November 23, 2019
NYT editor claims he was fired for suggesting ‘one small edit’ to Trump article
To be clear, I asked, the only reason The New York Times was firing me was its perception that I had not been fair enough to Trump in my proposed edit? Was that right?
The center chief, and the human resources person who was listening in through the phone from Norfolk, confirmed that it was. When I posed the question again a couple of more times, they again confirmed it.
When I saw that infamous “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism” headline in The New York Times, I was not surprised in the least. And when I learned that it had set off subscription cancelations among outraged readers, I thought:
“Finally! What took so long?”
The paper, in its news columns and its internal communications, has been carrying out this project of Trump-dignification ever since, inevitably leading to something like that “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism” headline.
Last year, on July 9 — my wife’s birthday — The New York Times fired me with Trump-like peremptoriness. The reason: a single small cut I had made in a long story that I had been asked to reduce by two-thirds.
It was that cut, one that executive editor Dean Baquet and the office of the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, must have seen as essentially 'anti-Trump and therefore a reason that, after eight years of service during which I had received consistently good-to-glowing performance reviews, I could no longer be trusted professionally.
That jaw-dropping headline was only the latest evidence of The Times’ institutional affection for this bumptious devil that its top managers know so well.
So, I thought, this is the topsy-turvy America we are in now, one in which a union consciously protects a scab operation, and an ostensible global pillar of enlightened journalism and fit-to-print propriety goes out of its way to appease and dignify an orange-mopped racist goon who outrageously bullied and buffooned his way to the presidency.
The Times’s readiness to fire employees to protect the murderously unfunny joke that is Trump’s presidential dignity.
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