She knows that she can act with impunity, and increasingly pushes the envelope to see what she can get away with.
The latest round of controversy at the New York Times followed the insane firing of reporter Donald McNeil Jr. for repeating the n-word in a conversation about other people using it. The Times initially defended the ridiculous argument that “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” a standard that is so completely divorced from common sense that . . . I’d make up a comical reductio ad absurdum example of the stupidity of this, but the most extreme possible example already actually happened with the firing of a black school security guard in Madison, Wis., in 2019 when a student called him the slur and he repeated it solely for the purpose of telling her not to use that word against a black man: He “told the student multiple times ‘do not call me that,’ ‘do not call me that word,’ and ‘do not call me a N-word,’ using the slur during the confrontation.” The merciless hammer of zero tolerance fell on him; the guard got his job back months later, solely due to nationwide media attention.
McNeil has not been so fortunate, but there was a problem with the Times standard: 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones has used the word repeatedly on Twitter, most recently today. (So has op-ed writer Jamelle Bouie.) Now, if you apply things like reason, intent, context, and common sense, you might distinguish those cases on the grounds that these are African-American writers writing about racism. But that was not the standard deployed against McNeil. So, faced with the risk that the Times standard might apply to Hannah-Jones, who cannot under any circumstances be fired for anything, they changed the standard. When Hannah-Jones violated Twitter’s terms of service by releasing the private contact information of a Washington Free Beacon reporter who reached out to her for comment, the Times again defended her. As Isaac Schorr details, this really is only the tip of the iceberg of how fear of being accused of contradicting Hannah-Jones has led to her essentially dictating terms to the entire newspaper’s personnel — who can work there and who can’t, and why, ruining multiple careers in the process:
Does Hannah-Jones seem like someone who has been muzzled, or belittled, or treated as though she didn’t know her place? It seems to me as though she wields enough power to force the executive editor of the most famous publication in the world to rebuke some of his employees, fire others, and issue obsequious statements showering her and her shoddy work with praise. If Baquet were to resign from the Times tomorrow, he would have the same amount of authority over Nikole Hannah-Jones that he has today. It doesn’t matter how many times Hannah-Jones embarrasses the paper. She will not be reprimanded, much less removed from her position, even though the likes of Donald McNeil, James Bennet, and to a certain extent Bari Weiss have all been cast out for far less (in Weiss’s case, nothing) than what she is guilty of. The backlash would be far too great.
Something occurred to me reading all of this: Hannah-Jones’s relationship with the Times is effectively a mirror image of the relationship of Donald Trump with a significant chunk of right-wing media and the Republican party. Like Trump, she knows that she can act with impunity, and increasingly pushes the envelope to see what she can get away with or flaunt what she can get away with, secure in the knowledge that she will always be defended and deferred to, and that anyone in her way will quickly find the door with their belongings in a cardboard box. As with Trump, if she does something that conflicts with previously stated standards, those standards must change to conform to her behavior. As with Trump, the reason for all of this is that she has somehow managed to identify her own person with a particular narrative of cultural power and resentment, such that confronting her is tantamount to questioning that narrative, and is thus conflated with a personal attack on anyone who subscribes to the narrative.
This is no way to run an organization of any kind, least of all one such as a newspaper that is supposed to be dedicated to the fearless telling of truth or a political party that is supposed to stand for things. When one person is allowed to embody the organization’s cultural narrative to the point where no contradiction or accountability is possible, neither people nor facts nor ideas can stand in the way.