The New York Times has launched a mole hunt to determine “whether staffers leaked confidential information related to Gaza war coverage to another media outlet,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal report called it the “latest internal crisis at the Times” where infighting over coverage of “sensitive topics like the transgender community and social justice” has erupted in recent months.
Veteran editor Charlotte Behrendt, who has been with the Times for nearly 23 years and oversees internal investigations, “has summoned close to 20 employees for interviews to determine” if they have been leaking, according to Bruell, as the Times is now “investigating itself.”
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“The internal probe was meant to find out who leaked information related to a planned podcast episode about that article. But its intensity and scope suggests the Times’s leadership, after years of fights with its workforce over a variety of issues involving journalistic integrity, is sending a signal: Enough,” the WSJ report said.
Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn was irked when The Intercept recently reported an episode of the Times’ podcast “The Daily” about sexual violence committed by Hamas was shelved after “an intense internal debate” about the story.
Kahn told the WSJ that he’s open to “the normal push and pull of any newsroom—journalists challenging each other’s assumptions and debating whether coverage is fair,” but opposition to the Hamas sexual-violence article “crossed a line when confidential Times work-product was allegedly shared outside the newsroom.”
The WSJ report also indicates that Times employees are bickering over the probe and whether it’s justified while some feel particular staffers are being bullied, but leadership wants to figure out who spoke to The Intercept.
“The union has filed a grievance alleging that the company was targeting a group of staffers of Arab and Middle Eastern descent. Times leaders said the allegations are false,” Bruell wrote.
The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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There have been a series of recent internal spats at the Times, including a “heated dispute in a WhatsApp group chat over the publication’s reporting on Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.”
At the time, Vanity Fair detailed hostile Slack messages in which employees bickered over coverage that was ultimately inaccurate and needed to be corrected with an editor’s note.
In December, former opinion editor James Bennet put a renewed spotlight on “illiberal bias” issues at the paper that were at the center of the media zeitgeist in 2020, Fox News Digital previously reported.
Bennet, who was forced to resign in 2020, penned a lengthy essay for The Economist outlining how liberal groupthink had taken over the Times newsroom. He suggested the paper has “lost its way,” and said publisher A.G. Sulzberger forced him to resign with “icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me” because liberal staffers were offended by an op-ed he published by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who suggested the military could be deployed to quell urban riots that summer.
Bennet called out his former employer, accusing the Times of graduating from liberal bias to illiberal bias and shutting down opposing viewpoints. He recalled top editor Dean Baquet asking in the midst of newsroom revolt over Cotton’s op-ed, “Are we truly so precious?”
“The answer, it turned out, was yes,” Bennet wrote.
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Bennet’s criticism of the Gray Lady echoed claims made by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss in 2020, who published a scathing resignation letter saying she was bullied by colleagues in an “illiberal environment.” Weiss noted that her own “forays into Wrongthink” made her the subject of “constant bullying by colleagues” who disagreed with her views.
Also last year, nearly 200 Times contributors wrote an open letter bashing their own outlet and claiming the paper was following the “far-right” in its coverage of transgender stories.
New York Times Magazine poetry editor Anne Boyer resigned in protest of what she calls Israel’s “U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza” following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack.
