Name: “It’s Chaos”: Behind the Scenes of Donald McNeil’s New York Times Exit
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“It’s Chaos”: Behind the Scenes of Donald McNeil’s New York Times Exit

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The turbulent exit of reporter Donald McNeil Jr., a 45-year New York Times veteran owning the biggest story in the world, has unraveled the Times newsroom and set social media ablaze, with private discussions taking place among employees of color on Slack, alumni jumping into the fray on Facebook, and polarizing takes flowing freely on Twitter. Though the broad outlines of McNeil’s ignominious departure are known, along with about McNeil’s conduct on a trip with high schoolers, I’ve been able to piece together a clearer picture of the Times’ handling of the whole messy affair, based on conversations with multiple people who have knowledge of how it all went down. That includes&nbsp;the Times’ 2019 investigation into McNeil’s behavior, candid discussions between Times reporters and masthead editors, and last week’s war room meetings among Times management concerning this latest installment in a string of mega controversies at the paper of record.Let’s start from the beginning. McNeil participated in a Times-organized “Student Journey” to Peru in the summer of 2019. After the trip the Times became aware of complaints from a number of the students and their parents. These complaints ranged from concerns about how McNeil discussed race and other sensitive cultural issues, to behavior during ceremonies the group was invited to attend with indigenous shamans, to a generally dismissive and prickly manner. But the most serious complaint of all was that McNeil had at one point used that most heinous of racial slurs for Black people.After catching wind of these complaints, the Times commenced an investigation conducted by Charlotte Behrendt. She’s an associate managing editor and lawyer who is a sort of quasi H.R. figure inside the newsroom, responsible for digging into messy personnel debacles like, say, the against political reporter Glenn Thrush in 2017. Behrendt, who was once described to me as “the Robert Mueller of the Times,” presented her findings to newsroom leadership. McNeil was informed by his manager that the brass needed to speak with him. Dean Baquet, who is the Times’ first Black executive editor, was furious about the incident—not just McNeil’s casual use of the N-word (which he’d apparently let slip in the context of referring to someone else using it), but the entire scope of the complaints. McNeil’s overall comportment around a bunch of teenagers was inappropriate and unprofessional, Baquet believed. Nevertheless, Baquet concluded that McNeil deserved a second chance, same as Baquet had given to other Times journalists who had become engulfed in major controversies. McNeil was reprimanded verbally. Additionally, a “harsh letter,” as one person familiar with the punishment put it, was added to his personnel file, essentially a red mark on McNeil’s permanent record—and not the first, sources said.Fast-forward to early 2020. A novel virus had been identified in China, and the world was on the verge of an earth-shattering pandemic. McNeil, a grizzled reporter “specializing in plagues and pestilences,” including “AIDS, Ebola, malaria, swine and bird flus, and Zika,” in the words of his Times bio, was among the first journalists to recognize the severity of the gathering storm. He soon became one of the most essential and high-profile reporters on the coronavirus beat, with a deep knowledge of epidemics and a Rolodex that gave him access to the nation’s top public health experts, like Dr. Anthony Fauci. McNeil was covering the story of a lifetime, and his semi-regular appearances on über-podcast The Daily made him journalist-famous. From a professional standpoint it seemed as if things couldn’t be any better.&nbsp;That all changed on January 28, when the Daily Beast about McNeil’s 2019 Peru trip. Reporters for the Beast had spoken to “multiple parents of students on the trip.” They published some of the students’ complaints verbatim. (“I would change the journalist. He was a racist.”) They even got their hands on emails between members of the Times’ corporate communications department. (“This is outrageous, in my view,” one had remarked.) The article included a statement from a Times spokesperson saying the company had “conducted a thorough investigation and disciplined Donald,” without specifying the discipline. “We found he had used bad judgment,” the statement continued, “by repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language.” The story also quoted an email Baquet had just sent to the newsroom, saying he was “outraged” about McNeil’s conduct and initially expected to fire him, but that “it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.” Crucially, the article did not include a statement from McNeil.