The New York Times is a mess.

We are all familiar with the sometimes bizarre spin the paper takes on various news stories. Ashley Rindsberg wrote an excellent book called “The Gray Lady Winked” describing the moral corruption at the heart of the organization over the years, including a long and glorious history of the lies the paper told to justify Stalin’s excesses, Fidel’s evil regime, and Palestinian terrorism.

No publisher wanted to touch it because the Times is so vital to the success of a publisher, but it is well worth a read despite lacking the benefit of an editor to polish it. I highly recommend it.

But in recent years the Times has suffered a different malady: the utter collapse of its internal stability. One of the reasons the Times has been so dominant in modern Western societies is that it has a consistent “voice” and some truly excellent talent. They may veer into propaganda, but the quality of their propaganda and occasionally of their reporting is undeniable. Even when they are inventing things out of thin air their product tends to be good, and occasionally their reporting when less biased is superb.

This latter quality is being destroyed from within, and their news product (which is separate from their many other cultural products which prop up the financial viability of their news) is likely to suffer.

Most people are aware of the editorial scandals that led to Bari Weiss’ departure, but the coverage of their internal squabbles is spotty. Unless you are plugged into the media world you may not be aware of the scandal regarding the newsroom revolts that seem to be a regular occurrence whenever the paper deviates an iota from the woke line.

Well yet another revolt is brewing, and again it has escaped into the wild as the whiney white woke women are running to other news organizations to complain about the Times’ oppressive, nay fascist policies.

In recent days not one but two controversies, both of course over complaints regarding the alphabet people’s oppression, have broken out into the open. I will rely on the Daily Beast’s coverage of both.

EXCLUSIVE: A New York Times executive stepped in it last week when she seemed to encourage a Slack room full of LGBTQ staffers not to raise workplace concerns in the channel dedicated to… raising employee concerns.

The latest from Confider: https://t.co/TOCaViuOUW

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) April 10, 2023

The first has to do with the Times’ making alphabet people feel “unsafe” due to the rather benign observation made by a Times HR staffer inviting them to use the Human Resources department to make complaints about perceived discrimination.

It turns out that the LGBTQIALKDEFJPOUEFRIPUPIJLNMSDLKJG)UEIOUJ++ employees at the Times were using an internal Slack channel to whine about how badly they are treated at the paper. The HR executive let people know that there is a formal process for registering grievances and that they could and should avail themselves of that process.

This, of course, was the moral equivalent of turning the paper into a concentration camp complete with gas chambers and ovens.

A New York Times executive stepped in it last week when she seemed to encourage a Slack room full of LGBTQ staffers not to raise workplace concerns in the channel dedicated to… raising employee concerns.

“I just wanted to share a note about discussing or reporting about your workplace experience to ensure everyone knows about our resources,” wrote Natalia Villalobos, the Times’ vice president of inclusion, strategy, and execution, in an April 3 post to TimesOut, the paper’s LGBTQ-focused employee resources group.

The HR exec directed employees to several HR-approved methods of expressing concerns: an “ask-the-company” Slack channel, a one-on-one with a manager, or the ever-helpful recourse of going directly to HR reps. “Going forward, I want to encourage folxs here to raise concerns or issues via the places above ^^^^ rather than in this ERG channel,” she wrote.

Suffice to say the post rankled staffers in the Slack channel—especially as the paper deals with continued fallout over its handling of internal and external criticism of its trans coverage. Several Times employees directly replied to Villalobos to question what prompted her post’s timing and how her suggestions could make LGTBQ staffers feel unsafe at the paper.

Unsafe? As in being a grocery worker in San Francisco or a coffee shop barista in Portland? Or perhaps a tech baron in San Francisco?

Let it be noted, lest you have never been employed, that bitching about one’s employer in public is generally frowned upon by the said employer. Worse, such bitching if directed at specific people might, in fact, make them feel unsafe. At the very least in fear for their own employment.

This is what Human Resources departments are for, and in this litigious environment even small employers now often use HR firms that one can employ as a service. Big corporations often have large and intrusive departments that make life hell for everyone.

In other words, this is exactly what you should expect if you work for a large corporation, and the NYT is such a place.

“I can’t help but feel lately like I’m expected to just shut up and deal with the negativity because it might make some of my coworkers feel uncomfortable if I speak up,” one Times staffer wrote in the messages reviewed by Confider. “It feels completely surreal and disrespectful to get corporate swag branded with a pride flag at the same time as we’re being instructed not to publicly discuss our experiences as queer people in the workplace,” wrote another staffer in a comment that was pinned to the channel’s page.

Villalobos addressed the concerns a day later, acknowledging the optics of corporate HR pushing more HR-approved routes of voicing concerns over a room dedicated for such conversations.

“My post was meant to support the community by offering channels for reporting workplace concerns like discrimination and harassment so that they are received by HR and other partners who can help address them efficiently,” she wrote. “It was not meant to reduce sharing, eliminate community support, or tamp down community building.”

Pretty sure that the NYT is one of the “safer” places for Queer People™ in the entire universe. More than that, LGBTQ+ people are well and truly overrepresented in the paper’s employment. I suspect that is part of the Times’ problem.

This controversy follows an earlier one in which reporters at the Times published open letters complaining about the paper’s coverage of transgender issues. Despite being, on the whole, supportive of the alphabet ideology, the paper did cover the fact–belatedly and grudgingly–that perhaps the evidence behind “gender-affirming care” isn’t so solid, and that perhaps something hinky is going on with the obvious social contagion that has created a transgender generation.

This was unacceptable, as it deviated from the approved Narrative™. Staffers revolted or were revolting depending upon your point of view.

Their attacks on their colleagues finally got management stirred from their torpor, and in this case, they actually fired back. Attacking colleagues’ reporting and character clearly undermines the credibility of the paper–when one group of reporters attacks the reporting of another everybody’s credibility suffers, and the Editors rebuked the whiners.

The letter is actually pretty strong and welcome, even though it was only intended to protect the institution itself. Given that many corporations [Budweiser, ahem] appear willing to implode in order to cater to the whiney white woke women and the alphabet people, it is heartening to see even the execrable New York Times stand up for itself. I give them appropriate kudos, and perhaps even jazz hands.

This, my friends, has driven the alphabet people truly insane.

Far from feeling grateful to enjoy one of the best jobs in journalism, these entitled brats continue to attack their employer as fascists.

Now even I will admit that their Times is fascist-adjacent, but only due to their embrace of the woke ideology that promotes censorship and cancelation in service to the cultural Marxists. Trans and other alphabet “folx” are hardly “unsafe” at the Times.

Still, the Times has asked for it, and I hope they are enjoying the consequences of their own indulgence and embrace of the Left.

May it eat them up like cancer from the inside.