Donald McNeil says he’s not racist amid New York Times dismissal
By Lia Eustachewich
New York Pot
March 1, 2021
Former New York Times reporter Donald McNeil on Monday blamed the Gray Lady for exacerbating the N-word debacle that torpedoed his career — as he issued a full-throated defense of himself online.
In a 20,000-plus word, four-part post on Medium, the journalist, who spent 45 years at the newspaper, opened up about the scandal that exploded over the comments he made while on a 2019 student trip to Peru.
“I never dreamed that one of the two Peru trips I took — which to me were just blips in my life, something I’d done largely as a favor to a friend who needed experts to make the trips sell — would sink my Times career,” McNeil wrote in the first of a four-part post on Medium.
In late January, the Daily Beast reported the claims that McNeil, who most recently led the newspaper’s COVID-19 coverage, dropped the N-word and other offensive remarks during the trip.
McNeil, who has publicly kept mum over the matter following his resignation letter last month, slammed the Times over its reaction to the imminent Daily Beast story.
After the Beast contacted McNeil on Jan. 28 for comment on their report, he said the Times went into “full freakout message-control mode” — by calling on him to immediately issue an apology and nixing the drawn-out explanations he initially wanted to send to the Beast.
“If the Times had not panicked and I had been allowed to send some version of that, perhaps the Beast would have rewritten or even spiked its story,” McNeil said. “Almost undoubtedly, the reaction inside the Times itself would have been different.”
Four days later, McNeil claims Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Deputy Managing Editor Carolyn Ryan “twisted his arm” to consider resigning — which resulted in him telling them no and lawyering up.
“You’ve lost the newsroom,” Baquet, a longtime colleague of McNeil’s, allegedly told him during the phone call. “A lot of your colleagues are hurt. A lot of them won’t work with you. Thank you for writing the apology. But we’d like you to consider adding to it that you’re leaving.”
McNeil’s resignation — along with the exit of Andy Mills, the co-host of the embattled “Caliphate” podcast — was announced Feb. 5 in a statement that noted “this is the right next step.”
McNeil, who copped to using the N-word in his resignation letter, said assumptions from some that he’s a racist are “quite baffling and painful.”
“Am I a racist? I don’t think so — after working in 60 countries over 25 years, I think I’m pretty good at judging people as individuals,” he said in the post, which he claimed was vetted by two lawyers beforehand.
He added, “What particularly baffled me was that anyone would look at my work and conclude that I would have chosen my beat if I were a racist, and could or would have survived on it that long” — and pointed to a series of awards he’s won for his coverage involving countries like Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria and Haiti.
McNeil said he was paid $300 a day to accompany the private school students around Peru — and deliver three talks “about global health,” as well as “make myself available to the students as much as possible” — as part of the paper’s “Student Journey” program.
The veteran newsman suggested his conversations with the youngsters may have been misconstrued due to a generational gap.
“My girlfriend thinks I have a high-functioning Asperger aspect to my personality — I’m empathic about suffering but I also very much misread audiences,” he wrote.
“So — was I five decades older than the students in Peru and out of touch with their sensibilities? Absolutely. Did I have perspectives to offer that they didn’t get at prep school? I think so.”
McNeil, 67, whose work on the pandemic was submitted for Pulitzer Prize consideration, also questioned the timing of the accusations.
“I’ve been asked many times: Who was the Daily Beast’s source? And why was it leaked now, just when you’re up 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 inside. But you never know. And why? I don’t know.”
McNeil said he had used the N-word in response to a conversation he was having with a student over “whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used” the slur.
He said the other allegedly offensive remarks were misinterpreted.
McNeil promised to only discuss the matter on March 1 — when his resignation became official.
In concluding his lengthy piece, he lamented on the scandal marring his decades-long reputation as a science reporter covering global health issues.
“Obviously, I badly misjudged my audience in Peru that year. I thought I was generally arguing in favor of open-mindedness and tolerance — but it clearly didn’t come across that way,” he wrote. “And my bristliness makes me an imperfect pedagogue for sensitive teenagers.”
“And now I’d like to put this behind me. I had hoped to be remembered as a good science reporter whose work saved lives. Not for this.”
1 comment:
It was stupid to even utter the N-word in any context. If it must be mentioned it should be mentioned as "N-word."
Post a Comment