James Bennet is the former NY Times editor who was cast off for sin of publishing an op-ed by a sitting Senator. That was in the summer of 2020 and ever since then we’ve gotten glimpses of what went on behind the scenes that led up to that firing. The gist is that a bunch of younger staffers, led by Black@NYT and given support by Nikole Hannah-Jones (author of the 1619 Project) demanded Bennet’s scalp and the paper capitulated.

Today, Mediate has a story up about a new book which offers a behind the scenes perspective on that moment in time. The book by Steve Krakauer is titled “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People.” It contains an interview with former Times staffer Shawn McCreesh in which he describes the meltdown that was happening internally.

McCreesh said that Charlie Warzel, a White tech writer, started to cry because “none of his friends wanted to talk to him anymore because he worked for this horrible evil newspaper that would print this op-ed.”

“It was just so bizarre what was happening,” said McCreesh. “It was like a Maoist struggle session.”

That’s followed by an excerpt from the book itself. This is McCreesh speaking:

“There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” he told me. “And all these angry backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on Slack. And the leadership was so horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve.”

McCreesh said at some point he just closed his laptop and poured a glass of wine even though it was around noon. “I was so fucking freaked out by what we had just witnessed,” he said.

This isn’t the first glimpse inside the Times that we’ve gotten from people who worked there. Last October, James Bennet himself told Ben Smith the Times was trying to appease the left:

The Times and its publisher, Bennet said, “want to have it both ways.” Sulzberger is “old school” in his belief in a neutral, heterodox publication. But “they want to have the applause and the welcome of the left, and now there’s the problem on top of that that they’ve signed up so many new subscribers in the last few years and the expectation of those subscribers is that the Times will be Mother Jones on steroids.”

He added, “This is why I was so bewildered for so long after I had what felt like all my colleagues treating me like an incompetent fascist.”

Of course Bennet wasn’t the first or the last to receive such treatment from the newsroom. A few months later the same group demanded the firing of science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. after learning he’d used the N-word two years earlier when responding to a student’s question about whether it was acceptable to use the N-word. McNeil would later describe in detail his final meeting with executive editor Dean Baquet, who cited the anger of the “newsroom” as the reason McNeil needed to resign.

“Donald, I know you,” he went on. “I know you’re not a racist. We’re going ahead with your Pulitzer. We’re writing to the board telling them we looked into this two years ago.”

“But Donald, you’ve lost the newsroom. People are hurt. People are saying they won’t work with you because you didn’t apologize.”

“I did write an apology,” I said. “I sent it to you Friday night. I sent another paragraph on Saturday morning. Didn’t you get it?”

Dean didn’t answer.

“I saw it,” Carolyn said.

“But Donald,” Dean said, “you’ve lost the newsroom. A lot of your colleagues are hurt. A lot of them won’t work with you. Thank you for writing the apology. But we’d like you to consider adding to it that you’re leaving.”

“WHAT?” I said loudly. “ARE YOU KIDDING? You want me to leave after 40-plus years? Over this? You know this is bullsh*t. You know you looked into it and I didn’t do the things they said I did, I wasn’t some crazy racist, I was just answering the kids’ questions.”

“Donald, you’ve lost the newsroom. People won’t work with you.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Since when do we get to choose who we work with?”

At the time even CNN reported cancel culture had run amok within the NY Times:

“It’s a real f**king disaster,” one Times employee remarked to CNN Business…

One group of journalists inside The Times believes that the departures are emblematic of a so-called “cancel culture” at the newspaper, with management catering to what they describe as a vocal minority of “woke” staffers who raised concerns about McNeil and Mills. These staffers point to a letter that 150 of their colleagues reportedly signed asking top management to reassess McNeil’s behavior…

“I hate to say this, but inside The Times there is a ‘cancel culture,’” one staffer at The Times commented to CNN Business. The staffer, echoing what several other Times journalists told CNN Business in separate conversations, described a dynamic where “there is not much infighting, but there is a small group of people who are very vocal” and who, this staffer said, do not appear to be satisfied until “heads roll.”

So this has been covered and written about before but the new information about Bennet’s firing is still pretty revealing. The newsroom unleashed a Maoist struggle session to get Bennet fired and it worked. Meanwhile, all of the woke Maoists are still there.