Will The New York Times discipline Nikole Hannah-Jones for blaring the personal information of another publication’s reporter across the internet? If not, it’s final confirmation that the inmates are running the asylum.
Hannah-Jones’ “doxxing” of The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium was the latest act in a theater of the absurd that included the forced departure — despite the clear wishes of the people who supposedly run the paper — of star science reporter Donald McNeil Jr., taken down by the paper’s woke mob.
Executive Editor Dean Baquet had already disciplined McNeil for his use of the N-word on a Times-run student trip to Peru in 2019. McNeil says a student asked “whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used” the word. For context, McNeil asked, using the word itself, “if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title.” Baquet determined McNeil’s intent was not malign, and accordingly gave him a wrist-slap.
But staffers who thought that insufficient leaked word to the Daily Beast, which duly blared the “injustice” last week. Some 150 Times staffers then signed a letter demanding that McNeil pay a harsher price.
And Hannah-Jones, founder of the paper’s ahistorical 1619 Project, reportedly threatened Baquet, who’s also black, that she’d do her own investigation of what happened if he didn’t reverse course. The executive editor caved, axing a writer who’d joined the Times in 1976 and last year won the John Chancellor Award for lifetime achievement in journalism.
“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn wrote the staff, adding the paper had a “red line” on such words.
That statement led Sibarium to ask Hannah-Jones about her own use of the N-word on social media. “She responded by posting this reporter’s inquiry, including his cell phone number, on Twitter,” he wrote.
It took her 47 hours to delete it after Sibarium complained — and she knew she’d published his number because she responded to a cheering fan who mentioned it. She then scrubbed her Twitter account entirely.
Anyone at the Times who isn’t a woke warrior is at risk now, and top management will rewrite its rules to fit. Consideration of intent — along with all the old ethical rules, like not putting other journalists at risk — are out the window.