Former New York Times reporter Donald McNeil on Monday blamed the Gray Lady for aggravating the N-word debacle that torpedoed his career – while making a full defense of himself online.
In a four-part post of more than 20,000 words on Medium, the journalist, who spent 45 years with the newspaper, opened up about the scandal that exploded over the comments he made during a student trip to Peru in 2019.
“I never dreamed that one of the two Peru trips I took – which were just blips in my life to me, something I had done largely as a favor to a friend who needed experts to sell the trips – my Times career would sink., ”McNeil wrote in the first of a four-part post on Medium.
In late January, the Daily Beast reported allegations that McNeil, who recently spearheaded the paper’s COVID-19 coverage, had dropped the N-word and other offensive comments during the trip.
McNeil, who publicly held his mother on the matter after his letter of resignation last month, was hitting the Times hard at the response to the upcoming Daily Beast story.
After the Beast reached out to McNeil for comment on their report on Jan. 28, he said the Times went into “full messaging mode” – calling on him to immediately apologize and ignore the drawn-out explanations that he initially wanted to send it to the beast.
“If the Times hadn’t panicked and I had been allowed to send a version of it, the Beast might have rewritten or even amplified its story,” said McNeil. “Almost no doubt the response in the Times itself would have been different.”
Four days later, McNeil claims that Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Deputy Editor Carolyn Ryan “twisted his arm” to consider resigning – which resulted in him saying no and becoming a lawyer.
“You lost the newsroom,” Baquet, an old colleague of McNeil’s, told him over the phone. “Many of your colleagues have been hurt. Many of them will not work with you. Thanks for writing the apology. But we would like you to think about adding that you are leaving. “
McNeil’s resignation – along with the departure of Andy Mills, co-host of the controversial “Caliphate” podcast – was announced on Feb. 5 in a statement saying “this is the right next step.”
McNeil, who stopped using the N word in his letter of resignation, said the assumptions made by some that he is a racist are “quite baffling and painful.”
“Am I a racist? I don’t think so – after working in 60 countries for over 25 years, I think I’m pretty good at judging people as individuals,” he said in the post, which he claimed had been vetted beforehand by two lawyers.
He added, “What baffled me most of all was that everyone would look at my work and conclude that if I was a racist I would have chosen my beat, and could or could have survived it for so long” – and noted a string of awards he has won for his coverage of countries such as Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria and Haiti.
McNeil said he was paid $ 300 a day to mentor the private school students in Peru – and give three lectures ‘on global health’ and ‘make myself available to the students as much as possible’ – as part of the ‘Student Journey’ newspaper – program.
The veteran journalist suggested that his conversations with the youngsters may have been misinterpreted because of a generation gap.
“My girlfriend thinks I have a high-functioning Asperger’s aspect to my personality – I am empathetic to suffering, but I have also very misread the audience,” he wrote.
So – was I five decades older than the students in Peru and out of touch with their sensitivities? Absolutely. Did I have perspectives that they didn’t get in prep school? I think so.”
McNeil, 67, whose work on the pandemic was submitted for Pulitzer Prize consideration, also questioned the timing of the allegations.
“I’ve often been asked: who was the source of the Daily Beast? And why is it now leaked, just when you’re in the mood for a Pulitzer? said the journalist.
“The answer is: I have no idea. The story is quoted from an internal email from Times so I have to assume it leaked from the inside. But you never know. And why? I do not know.”
McNeil said he had used the N word in response to a conversation he had with a student about “whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been banned for a video she made as a 12-year-old in which she used” The blemish.
He said the other supposedly insulting comments were misinterpreted.
McNeil promised not to discuss the matter until March 1 – when his resignation became official.
Concluding his feature, he lamented the scandal that tarnished his decades-long reputation as a science reporter on global health issues.
“It is clear that I seriously misjudged my audience in Peru that year. I thought I was generally advocating open-mindedness and tolerance – but it clearly didn’t seem like that, ”he wrote. “And because of my bushiness, I am an imperfect educator for sensitive teenagers.”
And now I want to put this behind me. I had hoped to be remembered as a good science reporter whose work saved lives. Not for this. ”