“Times Writer Forced Out and Charged With Possession of a Conscience”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The New York Times announced in a note to staff Friday that a writer for its magazine resigned after violating newsroom policy by signing an open letter that accused Israel of trying to “conduct genocide against the Palestinian people.”
Jazmine Hughes, who joined the paper in 2015 and has won multiple national awards, was one of the most prominent names on a statement published last week by a group called Writers Against the War on Gaza.
“While I respect that she has strong convictions, this was a clear violation of The Times’s policy on public protest,” magazine editor Jake Silverstein wrote in an email to staff Friday evening.
Hughes has won a string of accolades while working as a writer and editor at the Times, including a National Magazine Award in March for profiles on Viola Davis and Whoopi Goldberg.
The Israel-Gaza war has forced many institutions to contend with members who feel strongly about the conflict, which involves a long history of Israeli occupation and deadly military reprisals on Palestinian territory.
David Velasco was ousted as editor in chief at Artforum after the arts publication posted an open letter that supported Palestinian liberation and called for a cease-fire.
The original article contains 591 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
“While I respect that she has strong convictions, this was a clear violation of The Times’s policy on public protest,” magazine editor Jake Silverstein wrote in an email to staff Friday evening. “This policy, which I fully support, is an important part of our commitment to independence.”
Silverstein said Hughes also violated the policy earlier in the year
I get that it’s a policy many disagree with but breaking it twice, yeah you’ll get fired (or forced to resign I guess)
The little blurb in the middle of this article about genocide hyping up their “Style!” section as if genocide is just a fun and light pop culture topic is unreal
You’re definitely on the right side of things when you silence people calling out genocides.
Right. If you think people calling out genocide are wrong, show evidence that contradicts that contradicts that conclusion.
which should be really easy given there will be all the people free and not rounded up on camps with limited expression
It’s wild that we live in such polarized times that every single comment in this thread is talking about how this is wrong because of some variant of “she’s being fired for calling it like it is.”
That’s not what happened. She was fired (forced to resign, same difference) because she went on record with a political viewpoint and made value judgements. YOU DONT GET TO DO THAT AS A JOURNALIST. It doesn’t matter if she’s right (she is, in my opinion, before someone accused me of supporting apartheid and misses the point). What matters is she has taken away any appearance of being unbiased, both for her and by association for the paper. It’s crazy damaging and the Times should have fired her instead of letting her resign. This is like journalistic ethics 101. My parents were both journalists and wouldn’t even talk to me about who they voted for - and they weren’t even in hard news.
I know these days there are so many biased news agencies and lots of opinions masquerading as news, but for hard news agencies this kind of thing does not, and should not fly. The woman was dumb and I hope she was ready for a career writing op-eds and being a partisan talking head, because she’ll never write hard news at a reputable source again.
This is stupid, she’s a human first, and journalist second. If aliens were committing genocide on humans would you still have the same opinion?
We should be allowed to have and express opinions. How many reporters use the words terrorist? Freedom fighter? You can’t police people’s bias, nor should you.
You literally can police people’s bias if they want to be a good journalist. That’s why the NYT has a clear policy on this stuff, that she violated twice! Some people can’t control their biases or don’t want to, and that’s fine. They don’t get to be journalists at organizations that have to maintain strict impartiality.
Also, if you think the newsroom doesn’t have deeply debated guidelines and rules on how and when you use the label terrorist vs freedom fighter, or how to avoid using either term, you’re kidding yourself. This is why editors exist.
You’re literally advocating for what is essentially approved propaganda. That you think there is an objectively correct bias terrifies me, and if you had sense, it would terrify you too.
There is no such thing as objective truth, just perception and bias, and you truly believe it’s not okay to speak out against genocide?
I hope the history books of the future describe the atrocities of the present, because clearly we can’t rely on the news.
I think the point was more that an institution like the times doesn’t want to appear to be doing anything other than providing plain facts that don’t lead people into thinking one way or the other about a given thing so that their reporting can be trusted as not being propaganda.
It’s the difference between saying “stupid asshat Donald Trump, who’s obviously a criminal, was found guilty of the fraud we all knew he did.” And “A judge convicted Donald Trump of fraud.” That’s not propaganda, that’s just stating plain facts that don’t try to leave any impression on the reader which is important for trust.
Eh… She probably will get a better employer who actually has a conscience.
Good for her. She shouldn’t write for a rag that apologizes for / denies genocide.
The Onion has had the best takes on this so far
As is tradition
Here in chile the pro Palestine posture is razonably transversal and condemnation to Israel is normal to see.
With reasons well grounded in Chilean history, as I’m sure you may know. I’ve had a very eye opening time with this book, The Palestine Laboratory, free right now from the publisher. The first chapter is a pretty intense recounting of the ways that the Israeli government and military industry were materially supportive to Pinochet’s regime.
Yeah, it’s interesting how the rest of the world gets a pass. It’s almost as if they have to forcibly, manipulate the pro-zionism mindset in the country whose tax payers fund this genocide in its entirety. Hopefully this country can rid itself of that mental disorder and Israel can start taking the responsibility it should have in the beginning when it begged the world for their own safe space where people already lived.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the rest of the world gets a pass”. What are you trying to express? Thanks!
Silverstein said Hughes also violated the policy earlier in the year, when she signed an open letter protesting the Times’s coverage of transgender issues. “She and I discussed that her desire to stake out this kind of public position and join in public protests isn’t compatible with being a journalist at The Times, and we both came to the conclusion that she should resign,” he wrote in the email.
It seems having a spine isn’t compatible with being a journalist at the Times.
Working hard to make change from within fails yet again.
Well, “anywhere where they expect their journalists to present a neutral point of view or the appearance of it” would be more appropriate than saying it’s something that only applies to The Times… Journalists know they’re risking their career by doing something like what happened here. 8t might lead them to become columnists instead, as happened with a local TV journalist that decided to write a letter criticizing a controversial bill and to submit it for publishing in a journal, she lost her job and started writing books and opinion pieces instead.
You believe the right wing op ed writers at the times could ever get fired for their opinions? Bari Weiss was making mid 6 figures posting trash on the NYT before she accused her employer of discrimination to jump start coverage of her new substack.
Everyone is biased, it’s how the brain operates. Some biases try to reflect reality while others try to manipulate people to believe propaganda. The Times is perfectly fine employing propagandists.
Op Ed is the opposite of journalism, I was talking about journalists.
Op Ed writers literally write opinion pieces. That’s not journalism.
All the news that’s fit to print