&nbsp;The Times was already under fire on two fronts. One was the Lauren Wolfe, some of whose tweets—most notably, one in which she professed to having “chills” watching&nbsp;Joe Biden’s plane land—the Times determined had crossed into political territory, a ruling that was criticized by many in the journalism community as unfair and heavy-handed. The other was the ongoing fallout from the Times’ now infamous Caliphate podcast. Crucial elements of Caliphate had fallen apart under scrutiny, and the podcast’s primary producer, Andy Mills, was now in the spotlight for allegations of past inappropriate interactions with female colleagues. A separate review of Mills had been unfolding in the background. It was prompted by new complaints about his behavior that began to pour forth after he guest-hosted The Daily in December, less than a week after the Times acknowledged its failures with Caliphate and reassigned the podcast’s star reporter, Rukmini Callimachi. (Times managers have privately acknowledged that allowing Mills to guest-host The Daily was a “severe error in judgment,” as one put it.)Most PopularThe McNeil situation not only exacerbated these imbroglios, but quickly snowballed into a major scandal in its own right. As soon as the Daily Beast story landed, Times managers snapped into crisis mode. Over the next week there was a series of video meetings attended by the Times’ most senior editors on the masthead. A.G. Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher, participated in some of these as well. There was also a strong and protracted effort to get a public apology from McNeil, starting with when the Times’ communications team was putting together its response to the Daily Beast. McNeil was resistant, according to my sources who know how all of this played out. He did, however, give a to a reporter from The Washington Post: “Don’t believe everything you read.”&nbsp;That comment did not go over well with newsroom management, whose reactions ranged from “annoyed” to “furious.” It also inflamed tensions within the rank and file, as did McNeil’s apparent lack of contrition. With past controversies involving cultural and workplace issues, employees had descended on a “#newsroom-feedback” channel within the Times’ account on Slack, the messaging platform. But that channel was recently suspended, and several dozen Times employees of color created their own Slack channel outside of the company account. That’s where some of the very candid discussions about the McNeil incident have been playing out, although there’s been intense discussion and debate throughout the organization, which also spilled out into alumni group on Facebook on Twitter. “The non-apology has become this crazy sticking point,” a Times reporter told me late last week as the situation was nearing a fever pitch. “The McNeil thing is the most explosive scandal I’ve seen at the paper. It’s chaos.”On Wednesday, February 3, Sulzberger received a , demanding further investigation into the Peru trip and an apology from McNeil. (The letter did not call for McNeil to be ousted from the Times.) That night the entire staff received an email from Sulzberger, Baquet, and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. “We welcome this input. We appreciate the spirit in which it was offered and we largely agree with the message,” the email read in part. “In often raw and searching conversations over the last several days with hundreds of people on our staff, including many of the signers of the letter, we have made clear that we are determined to learn the right lessons from this incident and take concrete actions to improve our workplace culture, ensure the integrity of our journalism, and examine the way we manage behavioral problems among members of the staff.”&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;After the letter to Sulzberger became public, several members of the masthead placed calls to a handful of Black Times journalists who had signed the letter. At least one of these journalists expressed concern to Baquet about this outreach. The journalist told Baquet that while the calls might have been well intentioned, they’d actually had the opposite effect, and were interpreted as undermining the spirit of the all-staff note. Baquet replied that his impression of the calls was that his masthead colleagues were simply trying to support him, and that they did not mean to intimidate or exert pressure on anyone. Nonetheless, he said he would ask them not to make any further calls.Most PopularBy Thursday it was clear to members of the masthead that things had moved in a direction in which McNeil was not long for the Times. In addition to the lack of a public apology and his ill-advised comment to the Post, managers were now assessing other complaints about McNeil that had emerged since the Daily Beast story broke. It was made clear to me that these complaints did not involve things like harassment or cultural insensitivity. Rather, they were complaints that simply reflected poorly on McNeil as a colleague, or that cast him as someone who was difficult to work with or who hadn’t always treated coworkers with respect. The combined effect of these new complaints and McNeil’s overall handling of the situation led to a consensus that it was not tenable for him to remain at the Times. McNeil was an active member of the NewsGuild, a union that represents some 1,200 Times employees, and the guild while he negotiated the terms of a separation. He was not fired. (When I reached McNeil on Wednesday morning, he referred me to his lawyer, who didn’t return an email.)