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 revelations 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 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 allegations of sexual misconduct 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.
That all changed on January 28, when the Daily Beast published a damning article 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.
The Times was already under fire on two fronts. One was the recent termination of freelance editor Lauren Wolfe, some of whose tweets—most notably, one in which she professed to having “chills” watching 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.)
The 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 terse statement to a reporter from The Washington Post: “Don’t believe everything you read.”