You Should Think Through The Positions You Hold. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

9 - 11 minutes

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Like everyone else in media, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the latest wave of internecine fighting within The New York Times that was kicked off by The Open Letter (it has achieved definite-article status) signed by a bunch of contributors and others arguing (falsely) that the paper’s recent coverage of transgender issues has been deeply transphobic. 

After that letter (and an accompanied one sent out by GLAAD) went out, Times management responded by throwing a fairly strong brushback pitch at Times staffers who had attached their names to attacks on their colleagues. As The Daily Beast and others reported, executive editor Joe Kahn then wrote in a note to staff that “Participation in such a campaign is against the letter and spirit of our ethics policy.” Further: “We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”

Susan DeCarava, president of NewsGuild of New York, which is “the union for news professionals in America’s media capital” and which represents Times editorial staffers, responded by sending her own rather searing note to her members. That one read, in part: “I want to make one thing clear: Employees have a federally-protected right to engage in concerted activity to address workplace conditions. It is a violation of federal law for The New York Times to threaten, restrain or coerce employees from engaging in such activity.” (Someone sent me a full copy of the letter — I can’t say for sure, but it didn’t look like anyone else had published the whole thing yet so I posted it here yesterday.)

The Guild appears to be painting Times staffers’ decision to put their names on an activist note blasting their colleagues as an effort to “address workplace conditions.” I don’t know labor law (obviously). Presumably, if things got more heated, at some point someone within the legal system would adjudicate whether signing this letter was, in fact, an expression of these staffers’ “federally protected right to engage in concerted activity to address workplace conditions.” It certainly seems intuitively ridiculous, but things that seem intuitively ridiculous to non-lawyers sometimes turn out to be perfectly reasonable in a legal context. 

For what it’s worth, I asked a veteran Times staffer what he thought was going on here, and he pointed me to the very last line of The Open Letter, which reads: “There is no rapt reporting [in the Times] on the thousands of parents who simply love and support their children, or on the hardworking professionals at the New York Times enduring a workplace made hostile by bias—a period of forbearance that ends today.” That line has basically nothing to do with the rest of the letter, but the theory seems to be that because Kahn called out signatories on staff for denouncing their colleagues and participating in an activist campaign, the Guild could turn around and say, “Oh, so you’re punishing employees for signing a letter drawing attention to a hostile workplace?” It seems like a pretty clear bait and switch, since these are separate issues.

But I genuinely can’t speak to how a judge would view all this. Either way, the Guild clearly had a choice about how to approach this issue, which of its conflicting demands to prioritize, and how to communicate its approach. It could have, for example, sent a letter reiterating its support for its members who were attacked by activist groups, clarifying exactly which rules and rights applied to employees and how they conflicted, and explained the proper procedure for employees who felt they were being victimized by unfair workplace conditions. Instead, the Guild threw fuel on the fire, propagating the surely-at-least-debatable idea that even though the Times staffers had broken clearly established rules governing collegiality and impartiality, their decision to do so was federally protected.

If you think about this line of reasoning for one minute you’ll see that it would make genuine journalism at the Times impossible — not without the whole place melting down. It’s just completely unsustainable. As the Times staffer put it to me, “It is incoherent and logically implies a company can place no brake on intra-office feuding and battles.”

Surely there are Times staffers who are ardent Zionists, for example. If they have the right to endlessly and publicly attack any colleague who writes something they view as too pro-Palestinian, or editors who run articles or columns deemed as such, and if this behavior is protected by federal labor law, then can you imagine where things would end up? Or just swap out any subject on which people have strong feelings. Think of the very public internecine feuds we’ve seen in the liberal world since 2020, and how much they have damaged the institutions in question (including the Times), and then imagine multiplying that by an order of magnitude or two. 

This whole thing continues to be fueled by some massive differences in opinion about what journalism is, and where the lines between journalism and activism should lie. And one thing I’ve noticed, when I attempt to engage with the journalists who stand on the other side of this divide, is a strange inability to understand and explicate their own positions in anything but the most Manichean, knee-jerk manner.

What I mean is that, in my experience, they aren’t good at engaging in the more abstract forms of thinking that can help you make sure your views on something are robust, won’t lead to unanticipated adverse outcomes, and so on. In fact, they seem to recoil at the thought that they should have to engage in such thinking.

This is a good example of that: the maximalist, burn-it-all-down, if-I-am-offended-some-institutional-action-must-be-taken approach naturally leads to places like where the Guild ended up: you’re threatening to invoke federal labor law to make sure… journalists can continue to sign activist letters denouncing their colleagues? In addition to the aforementioned meltdown potential of this position, it just seems very, very far from the sorts of core workplace issues a union should focus its priorities on. It’s a bad sign that this type of muddled thinking has reached the heights of the NewsGuild of New York.

Or take another example: in the open letter itself, the signatories repeat the tired claim that because conservatives have cited Times reporting in legal cases, that’s an indictment of the reporting in question. I’ve already pointed out why this is ridiculous, but what’s interesting is that any journalist endorsing this reasoning could easily be victimized by it. Let’s say you cover police violence with a critical, journalistic eye, breaking stories about misconduct and so forth. If some wacko shoots and kills a cop, and they read or cited your work at some point, does that mean you’re responsible for the cop’s death? Of course it doesn’t! You were doing journalism — you didn’t call for anyone to shoot a cop. A standard which holds that journalists are responsible for the views and actions of anyone who cites their work for any reason is clearly both illogical and unsustainable — for exactly the same reason the position taken by the Guild is unsustainable.

Anyway, the good news is that the activists within the Times appear to be losing. Tuesday Last night (as I tweeted), a different source at the Times told me about a meeting the Guild held to invite member feedback on everything that had happened lately. “The newsroom just revolted” against the Guild, they told me. Overwhelmingly, those who spoke up expressed opposition to the Guild’s position on this issue, and there was also significant criticism leveled against the Times staffers who had bashed their colleagues. At the end of the meeting, at least one person openly asked about the process for recalling the Guild’s leadership.

I went back to the first source I mentioned in this post to ask him why he thinks things have gotten so different, so quickly, at the Times. “I hesitate to say it’s an entirely new day, because as we speak the Slack channel for the Guild is filled with recriminations,” he said. “But as I see it, 2020 was a high-water mark. We had a deadly plague and no vaccine. We had a case of horrific police violence.” At the time, he said, there wasn’t much pushback to the more intense instances of in-house activism at the Times, such as the successful (and wrongheaded) campaign to oust James Bennet for running the infamous-to-some Tom Cotton op-ed. “I truly think a lot of people were taken aback by all that was going on and had not processed it,” he said. “Now, we’ve seen the wages of not speaking up.” 

Questions? Comments? Knee-jerk opinions that will instantly backfire if enacted? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. The image of the Times building at night comes via Wikipedia.