The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship Of Colleagues

The New York Times Guild, the union of employees of the Paper of Record, tweeted a condemnation on Sunday of one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens. Their denunciation was marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company rules against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people, is to woefully understate the case.

What angered the union today was an op-ed by Stephens on Friday which voiced numerous criticisms of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1619 Project, published last year by the New York Times Magazine and spearheaded by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. One of the Project s principal arguments was expressed by a now-silently-deleted sentence that introduced it: that the country s true birth date is not 1776, as has long been widely believed, but rather late 1619, when, the article claims, the first African slaves arrived on U.S. soil.

Despite its Pulitzer, the 1619 Project has become a hotly contested political and academic controversy, with the Trump administration seeking to block attempts to integrate its assertions into school curriculums, while numerous scholars of history accuse it of radically distorting historical fact, with some, such as Brown University s Glenn Loury, calling on the Pulitzer Board to revoke its award. Scholars have also vocally criticized the Times for stealth edits of the article s key claims long after publication, without even noting to readers that it made these substantive changes let alone explaining why it made them.

via theintercept.com

It’s time to stop regretting what the NYT has become. It’s long since become a force for evil. Notwithstanding its occasional good reporting on reptiles and amphibians.