page immeasurably in April 2017 when he hired Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, who offers up unexpected opinions and ideas and knows how to express them. But we doubt he’ll improve those unsigned editorials as long as he confines himself to conventional liberal scolds who mistake offensiveness for wit. No newspaperman railed against bad prose more than the great James J. Kilpatrick, but even Kilpo admitted, “Style is important, but content comes first.”
