New York Times editor deletes and apologizes for past 'offensive' tweets
By Joe Concha
The Hill
August 22, 2019
A senior editor at the New York Times apologized Thursday for "offensive" tweets from nearly a decade ago, as one Republican lawmaker called for his firing.
“I have deleted tweets from a decade ago that are offensive. I am deeply sorry,” New York politics desk editor Tom Wright-Piersanti said on Twitter after Breitbart News drew attention to the tweets.
The tweets, which were deleted late Wednesday, include one from Jan. 1, 2010, in which Wright-Piersanti referred to a "Crappy Jew Year."
“I was going to say ‘Crappy Jew Year,’ but one of my resolutions is to be less anti-Semitic. So… HAPPY Jew Year. You Jews," he wrote in one tweet.
Another, from December 2009, referred to the “Jew-police.”
“We are aware of these tweets, which are a clear violation of our standards. We are reviewing next steps," The New York Times said in a statement.
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), who is Jewish, has called on Wright-Piersanti to be fired.
“An editor from the New York Times is scrubbing his [Twitter] account, this guy Tom Wright-Piersanti, because he was self-describing himself as an anti-Semite and he was going after Jews and others,” Zeldin said on Fox News Thursday morning before saying he “should be fired.”
Wright-Piersanti also deleted other offensive tweets.
“There are four indian guys with mohawks in this one class, and each one is a douche in his own awful way. I hate mohawk Indians,” reads one tweet dated Dec. 8, 2009.
“I don’t hate Mohawk Indians, though. I love those guys. I just hate Indians with mohawks. Different indians, different mohawks,” he wrote in another tweet that same day.
The Hill has reached out to Wright-Piersanti for comment.
Earlier this month the Times demoted its deputy Washington editor, Jonathan Weisman, over a pair of controversial tweets, removing him as a congressional editor and saying he will no longer be active on social media.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2014, Sarah Jeong, a Korean-American member of the editorial board at The New York Times, tweeted “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a former White House adviser who currently hosts a nationally syndicated radio program, told Breitbart News that “the New York Times has become a cess-pit of hatred and bigotry.”
1 comment:
I think Gorka may have nailed that one right on the head.
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