I’m a couple days late on this but it’s worth your time to read Donald McNeil’s four-part defense of himself after he lost his job over things he said on an educational trip to Peru with prep school teenagers in 2019. He was the New York Times’ top coronavirus reporter, and may end up winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage. Here’s the Times’ coverage of what McNeil wrote about his ouster. It’s instructive just to see how the institution chose to summarize McNeil’s side of things.
It turns out, like almost everything, this is a complicated story. McNeil comes off as an abrasive but gifted and fascinating guy who tried to be candid and challenging with teenagers. He was extremely unwise to repeat the n-word out loud, even in a context that was not racist or abusive. (Regardless of context, the cost-benefit analysis for any white person on uttering this word aloud is 100 percent clear: Do not do it. Ever.) But that doesn’t mean he should have been forced to resign, and his account of what happened, which seems meticulous and not overly axe-grinding, gives the strong impression that it was his resistance to parroting some kind of woke catechism to a bunch of rich kids and their handlers that ultimately brought him down. They wanted to hear about colonialism and oppression and white guilt and cultural appropriation, and he wouldn’t give that to them, at least not without major caveats. Formerly a foreign correspondent who’s been to “60 countries,” McNeil rejected what he viewed as this attempt to impose a specific contemporary American narrative on the entire world. That was the rub. The n-word is the headline, but it seems unlikely any of this would have blown up had McNeil simply bent the knee at the dinner table and agreed with the teenagers’ view of the world as a Marxist struggle for power with white Americans as the chief villains. He admitted things got heated one night. It’s not hard to imagine him pushing people’s buttons on that fateful junket. Like I said, he comes off abrasive, even cantankerous. It’s also not hard to imagine a certain type of young person viewing this old white guy as The Problem because he wasn’t saying The Right Things. Maybe they just didn’t like him. Maybe he talked too much and didn’t listen to anybody! Who knows!
In any case, a few of the kids and one of the handlers were very displeased. And McNeil had enemies in management at the Times thanks in part to his role as negotiator at the bargaining table for the union there. A disciplinary proceeding ensued and McNeil accepted a week’s suspension without pay. When somebody went to the Daily Beast with the story nearly two years later, it all got dredged back up and Times executive editor Dean Baquet quickly lost interest in backing McNeil, for whatever reason, and that was that. A 67-year-old at the height of his reporting powers, in the middle of a 100-year pandemic that he has covered as well as anyone, lost his job, mostly over differences of opinion about historical narrative with adolescents. Yikes.
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We had some technical difficulties with the footage from Atlanta. Some of the best interviews are visually well below par. I’m still wrestling with that. It’s not been fun. To anyone who is wondering about that video, apologies for the delay.
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David Shor on the election and its dilemmas for Dems — NY Mag*
The expensive U.S. effort to change Afghan gender norms — SIGAR
Nice scene-setter at George Floyd Square — Star Tribune
Texas power grid CEO fired — AP
Gaudy “Transformer” statues cause a fuss in Georgetown — DCist
Warren Buffett on interstate power lines — Inside Climate News
*can’t recommend this enough. Shor is transparently a progressive, but is also clear-eyed about electoral politics. Republicans and Democrats and Independents and anyone else will find the interview interesting.
Quotes
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” — Rene Girard, 2003
About: I was a newspaper reporter for 14 years, most recently at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I explained why my family left Minneapolis here. Now we live just outside Chattanooga and I work on Scuffed News, a project that either succeeds by July or will have to be abandoned. This is my newsletter. Please share it with anyone you think might enjoy it. I also periodically add people to the distribution list myself. You can support all of this work with your money on Patreon.