"The management of the nation’s most elite, center-left news organization, which, in its opinion pages, supports unionization at places like Amazon and..."

"... endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president in part because she would 'give workers more ability to bargain collectively,' is now telling its impecunious staff to quit clanking their tin cups. The workers want raises that keep up with inflation, and the company is on track for an annual operating profit of more than $300 million...."

Writes Shawn McCreesh in "Just What Did the [New York] Times Walkout Change?" (NY Magazine).

"It’s been quite baffling and painful for me to have people assume I’m a racist and believe that I said the ridiculous things I’m accused of saying..."

"... that 'racism is over,' that 'white supremacy doesn’t exist,' or 'white privilege doesn’t exist,' or that I defended the use of blackface or said horrible things about black teenagers in general. I’m surprised by how quick some colleagues who barely know me were prepared to accept those accusations and even add more on a Times alumni Facebook page. Someone to whom I don’t think I’ve spoken since 1994 said 'calling him only a racist is being nice.' An editor I happily worked side by side with in 1989 and have had brief but cordial chats with maybe once every ten years when we bump into each other on the street said I seemed 'dismissive of people of color and their views' back then. Someone I thought I’d been very nice to when she left the paper attacked me for using the expression 'third world' in a story that was, as always, approved by several Times editors.... 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.... [W]hat’s happened to me has been called a 'witch hunt.' It isn’t. It’s a series of misunderstandings and blunders. I may be the only living Times reporter who has actually covered a witch hunt — in Zimbabwe in 1997. They inevitably end worse for the accused. I’m at least getting my say."

From "NYTimes Peru N-Word, Part One: Introduction" by Donald McNeil (Medium). Interesting how he chooses to play the disability card with that "high-functioning Asperger aspect to my personality." I wonder how much of what the wokesters call "whiteness" (and maleness) could be repackaged as "high-functioning Aspergers" and received with some empathy as part of the rainbow of diversity. 

Here's the piece McNeil considers a story about a real witch hunt — "Zimbabwean Tribal Elders Air a Chief Complaint": 

"The online publication Slate has suspended a well-known podcast host after he debated with colleagues over whether people who are not Black should be able to quote a racial slur..."

"... in some contexts. Mike Pesca, the host of 'The Gist,' a podcast on news and culture... made his argument during a conversation last week with colleagues on the interoffice messaging platform Slack. In a lengthy thread of messages, Slate staff members were discussing the resignation of Donald G. McNeil Jr., a reporter who said this month that he was resigning from The New York Times after he had used the slur during a discussion of racism while working as a guide on a student trip in 2019....  Jacob Weisberg, Slate’s former chairman and editor in chief [said]... 'I don’t think he did anything that merits discipline or consequences, and I think it’s an example of a kind of overreaction and a lack of judgment and perspective that is unfortunately spreading'... Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate... disagreed. 'For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,' he said."

The NYT reports.

ADDED: If a place of business wants to have zero-tolerance rule that says you will lose your job if you ever say the syllables of the n-word, that's one thing. But I don't see how the policy can be, as Joel Anderson suggests, that it only applies to white employees. That's overt and unsubtle race discrimination, and it would, I think, be hard to argue that it's not a violation of statutory law. Would Anderson support a rule that required the firing of black employees who happen to slip into say the word? I don't think I've ever heard anyone push for a rule like that. So I think the employer would be well advised to take the context of the saying of the word into account.

AND: A race-neutral zero-tolerance rule would create a much greater risk for black people. I think it's very easy for white people to avoid ever saying the word. Some just don't think we should be so repressed and sensitive about the word — as opposed to its use as an insult. But if the rule is you'll be fired if you ever say it, regardless of context, white people will abide by the rule.

"The parents of adventurous young meritocrats paid $5,490 (plus airfare) for two weeks studying 'Public Health and Development in the Andes.'"

"On that trip, the reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., got into a series of heated arguments with students, none of them Black, on the charged question of race. Their complaints would ultimately end his career as a high-profile public health reporter for The Times, and again put The Times at the center of the national argument over journalism and racism and labor.... The student at the center of this story is Sophie Shepherd, who isn’t among the teenagers who have spoken anonymously to other news organizations. She and two other students said she was the person who spoke the most to Mr. McNeil and spent the most time with him on their 'student journey.' She was 17 at the time, and had just finished her senior year at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school sometimes rated America’s best."

 Writes Ben Smith in The New York Times — at "Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside The Times Won’t Stop/Other news organizations have their own personnel dramas. But none attract the spotlight the way The Times does." 

The New York Post publishes the Bret Stephens column that the New York Times spiked.

It's not that Stephens, a regular NYT columnist, can or would just give the rejected column to another newspaper to publish. The Post tells us the column — which defends the NYT reporter who got ousted for saying the n-word — "circulated among Times staffers and others" and the Post got hold of it "from one of them, not Stephens himself." Presumably, the Post publishes it because it is newsworthy — not as an opinion on the news but because the spiking of it is news, so we need to see what it is. 

Let's read it:

Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention. 

It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act).

Speaking of Donald Trump, it's the question I think should be at the core of the impeachment trial but is not: Did Trump intend that the crowd break into the Capitol and terrorize the members of Congress?  

It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage. A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention.

Yeah, why are the House Managers indifferent to this distinction? I am getting distracted! This Stephen's column reads like a criticism of the House Managers case against Trump. Trump said something, perhaps without any intention of causing the harm, but the harm did ensue. To care about the harm and not what the accused person intended is a "hallmark of injustice." Noted!