The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship of Colleagues | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship of Colleagues

theintercept.com

77 pointsdandare20 comments

For reference, the Guild's tweet [1] (since deleted):

"It says a lot about an organization when it breaks it's own rules and goes after one of it's own. The act, like the article, reeks."

The tweet was condemning an op-ed by Bret Stephens[2], that applied mild criticism to The 1619 Project's playing fast-and-loose with history.

[1] https://archive.is/705Tu

[2] https://archive.is/GTx3B

The grammatical errors are disturbing to see, considering it's a tweet by a guild of New York Times.

The NYT has undergone a rapid replacement of its staff as of recent. Expect to see 30 year-olds in the "senior" roles.

Even if not senior, these are not advanced grammar mistakes. A quick re-read would have caught those. It gives water to the other tweet indicating that whoever wrote this did not inform the guild beforehand.

The person in charge of the NYT guild Twitter account doesn't know it's from its. The newspaper of record, everyone.

A nice reminder that these types are always the loudest, but rarely the best and brightest of the bunch.

Thank you for taking the time to link the article, that was a very good read.

I find it a stunning display of arrogance that journalists feel free to rewrite history in spite of multiple historians telling them that they are flat out wrong. Do they not understand that by doing these mental gymnastics to fit history to their biases, they are acting in bad faith exactly like a certain politician lying for public approval?

But, but, but... we're doing it from our side! Unlike him, who is doing it from the wrong side! It's completely different!

It gets worse:

https://twitter.com/benyt/status/1315451891338313728

> Someone else active in the Times Union tells me that a leader of the chapter, who runs the account, tweeted about the Stephens column without any internal discussion, causing a furor in Slack and drawing heated objections from others in the Guild, and leading to this

Is that worse, or better?

It suggests that said leader in the journalist's union might not be a journalist, but an activist.

I'd call that better. It shows that at the very least some people inside their groups are willing the discuss and debate. The level of groupthink is probably lower than previously thought and the guild might be salvageable.

It gets worse:

https://archive.is/mlK3D

Dean Baquet, the executive editor:

>That criticism I firmly reject. The project fell fully within our standards as a news organization. In fact, 1619 - and especially the work of Nikole - fill me with pride.

Any dissent got quashed from high above.

Dean is leading like a leader who cares more about keeping his job than doing a good job.

Where would anyone get the idea that a columnist shouldn't criticize other writers at a paper? Everyone who works there is supposed to have the same ideas about everything?

Of course! Just like the graduate school always block papers that criticise pre-existing work. /s

One writer wrote the 1619 project, which was publicly called out for lying about American history to advance a racially divisive narrative in times of racial sensitivity. They had to issue corrections, and followed up recently with a round of unacknowledged stealth edits. That was fine.

These folks didn't criticize the writer whose agenda piece embarrassed the paper. But they criticize a writer for criticizing that article?

How can a guild that makes this kind of bizarre decisions, which are clearly agenda-drive and divorced from any commitment to objective truth, be trusted with the newspaper of record?

Neither the paper nor the guild can be trusted at all.

This article, from about three years ago, helped me understand how the media in the US got to where it is today. I would not be surprised to learn this mechanism is at play in other parts of the world.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...

For added context about the shift from the The Paper of Record to The Paper of Rags, read Barry Weiss' resignation letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

> Update: Oct. 11, 2020, 8:40 p.m. ET The New York Times Guild moments ago deleted its tweet denouncing Stephens and the paper, and then posted this [tweet by Nyt guild saying the deleted tweet was tweeted in error]

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