‘ARM TWIST’ TIMES
Editor forced me out in N-word flap
Former New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. claims Executive Editor Dean Baquet “twisted his arm” and intimidated him into resigning over the N-word debacle — even as the newsroom boss assured him, “I know you’re not a racist.”
In a four-part, 20,000-plus-word post published Monday on Medium, the journalist, who spent 45 years at the newspaper, issued a full-throated defense of comments he made during a 2019 student trip to Peru.
“What particularly baffled me was that anyone would look at my work and conclude that I would have chosen my beat if I were a racist, and could or would have survived on it that long,” McNeil, 67, wrote, pointing to a series of awards he won for his coverage involving countries such as Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria and Haiti.
“I never dreamed that one of the two Peru trips I took — which to me were just blips in my life, something I’d done largely as a favor to a friend who needed experts to make the trips sell — would sink my Times career.”
McNeil said he was paid $300 a day to accompany the privateschool students around Peru and deliver three talks “about global health,” as well as “make myself available to the students as much as possible,” as part of the paper’s Student Journey program.
The veteran science scribe has admitted to using the N-word during the trip but in the context of a student asking him “whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-yearold in which she used” the slur.
The incident was the subject of an internal investigation at the Times in 2019.
McNeil went on to blame upper management at the Gray
Lady for exacerbating the scandal, which exploded in late January, by going into “full freakout message-control mode” and demanding he apologize over issuing a lengthy explanation of his remarks.
Days after the accusations were published in The Daily Beast, McNeil said he got on a call with Baquet, his longtime colleague, and Deputy Managing Editor Carolyn Ryan.
“Donald, I know you,” Baquet allegedly told the lead COVID-19 reporter on the Feb. 1 call. “I know you’re not a racist.” “But, Donald, you’ve lost the newsroom,” Baquet continued. “People are hurt. People are saying they won’t work with you because you didn’t apologize.” McNeil also alleged Baquet and Ryan refused to divulge details of “other complaints that you made people uncomfortable” — leading him to believe they were trying to “intimidate” him. Then they asked for his resignation.
“We’re not firing you,” Baquet said, according to McNeil. “We’re asking you to consider resigning . . . we’re not twisting your arm.”
McNeil’s resignation — along with the exit of Andy Mills, cohost of the embattled “Caliphate” podcast — was announced on Feb. 5 in a statement from the Times that noted, “This is the right next step.”
The newsman suggested his conversations with the youngsters may have been misconstrued due to a generational gap.
“My girlfriend thinks I have a high-functioning Asperger aspect to my personality — I’m empathic about suffering but I also very much misread audiences,” he wrote.
McNeil also blasted Charlotte Behrendt, the Times’ associate managing editor for employee relations, in an e-mail to a friend.
“She makes the Times newsroom more like North Korea every day,” McNeil complained.
The Times didn’t return a request for comment.