The New York Times Must Explain Why Its Racial Double Standard Is Good For Society

The New York Times announced this week that it had hired Sarah Jeong as a new member of its editorial board. As is the unfortunate custom in the modern media age, this hiring led to a dissection of Jeong’s Twitter history in the hopes of finding something offensive. It did not take long for offensive things to be discovered. But in this case the offensive content came with a twist unique to the age of privilege. What the tweets described — and there were many — was how horrible white people are.

Among her many discriminatory tweets about white people, one showed a graph equating being white with being awful. The others were no better. The Times recently fired the writer Quinn Norton within hours of hiring her because of alleged racism, but has decided to stand by Jeong.

They released a statement about the controversy that included the following: “Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She sees now that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, and the Times does not condone it.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/03/the-new-york-times-must-explain-why-its-racial-double-standard-is-good-for-society/