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> But these 4 articles were so interesting and horrifying to read I read them all in one setting.

Wow, I was barely able to get through the first part and honestly the whole time I was thinking "I can't believe this guy has been a professional writer for decades. He desperately needs help from an editor."

I find the content interesting, but the writing seems to wander unnecessarily and I wish he'd focus more on getting to the point than needlessly interject his, at least to me, obnoxious attempts to defend his character rather than let the audience decide for themselves. Yes, I realize the entire point of this article is to defend himself, but I'd rather read the meat of the story than variations of "I don't think I'm a bad guy."

To each his own.

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Perhaps this guy really is doomed, because his defense depends on people being willing to read a long argument and understand nuance, when knee-jerk denunciations are usually so pithy.

The guy's problem is he's a terrible writer, which is pretty unforgivable considering his career. If he could articulate himself better I'd be interested to learn more about his story. Brevity is the way to go. This guy isn't Faulkner.

I'll regularly go hours into holes reading fascinating articles about obscure topics. I even wanted to learn more about this, but I just could not stomach his awful writing. He thinks he's more important than he is and he clearly does not know his audience, which is what got him into trouble in the first place.

He is legitimately a bad writer. He's not even mediocre. And the majority of comments here on HN seem to agree, and this is hardly the "knee-jerk" reaction forum of the internet.

There's a difference between writers and reporters. I think this guy is known as an amazing _reporter_. I think there are some people who are both but they are less common than you might think.

So yes, he does need help in the writing department but, as someone mentioned before, he just lost that.

Okay, fair. I guess what I should have said is "he needs to learn how to tell his story in a way that people want to listen." Finding an editor is likely an easier solution than relearning how to write.

I suspect that he was also writing in large part for his colleagues at the NYT, who might be quite a bit more interested in the office/corporate/union politics angles that he spends a lot of time talking about. Obviously that's less interesting for those of us on the outside.

Taste really is subjective. I couldn't stop reading, and enjoyed his writing style (a pity I've been introduced to it by such an awful tale).

If you think these articles qualify as 'terrible writing', you haven't read much.

Nah, Fox News will pull the juicy parts out into tweets and punched up articles soon enough.

> He desperately needs help from an editor.

Well, he did just get fired and lose al the editors he worked with for decades.

Goes to show how important editors are and writers really benefit from editors.

> but I'd rather read the meat of the story than variations of "I don't think I'm a bad guy."

Especially when he illustrates that with examples of him being the bad guy.

In what instance is he being _bad_?

I see instances where he makes perceptive mistakes and possibly cavalier. Bad? No.

If he’s _bad_ then if we look at the world at large, then over 50% of people are _bad_.

He’s more of a victim of a purity crusade by people who also are the same “bad” but either don’t see it, don’t admit to it, or are following a popular trend.

It reminds me of the cultural revolution where in order to save themselves neighbors, friends and family would denounce each other for doing “bad” (baselessly accused of being counterrevolutionaries) just to get ahead of being accused of doing “bad” things. In the end there was great injustice, but Mao got what he wanted out of it.

> In what instance is he being _bad_?

In his own words, he is an asshole some of the time

>> Am I really an asshole? I don’t think so. Not most of the time.

Many of us have worked with men like this and they're awful.

I mean, this example was pretty poor because it combines him being an asshole and his interpretation of the word "drug", Dictionaries disagree with him.

>> Now, there is an exception: if you’re an editor and you write an error into my copy, I can definitely be an asshole.

[...]

>> To give an example: an editor once went through a story of mine and changed all the references to vaccines to “drugs.”

>> I went over and said, “Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea what you’re doing? Vaccines and drugs are different. A vaccine is something you take to prevent illness. A drug is something you take when you’re already ill.”

Chambers:

> 1. Any substance used in the composition of medicine to cure, diagnose or prevent disease

Mirriam Webster:

> b: a substance used as a medication or in the preparation of medication c according to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (1) : a substance recognized in an official pharmacopoeia or formulary (2) : a substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease (3) : a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body (4) : a substance intended for use as a component of a medicine but not a device or a component, part, or accessory of a device

Jobs, if tales are true, would be an ass/arsehole. Does that make him bad? I don’t think so. Toxic, yes, that’s potentially toxic (we don’t know what the editors were like).

I think your and my definition of bad differ. Bad to me means being directly significantly detrimental to others who were not doing bad to you.

Oh good, you read the first part!

Let him (or her) who is not sometimes an asshole cast the first stone...

If you've never been an asshole sometimes, congratulations, you're an elite member of 0.0001% of the population of the world.

The idea that "is sometimes an asshole" means "is a bad person" is flat-out wrong, and is a big part of what is wrong with the internet: you get a short, context-free soundbite of something that may or may not have actually happened, and that's it for someone's career and life's work.

I read all four parts of his story, and found it riveting. Life is in the details. But those details are too boring and don't generate clicks and ad impressions, so the vast majority of the people who hear about this will only know "a NY Times reporter was fired for saying the n-word to kids in Peru, supporting colonialism, claiming white privilege doesn't exist, and getting his photo taken with naked underage girls", and will immediately assume the guy is a racist, perverted piece of garbage, and never know that they're being lied to.

Not commenting on this guy in particular but sometimes when people use long-winded stories to explain themselves, it's usually to hide something. Like hiding the truth in between embellishments. I don't know anything about this guy though so he maybe innocent of whatever thing he did? I skimmed over the article but still don't know what happened.

I also suspect that being an older journalist, he's accustomed to writing long-form content. There's a level of fluff and narrative crafting that is not at all appreciated in today's information saturated landscape.

"I don't trust his writing style" is a fallacy of mammoth proportions.

Being a writer, he probably comes from a culture where people write lots of words and has many friends who respect people who write verbosely.

Someone's level of articulateness provides no information whatsoever of how truthful their writing is. There are countless extremely articulate lies told by people with mastery over their medium.

I think this is true when someone is speaking--liars often try to hide behind details which they think makes their stories believable and explains the discrepancies that they see in their own fabricated story. But I have the opposite perception of this narrative, I think it was written with the intention of being precise, and either his background as a journalist or the public nature of the issue are reasons enough to explain why he wrote with the detail that he did. I often try to write with precision and detail too, and it certainly doesn't mean I'm lying when I do.

You don't know what happened because you skimmed over it. Brilliant.

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