The union representing New York Times employees accused the company on Friday of hiring employees with backgrounds as part of a weeks-long investigation into leaks from its newsroom about the paper's coverage of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel To have targeted the Middle East or North Africa.
In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, said managers had identified certain employees — “who were targeted because of their national origin, ethnicity and race” — who raised concerns about the newspaper's coverage , were singled out because of “particularly hostile questioning.”
“We demand that the Times end what has become a destructive and racially targeted witch hunt,” DeCarava wrote in the letter to Times Publisher and Chairman AG Sulzberger.
In a separate statement sent to Guild members late Friday, union leaders said Times managers had questioned employees about their involvement in an affinity group for employees of Middle Eastern and North African descent and “instructed them to include the names of all…” hand over. active members and requested copies of private text message conversations between colleagues about their shared workplace concerns.”
The leak investigation was launched after Intercept reported that the Times' flagship podcast, “The Daily,” was staging a planned episode about the paper's major investigative report that described a “pattern of gender-based violence” during the attacks Shelved after employees and outside critics did so, raising questions about the credibility of the story.
The Times defended its coverage of the December story both in statements to other news organizations and in a follow-up story on Jan. 29.
But the storm of criticism and questions has led to tensions in the editorial team. And in the weeks following the Intercept report, Times executives called employees into meetings to find out how internal discussions about the shelved Daily episode were leaked. According to DeCarava's letter, the employees summoned for questioning asserted their right to have union representatives present at these meetings.
The existence of the leak investigation was first reported by Vanity Fair.
A spokeswoman for The New York Times did not immediately respond to comment on the guild's letter.
With graphic details and a headline suggesting that Hamas had “used sexual violence as a weapon,” the Times article by correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman and two Israel-based freelancers caused a stir when it was published on December 28.
But questions about the story quickly began to circulate. Relatives of a woman killed in the attack, whose story was the focus of the Times report, have expressed doubts about the reporting suggesting she was raped, while other critics have pointed to discrepancies in various accounts from an eyewitness cited in the story.
According to the Intercept, the Times had originally planned to feature its Oct. 7 sexual violence coverage in a Jan. 9 episode of The Daily.
But “as criticism of Gettleman's story mounted both internally and externally,” The Intercept wrote on Jan. 28, “The Daily's producers shelved the original script and paused the episode, according to newsroom sources familiar with the matter .”
Instead, the Intercept wrote, the staff prepared a new script that “contained major caveats [and] Uncertainty allowed.” Nevertheless, no program about the history of sexual violence has been broadcast on the podcast.
The Times declined at the time to confirm or deny that an episode had been canceled. “As a policy, we do not comment on the specifics of what may or may not be published in The New York Times or our audio programs,” the company said in a statement to the Intercept. “There is only one 'version' of all audio journalism: the one that publishes.”
This week, the reporting came under renewed scrutiny following revelations about social media posts previously “liked” by one of the Times' freelancers, including one that called on Israel to turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse.” if hostages were not immediately returned and Palestinians were referred to as “human animals”.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, the Times called Anat Schwartz's social media activity “unacceptable” and said the company was reviewing the matter. The Intercept's follow-up story this week raised the question of whether Schwartz, a documentary filmmaker who had not previously worked as a reporter, had relied on dubious sources.
The article focused heavily on Schwartz's comments in a January 3 podcast interview with an Israeli media outlet. The Times said in a statement to the Intercept that the story took Schwartz's quotes out of context.
The existence of a leak investigation surprised observers inside and outside the Times. Newsrooms are a place for gossip, intrigue and disagreement, and the Times' internal drama — perhaps more than most media organizations — has been the fodder for countless news stories over the years.
“I can understand why Times management is unhappy about the inner workings of its editorial process being made public,” said Margaret Sullivan, a former Times public editor and now executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University Journalism School. “But pursuing a leak investigation seems at odds with the ethos of reporting and transparency.” (Sullivan is a former Washington Post columnist.)
In her letter, DeCarava said some of the employees selected for questioning had no connection to The Daily. Instead, she said, they had previously raised concerns about reporting on sexual violence with Standards editors. “These members did their best to adhere to company policies and provide feedback internally to standards, which the Times encourages its journalists to do,” she wrote.
The result, she wrote, was “a threatening chilling effect throughout the newsroom…effectively silencing necessary and critical internal discussion.”
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