The New York Times Sarah Jeong Hiring Controversy

Submission 41,788

Overview

The New York Times Sarah Jeong Hiring Controversy refers to an online backlash directed at The New York Times for hiring journalist Sarah Jeong to the publication's editorial board in late July 2018. Jeong was accused of posting tweets viewed as derogatory toward white people, which were published on her Twitter account in 2014.

Background

On August 1st, 2018, The New York Times^[2] announced that journalist Sarah Jeong would be joining their editorial board as the "lead writer on technology." Shortly after the announcement was made, a collection of tweets posted by Jeong in which she makes several remarks about "white men" and "white people" began circulating online (shown below).

Developments

Online Reaction

That evening, screenshots of the tweets were reposted by Twitter user @GarbageHuman_^[6] and on the /r/The_Donald^[5]^[8] subreddit.

On August 2nd, Edward Snowden tweeted^[7] an article written by Jeong along with the message that her articles were "insightful" and "often important" (shown below, left). Additionally, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel tweeted a defense of Jeong, adding "digging for old, out-of-context tweets in bad faith to drum up outrage is bad for the news and society at large (shown below, right).^[10]

Meanwhile, others accused The New York Times of hypocrisy for refusing to terminate Jeong after firing journalist Quinn Norton over tweets revealing she had a relationship with Andrew Auernheimer (shown below).

Sarah Jeong's Response

On August 2nd, 2018, Jeong tweeted that she had "a statement about the tweets that have been going around," followed by a screenshot of two tweets referring to her as a "dog eating gook" and threatening to "sock" her in her "lesbian face." The screenshots were accompanied by an message claiming she had previous engaged in "counter-trolling" and that her tweets were "intended as satire" (shown below).^[9]

The New York Times' Response

The same day, the @NYTimesPR^[3] Twitter feed posted a statement regarding the controversy, claiming Jeong had been the target of harassment campaigns and was "imitating the rhetoric of her harassers." The statement revealed the publisher had spoken with Jeong about her social media history and that Jeong "understands this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times" and that she "will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward" (shown below). Within three hours, the tweeted gained over 1,800 likes and 500 retweets.

That day, the news site The Verge published an article titled "A note from the editorial leadership of The Verge," which compared the tactics used against Jeong to Gamergate.