A new book by a former New York Times staffer spills the tea about the “backbiting” and “bloodthirsty” colleagues he once worked alongside.
In the newly released “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People,” author Steve Krakauer interviewed former Times staffer Shawn McCreesh, according to Mediaite, which obtained excerpts of the new book.
McCreesh recounted the “Maoist struggle session” at the paper that eventually led to the ousting of editorial page editor James Bennet in 2020.
Bennet left the outlet after publishing a column by Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, in which he called for sending the military into major cities to stop rioting and looting by left-wing Black Lives Matter activists. Employees alleged that the publication of the article endangered black journalists, and Bennet eventually stepped down.
McCreesh said Cotton’s op-ed was enough to bring out a “bloodthirsty” side of his former colleagues, Mediaite reported.
“It was just so bizarre what was happening,” McCreesh reportedly said. “It was like a Maoist struggle session.” (RELATED: The New York Times Union Is Pushing For Compensated Pre-Publication ‘Sensitive Reads’)
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 14: Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) speaks with reporters after attending a closed-door, classified briefing for Senators at U.S. Capitol Building on February 14, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” McCreesh reportedly said. “And all these angry backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics.”
“It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on Slack,” McCreesh said, according to Mediaite. “And the leadership was so horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve.”
McCreesh said the “worst part was that a lot of the people who were stabbing James in the front were the ones that he hired and brought to the newspaper,” adding that he was “so fucking freaked out by what we had just witnessed.”