NY Times Defends Hiring Writer With History Of Inflammatory Tweets

Some of the Tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1025026558984159232" target="_blank" rel="noopener">that have come into question</a>

On Wednesday, the NY Times announced that it had hired Verge senior writer Sarah Jeong to join its editorial board to write about technology. By Thursday morning, old Tweets from Jeong—including "Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins"—circulated, prompting headlines like "Newest Member of NYT Editorial Board Has History of Racist Tweets."

The NY Times is standing by Jeong, and issued a statement to that effect:

We hired Sarah Jeong because of the exceptional work she has done covering the internet and technology at a range of respected publications.

Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She sees now that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, and The Times does not condone it.

We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history. She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times and we are confident that she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.

Jeong also issued her own statement, characterizing the Tweets as "satire" and, at times, "counter-trolling" that was intended not for a general audience. She explained, "As a woman of color on the internet, I have faced torrents of online hate, often along this vein," and offered these Tweets as evidence:

I engaged in what I thought of at the time of counter-trolling. While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns. I can understand how hurtful these posts are out of context, and would not do it again.

If you dare wade into Twitter, there's the usual debate out there:

Earlier this year, the NY Times hired tech journalist Quinn Norton to join its editorial board, but then, hours later, Norton and the Times decided to part ways after Twitter users surfaced her friendship with internet troll and neo-Nazi Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, who work for the Daily Stormer, as well as Tweets with racial slurs and anti-gay slurs. Times editorial page editor James Bennet explained, "Despite our review of Quinn Norton’s work and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us. Based on it, we’ve decided to go our separate ways."

Norton later wrote about the experience, "If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past."

For further reading, let's revisit Times opinion writer David Brooks's columns on how Egyptians aren't intelligent enough to govern and questioning Ta-Nehisi Coates about the black experience in America.

Ed. note: The headline originally used the term "anti-white" to describe the Tweets. It has been changed because of that term's use by white supremacists.