People Are Cancelling the New York Times Again for Reporting on the Whistleblower's Identity

[Miloch]

https://splinternews.com/people-are-cancelling-the-new-york-times-again-for-repo-1838525164

Yesterday, amid a long day of day of congressional testimony and presidential
lunacy, the New York Times published a story about the identity of the
whistleblower who first exposed President Donald Trump’s extremely suspect
conversations with the Ukrainian president. While the paper didn’t reveal the
person’s name, it reported that the whistleblower works with the CIA and was
detailed to work at the White House.

Almost immediately, the paper of record faced yet another outrage cycle, with
readers pledging to cancel their subscriptions to the paper as critics charged
the Times story seriously jeopardized the whistleblower’s anonymity, potentially
exposing them to retribution by the Trump administration.

The public blowback started, as it often does, online, with #CancelNYT trending
on Twitter. The Times has faced these waves of threatened mass cancellations
before, notably when its opinion desk hired climate change denier and overall
bigot Bret Stephens. While it’s certainly bad PR, it doesn’t appear to pose a
significant threat to the Times’ business, which is much healthier than many
other local and national news sources. Reached for comment by Splinter, Times
spokeswoman Eileen Murphy minimized the story’s impact on subscription numbers,
saying:

"The Times has 4.7 million total subscriptions and on any given day, we see
stops and starts. We did see an uptick in stops yesterday, but nothing that is
statistically significant.


The discourse this time around felt particularly aggrieved, though, as the
paper’s decision to publish could have immediate consequences for the most
significant push for impeachment the Trump administration has faced yet.

The Times’ story reported the whistleblower was a male CIA officer detailed to
the White House, and contained just enough identifying details to make many
members of the intelligence community and public fear the Trump administration
would be able to narrow its search and expose the whistleblower’s identity. (The
Times also reported the White House knew a CIA officer raised concerns even
before he filed the complaint.) But given President Trump’s openly violent
rhetoric toward the whistleblower already, the story raised eyebrows.

In a statement about the paper’s decision to publish, executive editor Dean
Baquet said given the president’s attacks on the whistleblower’s credibility,
“we wanted to provide information to readers that allows them to make their own
judgments about whether or not he is credible.”

The New York Times
✔ @nytimes
· 22h

Replying to @nytimes

Dean Baquet, our executive editor, explains why we chose to publish the
information about the whistle-blower http://nyti.ms/2loU4p0

The New York Times
✔ @nytimes

Here's more from Dean Baquet, our executive editor, on why we published limited
information about the whistle-blower whose claims led Democrats to begin an
impeachment inquiry against President Trump https://nyti.ms/2nvLhCj

It’s true that the whistleblower’s credibility has been immediately and
viciously attacked by the Trump administration, despite the careful level of
detail and precision of his original complaint. But as many angry commenters
noted, the Times could have made that case without providing as many identifying
details, something they would surely refrain from doing for one of their own
numerous anonymous sources.

The decision was always going to be fraught—and you know what might have helped?
A public editor, which the Times no longer has. The whistleblower story is just
the latest in a series of highly questionable editorial decisions the paper has
made in recent weeks, which have been met with a thoroughly insufficient
response from Baquet and the powers that be at the Times. It’s not a given that
a designated public editor would do any better at illuminating the paper’s
decision-making process, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have someone who’s
internal but still independent direct the conversation about the ethics around
an issue like this. For the time being, however, it seems clear that the Baquet
administration considers the story unimpeachable.




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