Employees persecuted at Times, says union

The union representing New York Times employees accused the company Friday of targeting employees with Middle Eastern or North African backgrounds in a weekslong 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.”

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.”

Overall, “more than 20” Times employees sat for questioning with a union steward providing counsel, according to the Guild email.

A 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. She declined to comment on internal matters but added that “the work of our newsroom requires trust and collaboration, and we expect all of our colleagues to adhere to these values.”

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.

In the weeks after 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.

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.”

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.