Two-Faced Hackery at the Times

For decades, the New York Times editorial page has featured some of the dullest prose in American journalism. Elsewhere in the paper, one typically finds vivid and fluent writing. The ideological biases can be insufferable, but the writing is mostly superb. Except on the editorial page—and particularly in the paper’s unsigned editorials. Nearly every day, on otherwise riveting topics, the typical Times editorial seems perfectly calculated to make a reader stop reading after the second or third paragraph.

It’s understandable, therefore, that Times’ editorial-page editor, James Bennet, would try to hire a writer capable of expressing edgy, abrasive opinions—someone who could give those sleepy editorials a bit of life. What they came up with was Sarah Jeong, a 30-year-old technology writer for the Verge.

The Times, no doubt assuming Jeong’s status as a good liberal made it impossible for her to express retrograde opinions, evidently neglected to search her social-media history. A scroll through her Twitter page quickly revealed plenty of unsavory stuff. Among her charming declarations on the subject of race: “basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture.” “White men are bullshit.” “[O]h man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” “Dumbass f—ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” In short, Jeong can get pretty nasty behind a keypad.

Her explanatory statement on these and similar remarks is self-exculpatory but not totally unconvincing. “As a woman of color on the internet, I have faced torrents of online hate,” she writes, supplying a couple of sinister remarks directed at her. She goes on: “I engaged in what I thought of at the time as counter-trolling. While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns. I can understand how hurtful these posts are out of context, and would not do it again.”

Maybe she’s not the bigot her meta-satirical tweets suggest, but her apology doesn’t explain her malicious tweets about police officers: A sampling: “F— the police.” “If we’re talking big sweeping bans on sh— that kills people, why don’t we ever ever ever ever talk about banning the police?” “[C]ops are a—holes.”