(“This is outrageous, in my view,” one had remarked.) The article included a statement from a Times spokesperson saying the company had “conducted a thorough investigation and disciplined Donald,” without specifying the discipline. He was a racist.”) They even got their hands on emails between members of the Times’ corporate communications department. Reporters for the Beast had spoken to “multiple parents of students on the trip.” They published some of the students’ complaints verbatim. That all changed on January 28, when the Daily Beast published a damning article about McNeil’s 2019 Peru trip. Additionally, a “harsh letter,” as one person familiar with the punishment put it, was added to his personnel file, essentially a red mark on McNeil’s permanent record-and not the first, sources said. Nevertheless, Baquet concluded that McNeil deserved a second chance, same as Baquet had given to other Times journalists who had become engulfed in major controversies. McNeil’s overall comportment around a bunch of teenagers was inappropriate and unprofessional, Baquet believed. Dean Baquet, who is the Times’ first Black executive editor, was furious about the incident-not just McNeil’s casual use of the N-word (which he’d apparently let slip in the context of referring to someone else using it), but the entire scope of the complaints. McNeil was informed by his manager that the brass needed to speak with him. Behrendt, who was once described to me as “the Robert Mueller of the Times,” presented her findings to newsroom leadership. ![]() figure inside the newsroom, responsible for digging into messy personnel debacles like, say, the allegations of sexual misconduct against political reporter Glenn Thrush in 2017. She’s an associate managing editor and lawyer who is a sort of quasi H.R. But the most serious complaint of all was that McNeil had at one point used that most heinous of racial slurs for Black people.Īfter catching wind of these complaints, the Times commenced an investigation conducted by Charlotte Behrendt. These complaints ranged from concerns about how McNeil discussed race and other sensitive cultural issues, to behavior during ceremonies the group was invited to attend with indigenous shamans, to a generally dismissive and prickly manner. ![]() After the trip the Times became aware of complaints from a number of the students and their parents. ![]() McNeil participated in a Times-organized “Student Journey” to Peru in the summer of 2019. That includes the Times’ 2019 investigation into McNeil’s behavior, candid discussions between Times reporters and masthead editors, and last week’s war room meetings among Times management concerning this latest installment in a string of mega controversies at the paper of record. Though the broad outlines of McNeil’s ignominious departure are known, along with revelations about McNeil’s conduct on a trip with high schoolers, I’ve been able to piece together a clearer picture of the Times’ handling of the whole messy affair, based on conversations with multiple people who have knowledge of how it all went down. The turbulent exit of reporter Donald McNeil Jr., a 45-year New York Times veteran owning the biggest story in the world, has unraveled the Times newsroom and set social media ablaze, with private discussions taking place among employees of color on Slack, alumni jumping into the fray on Facebook, and polarizing takes flowing freely on Twitter.
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