Former New York Times reporter Donald McNeil on Monday blamed the Gray Lady for exacerbating the N-word disaster that torpedoed his career – while he issued a self-defense online.
In a post of more than 20,000 words and four parts on Medium, the journalist, who spent 45 years in the newspaper, opened the scandal that exploded with the comments he made during a 2019 student trip to Peru.
“I never imagined that one of the two trips I made to Peru – which for me were just punctuated in my life, something I did largely as a favor to a friend who needed specialists to sell the trips – would sink my career at the Times, McNeil wrote in the first of a four-part post on Medium.
In late January, the Daily Beast reported allegations that McNeil, who most recently led coverage of the newspaper COVID-19, abandoned the N word and other offensive comments during the trip.
McNeil, who publicly remained silent on the issue after his resignation letter last month, criticized the Times for its reaction to the impending Daily Beast story.
After the Beast contacted McNeil on January 28 to comment on his report, he said the Times went into “total madness message control mode” – asking him to immediately issue an apology and reject the lengthy explanations that he initially wanted to send to the Beast.
“If the Times had not panicked and I had been allowed to send some version of this, perhaps the Beast would have rewritten or even added to its history,” said McNeil. “Almost without a doubt, the reaction within the Times itself would have been different.”
Four days later, McNeil claims that Times executive editor Dean Baquet and deputy managing editor Carolyn Ryan “twisted their arms” to consider the resignation – which resulted in him saying no to them and defending the position .
“You lost your essay,” Baquet, a longtime colleague of McNeil’s, would have said to him during the call. “Many of your colleagues are injured. Many of them will not work for you. Thank you for writing the apology. But we’d like you to add that you’re leaving. “
McNeil’s resignation – along with the departure of Andy Mills, co-host of the “Caliphate” podcast – was announced on February 5 in a statement that said “this is the next correct step”.
McNeil, who started using the N word in his resignation letter, said the assumptions of some that he is racist are “quite disconcerting and painful.”
“Am I a racist? I don’t think so – after working in 60 countries over 25 years, I think I’m very good at judging people as individuals, ”he said in the post, which he said had been examined by two lawyers before.
He added: “What made me particularly perplexed was that someone would look at my work and conclude that I would have chosen my style if I had been racist and could or would have survived that long” – and pointed to a series of awards he won for his coverage involving countries like Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria and Haiti.
McNeil said he was paid $ 300 a day to accompany students from private schools across Peru – and give three lectures “on global health” as well as “making myself available to students as much as possible” – as part of the article ” Student Journey Program ”.
The veteran journalist suggested that his conversations with young people may have been misinterpreted due to a generational gap.
“My girlfriend thinks I have a highly functioning Asperger aspect of my personality – I empathize with suffering, but I also misinterpret the audience,” he wrote.
“So – I was five decades older than students in Peru and out of touch with their sensibilities? Absolutely. Did I have prospects to offer that they didn’t make it to prep school? I think yes.”
McNeil, 67, whose work on the pandemic was submitted to the Pulitzer Prize for consideration, also questioned the timing of the charges.
“I’ve been asked many times: who was the source for the Daily Beast? And why did it leak now, when you’re running for a Pulitzer? ”Said the journalist.
“The answer is: I have no idea. The story includes a quote from an internal Times email, so I must assume it leaked from within. But you never know. It’s because? I do not know.”
McNeil said he used the word with N in response to a conversation he was having with a student about “if I thought her classmate should have been suspended for a video she made when she was 12 years old in which she used it” Slander.
He said the other allegedly offensive comments were misinterpreted.
McNeil promised to discuss the issue only on March 1 – when his resignation became official.
In concluding his long article, he deplored the scandal that damaged his decades-old reputation as a science reporter covering global health issues.
“Obviously, I misjudged my audience in Peru that year. I thought I was generally arguing in favor of an open mind and tolerance – but clearly that was not the case, ”he wrote. “And my erythema makes me an imperfect teacher for sensitive teenagers.”
“And now I would like to leave that behind. I expected to be remembered as a good science reporter whose work saved lives. Not for that. ”