&nbsp;At 4:30 on the afternoon of Friday, February 5, Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn sent out a memo informing staff that McNeil would be leaving the company. “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” they wrote in a hastily composed email. “We are committed to building a news report and company that reflect our core values of integrity and respect, and will work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.” An hour earlier the audio team at the Times had been similarly notified that Mills would be leaving the company. The timing of the two announcements, late on a Friday afternoon, was purely a coincidence, sources told me. Management even considered holding off on one of the announcements until after the weekend, but they ultimately decided it was best to bring both matters to a resolution as quickly as possible. (Mills published an on his personal website, stating, “The allegations on Twitter quickly escalated to the point where my actual shortcomings and past mistakes were replaced with gross exaggerations and baseless claims.”)When Baquet and Kahn sent out their email to employees, they also passed along a statement from McNeil. It was the apology many staffers had been waiting for. “On a 2019 New York Times trip to Peru for high school students, I was asked at dinner by a student 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 a racial slur,” McNeil wrote. “To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself. I should not have done that. Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended. I now realize that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful. The fact that I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgement. For that I apologize. To the students on the trip, I also extend my sincerest apology. But my apology needs to be broader than that. My lapse of judgment has hurt my colleagues…So for offending my colleagues — and for anything I’ve done to hurt The Times, which is an institution I love and whose mission I believe in and try to serve — I am sorry. I let you all down.”Most PopularMcNeil is not without sympathy or support, both inside the Times and out. Some people feel that he was the latest victim of cancel culture run amok, forced out of his job by a public pressure campaign. Others feel that he shouldn’t have been allowed to remain at the Times after those complaints surfaced in 2019. Several higher-ups have privately suggested that if McNeil had fallen on his sword and immediately issued a profuse public apology like the one he eventually came around to, there’s a chance the outcome may have been different.Baquet, meanwhile, has been on a mission to heal the newsroom. In recent days he’s been talking with Times journalists both one-on-one and in small groups. Two separate themes have emerged in these discussions. One is an anxiety among some journalists at the Times, both white journalists and journalists of color, that decisions are being influenced by an activist contingent among the staff. The other is deep pain about the much larger issues that people of color currently face in today’s society, and the degree to which the McNeil episode amplified that pain, as did last year’s explosive over an op-ed in which Senator Tom Cotton called for the deployment of troops in quelling Black Lives Matter protests. It doesn’t help that members of the newsroom have been physically separated for the past year, unable to come together and work toward solving these problems in person.&nbsp;As for what comes next, Sulzberger is scheduled to deliver his annual “State of the Times” address on Thursday. He will presumably discuss the events of the past week. Beyond that, some veteran Times journalists gave me a very blunt take about what this latest agita means for the 170-year-old institution. “Newsrooms have long tolerated assholes because it’s a part of the culture,” one such source told me. “That tolerance for assholes is all but gone. You can frame this as the end of the asshole era at The New York Times.”More Great Stories From Vanity Fair&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;— Embedding With Pentagon Leadership in Trump’s — Donald From Women—And Then From America Itself— How Trump’s COVID Chaos Drowned the FDA in — Inside of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump— After Wrecking the Country, Vacation Plans— Can Trump’s Be Deprogrammed?&nbsp;— Trump Makes an Exit With His — From the Archive: How Donald Trump Against Him— Not a subscriber? to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now. is Vanity Fair’s senior media correspondent and the author of **. He previously worked at publications including Politico and the New York Observer. Follow him on and .The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.

The turbulent exit of reporter Donald McNeil Jr., a 45-year New York Times veteran owning the biggest story in the world, has unraveled the Times newsroom and set social media ablaze, with private discussions taking place among employees of color on Slack, alumni jumping into the fray on Facebook, and polarizing takes flowing freely on Twitter. Though the broad outlines of McNeil’s ignominious departure are known, along with about McNeil’s conduct on a trip with high schoolers, I’ve been able to piece together a clearer picture of the Times’ handling of the whole messy affair, based on...

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Joe Pompeo

Vanity Fair is a monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.  The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936. The imprint was revived in 1983 and currently includes five international editions of the magazine. As of 2018, the Editor-in-Chief is Radhika Jones.

“It’s Chaos”: Behind the Scenes of Donald McNeil’s New York Times Exit

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