This is a long read: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four. I really did not expect to make it all the way through myself. But as someone who is deeply suspicious of The New York Times, I just could not stop. I confess to an unworthy sense of satisfaction, even schadenfreude, as I read this.
I can't decide what is more sad. The fact that Donald McNeil does not understand the completely broken culture of The New York Times, a place he worked for over forty years. Or his tepid and timid response to it. He should have fought, quicker and harder. We, the sane, must fight this lunacy. If we don't, we become part of it, and consumed by it. Even now, McNeil describes the situation as a series of misunderstandings and blunders.
But it's so much worse than that. McNeil seems to be under the impression that what he actually said and did in Peru in 2019 matters. I guess that is why he goes into such great detail in Part Four. At the end of which, he says: I do not see why their [the students] complaints should have ended my career at the Times two years later. But they did.
Well if that is his conclusion, he deserves what he got. Because it was not the students' complaints that did him in. They were children. Rather, it was his respected colleagues, for whom virtue signaling outweighs integrity.
In fact, this entire extended episode demonstrates the complete lack of institutional integrity at The New York Times. If the Times' leadership will treat one of their own loyalists so shabbily, is it any surprise they treat news and opinion with such low integrity as well?
Bari Weiss understands this. Donald McNeil? He's not so clever.