The New York Times is being torn asunder by a civil war between the newspaper’s older, liberal veterans and its younger, woke staff over its coverage of the trans issue. The Daily Mail’s Tom Leonard has more.
The imposing headquarters of the New York Times was built of glass, supposedly to highlight the fact that the august newspaper has nothing to hide.
But last month, something happened there that the management would have very much preferred to go unnoticed.
An electronic billboard lorry parked outside the building bearing the message: “Dear New York Times: Stop questioning trans people’s right to exist & access medical care.”
The stunt was part of a campaign against America’s biggest newspaper to force it to stop criticising the transgender movement and specifically the controversial medical treatments offered to some children wanting to change gender.
What makes it so embarrassing for the 172-year-old newspaper — the bible of the city’s liberal elite and nicknamed the Grey Lady for its dour, sober-minded reputation — is that huge numbers of its own staff and contributors actually support the campaign being waged against it.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the trans debate appears to be tearing the paper apart as senior, more experienced staff insist on reporting the growing concerns among scientists, doctors and parents about the effects of transgender treatment, especially on children — while younger, woke employees are furious at what they see as an attack on the trans movement they wholeheartedly support.
The trouble, simmering for some time, burst into the open a few days ago when more than 180 contributors to The New York Times signed a letter to the paper’s ‘managing editor for standards’, accusing it of fomenting ‘bigotry and pseudoscience’.
The newspaper was following the lead of ‘far-Right hate groups’, they added, in what they claimed was excessive and biased coverage of transgender issues.
Signatories to the letter — which controversially named and shamed specific journalists — included famous names such as Sex And The City actress Cynthia Nixon, writer and actress Lena Dunham, and the U.S. intelligence whistleblower Chelsea Manning, herself [sic] a trans woman, who was jailed after leaking hundreds of thousands of secret files about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This virtuous army of self-described ‘thinkers’ accused the newspaper of publishing “irresponsible misinformation about trans people”.
Read More: Civil War at the New York Times
