Senior leadership at the New York Times has finally had enough of being pushed around by newsroom employees. The paper has tasked editor Charlotte Behrendt with examining allegations that staff has leaked sensitive story details ahead of publication to rival outlets to damage the paper’s reporting, especially regarding the Israeli war against the Hamas terrorist group.
“The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process,” the paper’s executive editor, Joe Kahn, said in an interview. He added: “I haven’t seen that happen before.”
ISRAEL COVERAGE SPARKS BACKLASH.
Coverage of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel has been a point of particular contention among reporters and other newsroom staff. Despite the New York Times‘s reporters assigned to cover the ongoing conflict having found reasonably conclusive evidence that Hamas engaged in rape and other forms of sexual violence against Israeli citizens, other newsroom staff have either tried to deny the assault happened or have complained the team hasn’t done more to cover Israeli atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza.
In an incident that pushed senior executives at the paper to have Behrendt begin investigating their news staff, sensitive details about the violent acts of the Hamas terrorists on October 7 — which were set to be revealed on a New York Times podcast — were leaked to a competing outlet before the podcast aired.
THE TOM COTTON INCIDENT.
The internal backlash over coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict has sparked concerns among senior staff at the paper that their newsroom has become too focused on activism and not news coverage — resulting in a breakdown of trust. However, this was a problem long before the October 7 terrorist attacks. The activist employees pushed out Editorial Page Editor James Bennet after he greenlit an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) calling on the government to deploy the National Guard in response to the George Floyd and BLM riots.
FOLLOW THE FACTS.
For his part, Kahn stressed that he believes the paper is becoming less biased — despite his reservations about some of the younger members in the newsroom. During a recent event with The Wall Street Journal, he stressed that the paper — in his opinion — has been relatively balanced in its coverage of President Biden. Specifically, he noted their coverage of concerns regarding the 81-year-old president’s age — despite objections from some younger staff who feared it might hurt Biden’s re-election efforts. “What you do is you pursue every story, you follow the facts and you give readers the information they need to make intelligent decisions,’ Kahn said.
