New York Times accused of racial targeting in leak hunt over Israel stories
The union representing New York Times employees accused the company Friday of targeting employees with Middle Eastern or North African backgrounds in a weeks-long investigation into leaks from its newsroom regarding the paper’s coverage of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel.
In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava said managers picked out particular employees — “targeted for their national origin, ethnicity and race” — who had raised concerns about the paper’s reporting for “particularly hostile questioning.”
“We demand that The Times cease what has become a destructive and racially targeted witch hunt,” DeCarava wrote in the letter to Times publisher and chairperson A.G. Sulzberger.
In a separate statement sent late Friday to Guild members, union leaders said Times managers had questioned employees about their involvement in an affinity group for employees of Middle Eastern and North African heritage and “ordered them to hand over the names of all of the … active members, and demanded copies of private text-message conversations between colleagues about their shared workplace concerns.”
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Overall, “more than 20” Times employees sat for questioning with a union steward providing counsel, according to the Guild email.
End of carouselA spokeswoman for the Times strongly denied the union complaint.
“The NewsGuild’s claim that we targeted people based on their associations or ethnicity is preposterous,” Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement.
In an email to staff late Saturday afternoon, top editors confirmed the “internal inquiry” into the leak of information from the newsroom but reiterated that the Guild’s accusations of racial targeting were false.
The email said most of the people interviewed in the investigation were not members of the Middle Eastern affinity group. They added that the review was being conducted because revealing information before publication “crosses a clear red line.”
“Revealing editing drafts, reporter notes or other confidential materials to outside media erodes trust and undermines our culture of collaboration,” read the memo, signed by executive editor Joe Kahn as well as managing editors Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan.
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The leak probe was launched after the Intercept reported that the Times’s flagship podcast, “The Daily,” had shelved a planned episode about the paper’s major investigative report describing a “pattern of gender-based violence” during the attacks, after staffers and outside critics raised questions about the story’s credibility.
The Times has defended its reporting of the December story in statements to other news organizations and in a Jan. 29 follow-up story.
Yet the storm of criticism and questions has triggered tensions in the newsroom. In the weeks following the Intercept report, Times managers have called in employees for meetings to try to determine how internal discussions about the shelved “Daily” episode were leaked.
The existence of the leak investigation was first reported by Vanity Fair.
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With graphic details and a headline suggesting that Hamas had “weaponized sexual violence,” the Times story by correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman and two Israel-based freelancers caused a sensation when it was published Dec. 28.
But questions about the story quickly circulated. Relatives of a woman slain in the attack, whose story became a central focus of the Times report, cast doubts on reporting suggesting that she was raped, while other critics have pointed to discrepancies in various accounts offered by an eyewitness cited in the story.
According to the Intercept, the Times had originally intended to showcase its reporting on Oct. 7 sexual violence in a Jan. 9 episode of “The Daily.”
But “as criticism of Gettleman’s story grew both internally and externally,” the Intercept wrote Jan. 28, “producers at ‘The Daily’ shelved the original script and paused the episode, according to newsroom sources familiar with the process.”
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Instead, the Intercept wrote, the staff prepared a new script that “offered major caveats [and] allowed for uncertainty.” Still, no programming about the sexual violence story has aired yet on the podcast.
The Times declined at the time to confirm or deny that an episode had been canceled. “As a general matter of policy, we do not comment on the specifics of what may or may not publish in The New York Times or our audio programs,” the company said in a statement to the Intercept. “There is only one ‘version’ of any piece of audio journalism: the one that publishes.”
This week, the reporting came under new scrutiny following revelations about social media posts that one of the Times’s freelancers had previously “liked,” including one that called for Israel to turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse” if hostages were not returned immediately and referred to Palestinians as “human animals.”
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In a statement to the Daily Beast, the Times called Anat Schwartz’s social media activity “unacceptable” and said the company was reviewing the matter. The Intercept’s follow-up story this week raised questions about whether Schwartz, a documentary filmmaker who had not previously worked as a reporter, had relied on dubious sources.
The article focused heavily on Schwartz’s remarks in a Jan. 3 podcast interview with an Israeli media outlet. The Times, in a statement to the Intercept, said the story took Schwartz’s quotes out of context.
The existence of a leak investigation surprised observers inside and outside the Times. Newsrooms are a locus of gossip, intrigue and dissent, and in-house drama at the Times — perhaps more than most media organizations — has been fodder for countless news stories over the years.
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“I can understand why Times management is unhappy with having the internal workings of their editorial process made public,” said Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor for the Times who is now executive director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School.
But Sullivan, a former columnist for The Post, added that “pursuing a leak investigation seems to run counter to the ethos of reporting and transparency.”
In her letter, DeCarava said some of the employees who had been selected for questioning had no connection to “The Daily.” Instead, she said, they had previously raised concerns about the sexual-violence reporting to standards editors. “These members went above and beyond to follow company policies in bringing feedback internally to Standards, as The Times encourages its journalists to do,” she wrote.
The result, she wrote, was “an ominous chilling-effect across the newsroom … effectively silencing necessary and critical internal discussion.”
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