Member-only story
Why There’s Still An Argument About NYT Coverage of Trans People
The New York Times is digging in its heels on institutional transphobia
Since the February 15 open letter to the New York Times criticizing the newspaper for transphobic articles, there’s been a debate over whether the Times reporting on transgender people amounts to poor “workplace conditions” for Times employees, as that’s something the writers’ union might address. Times journalists organize through the NewsGuild of New York.
It could indeed create bad workplace conditions, particularly for a journalist who is trans or who is closely connected to trans people. One colleague’s words about gender and sexuality inevitably affect their coworkers who belong to those groups.
Though NewsGuild president Susan DeCarava used the words “workplace conditions” in her own letter, she says she intended to take a different angle in her complaint. Following the New York Times letter to staff on February 16 in which editors Joe Kahn and Katie Kingsbury reiterated a “clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly,” DeCarava reminded them that they’d published Bret Stephens’ opinion “publicly attacking his colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project as ‘illogical’ and questioning the veracity of her reporting…
