The New York Times ended an internal probe into whether staffers leaked information about its controversial Gaza coverage — without reaching a conclusion.
“We did not reach a definitive conclusion about how this significant breach occurred,” NY Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn told staff Monday over Slack, per The Wall Street Journal.
The probe had only been underway for less than two months — prompted by a January report by left-leaning news site the Intercept that NY Times staffers were debating about whether to post a yet-to-be aired “Daily” podcast.
Ultimately, the episode was spiked due to disagreements over a story that alleged Hamas gunmen systematically raped Israelis during their murderous Oct. 7 rampage, according to the Intercept.
Charlotte Behrendt, NY Times’ director of policy and internal investigations, swiftly began overseeing an effort by management to discover how deliberations involving its “Daily” podcast leaked out, according to Vanity Fair.
Behrendt’s probe — which involved interviewing close to 20 people over the course of weeks — was described by staffers as a “witch hunt,” and became so contentious at times that the union filed a grievance alleging that the company was targeting a group of staffers of Arab and Middle Eastern descent.
NY Times leaders have said the allegations are false, according to The Journal.
“We did identify gaps in the way proprietary journalistic material is handled, and we have taken steps to address these issues,” Kahn added in his Slack message, according to The Journal.
Representatives for The Times did not immediately respond to noti.group’s request for comment.
In a recent interview with The Journal, Kahn, a longtime editor at the NY Times, said that he welcomed internal debate and discussion about the newsroom’s coverage.
However, the alleged leak crossed the line and reflected a “breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process.”
Times staffers were reportedly divided over a Dec. 28 dispatch by Israel-based freelancers who conducted an investigation for the Gray Lady on claims that Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women.
The accuracy of the story was called into question after discrepancies emerged and one of the people quoted as having witnessed rape offered contradictory statements.
One of the families interviewed by NY Times staffers later denounced the newspaper and accused the reporters of manipulating them into claiming that one of the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre, Gal Abdush, was raped when there was no evidence to support the claim.
The Intercept reported that a January episode of the “Daily” was put on ice because the producers and editors faced a dilemma — “run a version that hews closely to the previously published story and risk republishing serious mistakes, or publish a heavily toned-down version, raising questions about whether the paper still stands by the original report.”
A Times spokesperson told the Intercept that “there is only one ‘version’ of any piece of audio journalism: the one that publishes.”
Hamas gunmen slaughtered around 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers in a cross-border raid at dawn on that fateful October day — though Hamas has rejected allegations that its gunmen committed sexual assault.
Earlier in the conflict, NY Times came under fire for working with a Palestinian freelancer to cover the Israel-Palestine war who praised Adolf Hitler in multiple resurfaced Facebook posts.
Filmmaker Soliman Hijjy hailed the Nazi leader as recently as 2018 in a post on Facebook, when he shared a photo of himself captioned that he was “in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust,” per a translation from Arabic by pro-Israel media watchdog site HonestReporting.
That same year, Hijjy was hired by the NY Times as a freelance journalist and worked on a slew of “visual investigations” published by the organization through 2021, including one on an Israeli airstrike that killed 44 people.
Hijjy’s 2018 post — including a 2012 Facebook post where he wrote, “How great you are, Hitler” in Arabic alongside a photoshopped image of Hitler seemingly taking a selfie — were unearthed last year, when pro-Israel outlets called out the Times for hiring antisemitic journalists as freelancers.
At the time, Hijjy didn’t appear to be working for the NY Times anymore, and had since taken down his controversial pro-Hitler posts.
However, the Times rehired the antisemitic freelancer in late October following Hamas’ ambush attack.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
