Reporters at The New York Times have been circulating a draft of an open letter to executive editor Joe Kahn in response to his comments scolding young journalists for being “less accustomed” to “open debate” and a “robust exchange of views” while seeing the newsroom as a “safe space.”
The draft letter hits back at Kahn, accusing him of an “unwillingness to tolerate dissent,” according to the news site Semafor.
“Instead of engaging in robust exchange, we are increasingly discouraged from speaking up at all,” staff wrote in the draft letter.
“We are told that it is only appropriate to express concerns or even earnest questions in one-on-one conversations with people who outrank us.”
Staffers wrote in the letter that the Times did not offer them opportunities to exchange views and that more diverse perspectives were “needed to protect not just the independence but also the empathy of our journalism.”
Kahn was accused in the letter of making “broad generalizations that reflect a poor understanding of the people who make up your newsroom.”
“Your staff is not full of activists trying to impose their views on the report,” staffers wrote in the letter obtained by Semafor.
“Rather than tribalism or ideology, those who voice concerns do so in the interest of accuracy and fairness — to make The New York Times into the best version of itself.”
When reached by The Post, a Times spokesperson said: “We’re not going to comment on a draft letter that hasn’t been sent.”
The spokesperson referred The Post to comments that Kahn made in interviews with Semafor and The Wall Street Journal.
“Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about may have been the case in the past,” Kahn told the Journal last month.
The Journal detailed a sweeping Times internal investigation in which around 20 employees were summoned for interviews seeking information about leaks to a rival media outlet detailing newsroom strife over the paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Times staffers have reportedly been divided over one particular report about alleged widespread rape by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.
The strength of the reporting has been called into question — reportedly resulting in the Times canceling a planned episode of its popular “Daily” podcast which was set to be devoted to the story detailing alleged rape.
The Times recently closed the investigation, saying that it could not make a definitive conclusion about the source of the leaks.
Kahn was angered by the leaks to The Intercept. He told The Journal: “The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process.”
“I haven’t seen that happen before,” he said.
Earlier this month, Kahn was quoted as telling Semafor that “the newsroom is not a safe space.”
He said that college graduates today have not bee “fully prepared for what we are asking our people to do, which is to commit themselves to the idea of independent journalism.”
“I don’t think we can assume that they’ve been trained for that, if they’ve been trained for safe spaces,” Kahn added.
“The newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.”
In recent years, the Times has been the subject of controversy over its left-leaning newsroom bias.
In 2020, Bari Weiss, who worked on the paper’s editorial page, resigned in protest over what she called “bullying by colleagues” who created an “illiberal environment” with those who hold divergent viewpoints.
Kahn recently hit back at Weiss, saying that “she’s got a single note and keeps playing it up.”
That same year, James Bennet, who was the top opinion editor, was forced to resign after a staff outcry over a guest op-ed written by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) calling for a military response to the rioting that erupted in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
