New York Times Defends Reporter Sarah Jeong After Trolls Dig Up Her ‘Racist’ Tweets
By Khier Casino
August 2, 2018
The New York Times is defending its decision to hire South Korean-born writer Sarah Jeong after a series of her old tweets aimed at White people recently resurfaced on Twitter.
Many of Jeong’s unearthed tweets date back to 2013 and 2014 when she used the hashtag #cancelwhitepeople.
“Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” Jeong wrote in another post that has since gone viral.
The tweets have appeared in The Daily Caller, National Review, The Federalist and other conservative publications.
In response to the controversy, the Times issued a statement on Thursday, pointing out that as a young Asian woman, Jeong has been “a subject of frequent online harassment,” resulting in “imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”
“We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history,” the publication wrote. “She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times and we are confident that she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.”
Jeong also issued an apology, accompanied by screenshots of some of the hateful messages she receives from online trolls.
“While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers,” she wrote. “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.”
Even Dr. Eugene Gu has come out in support of Jeong:
Fellow journalists also took to Twitter to voice their opinions for and against Jeong:
After the Times’ statement, Jeong’s former colleagues at The Verge issued their own statement on the criticisms:
“Online trolls and harassers want us, the Times, and other newsrooms to waste our time by debating their malicious agenda. They take tweets and other statements out of context because they want to disrupt us and harm individual reporters. The strategy is to divide and conquer by forcing newsrooms to disavow their colleagues one at a time. This is not a good-faith conversation; it’s intimidation.”
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