Woke New York Times Newsroom Throws Tantrum Over Paper’s Alleged ‘Anti⁠-⁠Trans’ Bias (Update: Times Exec. Editor Responds)

Woke New York Times Newsroom Throws Tantrum Over Paper’s Alleged ‘Anti⁠-⁠Trans’ Bias (Update: Times Exec. Editor Responds)

For the most part, the New York Times is like many other major national news outlets when it comes to wearing their wokeness on their sleeves like a badge of honor. Racially-charged matters, abortion-themed pieces, and issues related to the LGBTQ community are typically presented in a sympathetic light and most often from the left’s perspective because the Times, of course, is admittedly a liberally biased newspaper with predictable left-wing narratives to push.

But every once in a blue moon, the Times strays from woke orthodoxy on these and other hot-button topics, whether it be on its opinion/editorial pages or in its “straight news” reporting. Over the last year or so, that has definitely been the case with their surprisingly wide-ranging coverage of the debate over so-called “transgender rights,” including whether or not the push to allow men who identify as women to compete in women’s sports is fair, and if it’s medically and morally appropriate to allow children to undergo the gender transition process, which sometimes includes surgery.

In fact, their coverage has been so balanced that it has caused an uproar among LGBTQ groups, including GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), which recently launched a campaign to shame the paper for having the nerve to occasionally present both sides of the gender identity politics debate or, as GLAAD characterizes it, their “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people” which supposedly spreads “inaccurate and harmful misinformation”:

We’ve had enough. We’ve joined over 100 organizations and leaders to demand that @nytimes stop printing inaccurate and harmful misinformation about transgender people and issues. Today we are outside of the Times building to send a clear message. https://t.co/IkQocpsG5q pic.twitter.com/bBVnFoqOjD

— GLAAD (@glaad) February 15, 2023

According to GLAAD drama queen extraordinaire president Sarah Kate Ellis, their key demand is for the NYT to “stop printing anti-trans stories, meet with trans leaders, and hire trans journalists.”

Naturally, some of the writers and contributors in the Times newsroom have jumped on board the GLAAD campaign, penning a temper tantrum of a letter to Philip B. Corbett, the “associate managing editor for standards,” and strongly urging him to reverse course from allegedly “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation”:

We write to you as a collective of New York Times contributors with serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people.

Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly. Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.

The newspaper’s editorial guidelines demand that reporters “preserve a professional detachment, free of any whiff of bias” when cultivating their sources, remaining “sensitive that personal relationships with news sources can erode into favoritism, in fact or appearance.” Yet the Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.

[…]

As thinkers, we are disappointed to see the New York Times follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation.

Not surprisingly, the Times contributors demanding the paper quash any stories that deviate from The Narrative also follows former Media Matters editor Parker Molloy, who is transgender, attacking the New York Times just last month over hiring who Molloy called an “anti-trans columnist” – David French:

3. My point in this piece is that NYT’s columnist roster is absolutely loaded with anti-trans voices with absolutely zero balance. For all the focus the paper keeps putting on “the trans debate,” it doesn’t seem particularly interested in actually involving trans people in said “debate” outside of the stray “Look! Here’s a trans person writing a ‘guest essay’ for us!” token piece they like to throw out there a couple of times a year. Meanwhile, their columnists will fire out half-informed pieces criticizing trans people and unnamed “trans activists” on the regular. (See: Pamela Paul’s tendency to hyperfocus on trans people, often going to extreme lengths trying — and often failing — to make a coherent point).

4. My point here is that I want NYT to hire multiple trans people to be full-time columnists for the paper. And that doesn’t mean they should be hired to write exclusively about trans issues. As much as editors at big papers like to pigeonhole trans writers as somehow only qualified to offer opinions on trans topics (when we’re given space to offer opinions at all), trans people deserve a true seat at the table if there’s going to be a continuing push to discuss “the trans debate.”

Since Molloy has recently stated that she “doesn’t have a real job,” presumably, she wants to be one of those hired by the Times.

If any of these tactics coming from “trans rights” activists and their allies on the left and in the press sound familiar, it’s because they are. We’ve all become familiar over the last several years with being labeled “transphobes” and “bigots” over merely questioning the wisdom of allowing a man who identifies as a woman to be in a women’s dressing room or shower, for expressing shock over the routine green-lighting of gender-transitioning surgical procedures for children by woke medical professionals, and over opposition to the same people being allowed to compete in women’s sports when it’s an undeniable fact transgender women (who were born men) have inherent advantages when they compete in women’s sports that in most cases cannot be overcome even with hormone-suppressing therapy.

It’s always the same old song and dance with the activist left – even against their own “side,” either conform or be shamed and canceled. Unfortunately for them, their targets aren’t easily intimidated. However, the editorial team at the New York Times might be an exception to the rule judging by past actions and statements.

Time will tell. Stay tuned.

Update – 6:45pm ET: New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn has responded accordingly:

Memo from Joe Kahn to NYT staff responding to yesterday's letter re: trans coverage.

Times leadership says the paper "will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums." pic.twitter.com/bjLruJVPnf

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) February 16, 2023

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

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