Now run by a ‘woke mob’?
The forced resignation of a veteran New York Times reporter over allegations of racial insensitivity has “unraveled the Times newsroom,” said Joe Pompeo in VanityFair.com. Donald McNeil Jr., a 45-year employee who’s led the paper’s pandemic coverage, departed amid an uproar over his use of the N-word on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru for high school students in 2019. McNeil was reprimanded after students complained that he used the slur in a discussion of racist language, and scoffed at the concepts of systemic racism and white privilege. But after TheDailyBeast
.com wrote about the incident last month, more than 150 staffers signed a letter expressing anger and “pain” over McNeil’s light punishment and alleged he’d previously displayed “bias against people of color.” McNeil soon resigned, amid furious internal debate over whether he was “the latest victim of cancel culture run amok.”
The debacle is “deeply symbolic of the way wokeness has corrupted a major American institution,” said Rod Dreher in TheAmericanConservative .com. Last year the “woke mob” demanded and got the head of editorial page editor James Bennet after he dared to publish a column by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton calling for troops to be deployed against the George Floyd protests. Now McNeil and his “irreplaceable” expertise are gone, too—with the Times saying his intent in using the word was irrelevant. The drama is “a snapshot of a bigger culture feud,” said Kaylee McGhee White in WashingtonExaminer.com. It illustrates how Millennials “educated in the safe spaces of left-wing universities” are now forcing a “hypersensitive social justice ideology” on their employers, social media, and everyone.
The controversy is “a sign that The Times’ unique position in American news may not be tenable,” said Ben Smith in The New York Times. Its agenda-setting role for “American news, culture, and politics” has “intensified its status as a cultural lightning rod,” even as a boom in digital subscriptions has made the paper “more beholden to the views of left-leaning subscribers.” The Peru incident, pitting idealistic high schoolers against a famously grumpy reporter, was “a collision between the old Times and the next generation of its core audience, the educated, globally minded elite.” Does The Times want to be the voice of the Left or to “hold what seems to be a disappearing center in a deeply divided country?” The question “won’t be easily resolved.”