Former NYT staffer describes news outlet’s ‘Maoist’ censorship

Former New York Times staffer Shawn McCreesh has revealed details about a “bloodthirsty” incident at the news outlet which offers a glimpse into the paper’s dark culture of censorship. 

McCreesh’s comments were included in Steve Krakauer’s new book, Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People, excerpts from which were published by Mediaite Tuesday.

In the book, McCreesh recalls the time in 2020 when the Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). The article, titled “Send in the Troops,” argued for President Trump to deploy the National Guard to quell the violent George Floyd riots spreading across the country.

The article sparked a revolt among the Times’ employees, who insisted that the words endangered Black people. McCreesh describes watching his colleagues suddenly turn “bloodthirsty” and maniacal as they maintained an outrage campaign until opinion editor James Bennet resigned from the pressure.

“It was just so bizarre what was happening,” said McCreesh. “It was like a Maoist struggle session.”

In a staff meeting about Cotton’s article, one tech writer named Charlie Warzel started to cry because “none of his friends wanted to talk to him anymore because he worked for this horrible evil newspaper that would print this op-ed.”

“There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” McCreesh told Krakauer. “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 like 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 Times executives were “so horrified by what was happening” they “completely lost their nerve.”

But the worst part, he said, is that some of the staffers who were “stabbing Bennet in the front” were employees Bennet had himself hired and brought to the newspaper.

“It was like Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate or something. Just this sort of horrible moment, and I remember closing my laptop and pouring a huge glass of wine, even though it was at like noon. Because I was so f*cking freaked out by what we had just witnessed.”

The New York Times eventually apologized for publishing Cotton’s article, but Bennet says the only thing he regrets is attaching an editor’s note to the article.

“My regret is that editor’s note. My mistake there was trying to mollify people,” he told Semafor‘s Ben Smith in October. “I never apologized for publishing the piece and still don’t.”