Thread by @NancyRomm

This is adapted from last week's Substack; go ahead and subscribe, nancyrommelmann.substack.com.

Some of us have been writing and podcasting for a week about Donald McNeil, who left the New York Times today, after 45 years and a week of outrage from some of his colleagues, for using the n-word in context during a student trip to Peru in 2019.

I suggested the context might have been quoting from a book or song.

Bingo: McNeil told us as much in his resignation letter, though apparently he was also about to be fired.

Employees seem heartened; Hannah Nikole-Jones was apparently, like some sort of hall monitor, about to start phoning the parents of kids on the trip.

Also apparently proud of themselves: the writers at the Daily Beast who "broke" this important story, who were commended on Twitter for their “phenomenal reporting.”

It’s not phenomenal reporting; it is superficial reporting and relies on outraged retweets to amplify the story so that it becomes a story, whose impact depends on how well you respond to outrage-fueled stories.

It’s like an old movie pitches, “If you liked our takedown of Bari Weiss, you’ll love what we’re doing with Don McNeil!”

The guns have also been out for Andy Mills, the whiz-kid producer of the Times' The Daily podcast and "Caliphate," who today also resigned, after a somewhat longer campaign to get him fired. And while it does not shake out that way today, good work stands, always always.

Here I think is where the Daily Beast writers destroyed what little credibility they might have had: into their pot of complaints about McNeil they tossed “Caliphate,” which they stated “has now been debunked.”

Well, no. Nothing in “Caliphate” has been debunked because nothing needed to be debunked. Go ahead and Google “Caliphate” and “controversy” and you will read the outrage-artists amplifying the takedown. Then go listen to the series.

Hear how it was always the case that the correspondents considered their main subject less than reliable, that he was perhaps a fabulist. Listen to the extraordinary work they do interviewing kidnapped and raped girls; how they give these girls voice and some measure of justice.

Listen to the caginess of Canadian authorities refusing to answer Rukmini Callimachi’s questions about the possible fabulist, the same authorities who now have put that fabulist in an impossible legal bind, for which Callimachi’s and Mills’ colleagues decided, they must pay.

Listen to The Fifth Column podcast episode 216 (starting at 01.12.00) discuss the important and groundbreaking work of “Caliphate” and why media people might want to bring its creators down.

I asked the Fifth's Matt Welch, "Can you imagine being unhappy at your colleagues success, people who'd won a Peabody award ("Caliphate"; rescinded during the controversy), people possibly being put up for a Pulitzer (which until last week, McNeil was)?" It's impossible.

The circumstances that led to today's resignations/firings have a lot of people wondering why we still place any faith in the paper of record, which, for the record, I think no longer deserves the title. Let's build new things, shall we?

Correction: Nikole Hannah-Jones