Comment by seven4
6 years ago
Edit: I'm 50:50 on whether they take the negative press hit of publishing this anyway. If they publish without name included - everyone still finds out the name of the "flippant" writer. If they don't it just concedes that their attitude was wrong to begin with. They are in a tough spot now - hard to feel sorry for them given the asympathetic position they assumed.
~~~
SlateStarCodex shutting down in direct response to the hubris/disregard of one NYT reporter hungry for a story. This parasitic appetite for airtime come-what-may approach to journalism needs to be checked. There's no reason the writer couldn't leave the real full name out of the article once requested and with legitimate concern aired by the person hes naming.
I'm glad "Scott" is taking this stance if only for the fact that it puts the onus of hard/difficult decisions back on the NYT - i.e. why despite legitimate concerns are your writers comfortable doxxing people?
The key highlight for me -
"When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he just said that me having enemies was going to be part of the story. He added that “I have enemies too”. Perhaps if he was less flippant about destroying people’s lives, he would have fewer.
(though out of respect for his concerns, I am avoiding giving his name here.)
After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks."
It's not just the New York Times either. Take a look at what happened to the NightJack blog in the UK (and in that case, it turned out that the Times had illegally hacked the blogger's email to get their information and then lied about it in court to dodge an injunction).
Wow, had not read about that!
> why despite legitimate concerns are your writers comfortable doxxing people?
This is especially important to ask when a big complaint of the NYT staff about the Tom Cotton is editorial was that it was directly endangering their safety.
Apparently the NYT does not have the same concern about other’s safety.
Or, as with much else in the woke lexicon[1], they don't use the word "safety" in the way that most people understand it.
[1] https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/