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.Racially profiling your own employees to find the leaker! In a newspaper!
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.”
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.”The Times calls it preposterous, which means it's 100% true!
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.There are plenty of earlier reports about the Times not even allowing internal criticism.
One hears these possible apocryphal stories about monarchs and similar having absolutely nuclear-level reactions to minor slights and those don't seem very ludicrous anymore. It's just what happens when you are on your 4th or 5th generation of failson, with or without the inbreeding.