[UPDATE: NY TIMES ISSUES STATEMENT] – Check out these insane tweets by a new editorial member just hired by the NY Times!

by The Right Scoop

The New York Times just hired Sarah Jeong to their editorial board, but there are serious questions about her. We’ll get to that in a moment.

First, here’s what the NY Times says about her:

Sarah Jeong is joining The New York Times editorial board. Read more in this note from James Bennet, Katie Kingsbury and Jim Dao:

What would it be like if we all deleted Facebook? What does the future of online privacy look like?Why can’t the tech industry diversify? Are monkeys allowed to sue over copyrights? And what in the world is #cockygate?

To answer questions like these, the editorial board will soon be turning to Sarah Jeong, who will join us in September as our lead writer on technology. Sarah will also collaborate with Susan Fowler Rigetti, our incoming tech op-ed editor, and Kara Swisher, our latest contributor on tech issues.

Sarah has guided readers through the digital world with verve and erudition, staying ahead of every turn on the vast beat that is the internet.

She arrives most recently from the Verge, where she’s a senior writer. She also authored the book, “The Internet of Garbage,” which examines the many forms of online harassment, free speech, and the challenges of moderating platforms and social media networks.

Born in South Korea, Sarah grew up in North Carolina and California. She’s both a journalist and a lawyer. As a student at Harvard Law School, she edited the Journal of Law & Gender and worked at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. She was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale for 2016 and was named to Forbes 30 under 30 for Media in 2017. She’s written for The Atlantic, Vice’s Motherboard, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Magazine.

Sarah lives in Portland, Ore., and will be writing for us from there. She’ll pay us a visit in the early fall, and we hope you’ll all join us in welcoming her then.

She sounds smart and savvy, like a good hire by the NY Times.

But a quick tour down her twitter memory lane from just a few years ago reveals that she has a deep antipathy towards white people, something one might even say is a bit racist!

Yikes.

I would note these tweets span a couple of years, from 2013 to 2015, just three years ago. Did the NY Times even bother to go through her twitter history before making this hire? And if they did, were they ok with it?

I know that in some circles, a person of color can’t be racist. This is a ridiculous notion to anyone with common sense, but maybe this is what the NY Times believes?

David French might think so, as he suggests she’s a good fit at the NY Times:

1. I think these tweets are actually consistent with the ethos of many employees at the Times.

2. LOL at the outrage over hiring thoughtful conservatives.

3. The Times is free to hire who it wants, and we’re free to note that outright racism is welcome within its walls.

Exactly. It’s outrageous to hire a thoughtful conservative, but this is a-okay?

Something is definitely wrong with this picture. And as French points out, while the NY Times is free to hire who they chose, we are free to expose them for their blatant racism. And that’s what we’re doing.

UPDATE:

The Federalist points out an interesting contradiction:

The announcement of Jeong’s hiring comes after The New York Times fired its previous brand new hire for the same technology writer position last February because she “retweeted a racial slur.”

The Times never explained what the racial slur was, but considering that, how in the world did Joeng ever make it to the hiring stage?

UPDATE 2:

The NY Times has just issued a statement regarding the criticism of their hiring of Sarah Jeong:

Dana Loesch, for one, isn’t buying this at all:

I’d have to agree with her. This sound pretty lame to me too. The other hire was fired in Feb for a mere ‘retweet’ of a racial slur. This girl has multiple very offensive tweets of her own and she gets to stay?

Uh huh.


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