Charlie SweatpantsCo-sign on this letter to the New York Times about their atrocious anti-trans bias/coverage/obsessions. That fucking newspaper is actively harming people and should be named and shamed until it stops.
If you're wondering if the #FTFNYT would take a letter signed by hundreds of its own contributors seriously and engage the specific and well articulated criticisms on the merits, I have a Wordle subscription to sell you.
https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/nyt-calls-own-contributors-activists
TL;DR They blew it off by writing three paragraphs to GLAAD, huffed about objective journalism, and ignored the rest. No mention in the paper itself, natch.
Oh, and to top it off they published *another* defense of Queen TERF JK Rowling on the op-ed page this morning.
Christ, what assholes.
After blowing off the letter from their own writers criticizing their hysterical trans coverage, Joe Kahn, Times executive editor, took the time to write a threatening letter to the signers of the original letter. What a peach.
I wasn't planning to use this account just for depantsing the Times, but I am angry at them and here we are.
You can read the full letter from Kahn on Max Tani of Semaphor's Twitter page: https://mobile.twitter.com/maxwelltani/status/1626324277422133253/photo/1
Max Tani on Twitter
“Memo from Joe Kahn to NYT staff responding to yesterday's letter re: trans coverage. Times leadership says the paper "will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums."”
Things start pretty calmly with a factual, to the point summation. Good newspapering, NYT boss guy. It's only going to be downhill from here.
Let us first note the steadily ascending violence of the vocabulary from sentence to sentence.
We go from "critique", "rally", and "seek" in the first sentence, to "joined the effort" in the second, before popping into full blown war wth "direct attacks" in the third. Things are escalating quickly and that will be a pattern for the rest of this self righteous diatribe.
Now the war is on. In this paragraph alone, the phrases "such a campaign", "joining protest actions", and "attacking one another's journalism" are all used to refer to . . . a letter. The word "attack" is used *twice*.
Campaign? The Ukrainians liberating Kherson was a campaign. Protest actions? The George Floyd response was "protest actions". This is a letter.
Worst of all is "attacking one another's journalism". The letter is twelve hundred very polite words illustrating specific and perfectly valid journalistic critiques across a total of 4 NYT articles.
Calling something that mainstream and professional an "attack" on anyone's journalism *is* an attack on journalism.
This is as fair play as fair play gets, and Joe the Timesman finds himself in highest dudgeon that anyone would dare point fingers and his paper.
This next paragraph is a whopper, so we're going line by line because this is what pissed me off so much I spent an hour fisking this entire thing.
Sentence 1 - "specific pieces singled out for attack" is more overt hyperbole and is countered in this case by declaring themselves "important, deeply reported, and sensitively written", which is funny because those were criticisms laid out in the letter that are addressed here with nothing more than assertion.
Sentence 2 - Your journalists have "endured months of attacks, harassment and threats"?
Fuuuuuck you, buddy.
First: who is doing the harassing and threatening? Is it trans people? Or is it the frothy mob your shitty coverage stirred up?
Second: trans people are under daily assault in this country (including to the point of death), and you have the unmitigated gall and hubris to compare that to receiving a letter? And a fucking polite letter at that? GTFO
Sentence 3 - "The letter also ignores The Times strong commitment to covering all aspects of transgender issues". Does it? Did you read it?
Cause the letter was actually SPECIFICALLY ABOUT THAT, and concludes that "There is no rapt reporting on the thousands of parents who simply love and support their children" to compare with the scaremongering that gets front page treatment.
Sentence 4 - Right after accusing their critics of ignorance, Joe Times asserts that "any review" of their coverage will show that their critics are full of it.
Well, I just so happen to have such a review right here, it's been online for a couple of weeks and notes the extreme discrepancy between actually well reported articles (page A13) and the articles specifically under critique here (A1, baby!).
Any comment on that?
It goes on from there for three more thin gruel paragraphs of whining about being the real victims and pretending to take the high road. They do take a moment to act aghast that any trans employees of theirs should feel slighted by any of this.
Of course it concludes by threatening the employment of anyone involved in such nefarious work as signing a letter to the editor. Such deviants cannot be tolerated at the New York Times.
/endrant