Should the New York Times have hired Sarah Jeong?

I don’t really see them as satire, but maybe I don’t have a sense of humor.
I think the Times could have and should have avoided all of this by not hiring her. I’m sure there are plenty of people that should have that job.

Sounds to me as a classic case of smashing your own windows.
She may feel lucky she got hired, although I would always have these expressions in my mind when she is reporting or writing (and use it to weigh her credibility).
If she was trying to be satirical, she failed miserably, in my view.
Better to suppress some urges, especially if you are in the public eye (which is what you are if you tweet them), and cool down before hitting that send button.

Candace Owens, a black conservative commentator, retweeted some of Jeong’s tweets replacing the word “white” with “Jewish” and “black” and had her account suspended. Twitter than reinstated her account, saying it was an “error”.

What a mess. Double standards can be hard to enforce!

Interesting that white folks can no longer be considered fair game as the bulk of them slide toward the status of other “oppressed” minorities.

@stanleybmanly except, uh, white folks don’t tweet such vitriol and rancor against minorities.

Trump is white(-ish).

Yellowdog. I must amend your answer to “most white folks”. It is currently very un PC to dump on minorities. This has not always been the case.

I’m sure there are white people who exist who have tweeted or messaged in some form some off color or derogratory comments about minorities in their private conversations. But comments such as these by “Sarah” Jeong are not, and never have been, easy to find from whites against minorities.

When a politician or law enforcement person texts or tweets something controversial or racist, it makes national news and the person finds themselves out of a job.

Very easy to find on right wing sites, like stormfront.

@Yellowdog What you say is true. But you should understand that tweeting is a very recent development. Were you to return to the “good old days” when white folks were literally all that mattered, minorities were diparaged as a matter of course.

And that’s what makes it a double standard. If someone had posted similar things about any group other than white men, even if they claimed it was satirical, they would’ve been fired or not hired.

People will defend the double standard saying “racism against white people doesn’t exist” (which is not a popular opinion, even among many liberals), but it’s clear that there is a double standard here. You can try and justify it, but you can’t deny it exists.

We live in an era of zero tolerance, swift punishment, firing at the first hint of offense. That didn’t happen here. Kevin Williamson was rightfully fired when his tweets about putting women who have abortions to death surfaced. I’m sure he tried to claim it wasn’t serious. It didn’t matter.

The fact that I think is the “gist” of this question is, Sarah Jeong was hired PRECISELY because she is this way. Controversy and hate sell newspapers and news agency’s political drive.

I’m OK with her being hired. I thought her tweets were amusing rather than malicious and I didn’t take offence. I expect she will tone it down a bit in future.

She doesn’t want you to be amused. You’re too cruel, @flutherother !

Was she being honest in her opinions? Isn’t that what the public wants in it’s journalists??? I don’t care if she’s racist or not, just as long as she’s honest.

@kritiper Maybe. It seems to be what some people want in their politicians. Though nastiness is not the same as honesty.

Nastiness is like beauty…it’s in the eye of the beholder.

@Yellowdog has clearly never clicked on a tweet by his dear leader.

To be fair, I’m not exactly sympathetic to Trump supporters who wear shirts that say “fuck your feelings” and then suddenly whine and bitch when they get a taste of their own medicine. Doesn’t change my opinion that Sarah Jeong’s tweets are hardly “satirical”. Attempted humor can’t be an excuse for everything.

‘Make America Great Again” does not exactly equate to ‘Fuck your feelings.’

No, but it’s a trope that is repeated by some ardent Trump supporters, along with the idea that the opposition is too whiny and sensitive. Yet here are examples when they are the ones being sensitive. My point is that accusations of “snowflake” are often hypocritical. Everyone has something they’re offended by. So calling others out when they’re offended will often just lead to hypocrisy when something offensive comes your way.

On the face of it, her explanation seems at least credible to me, just because I know plenty of stories from people in various minority groups who have been on the receiving end of those sorts of comments. (I also know that for many, those comments aren’t their only experience of racism/structural legacies of racism, so there’s often a cumulative effect as well.)

That said, what she did in response is still stupid (at the very least). And my finding the explanation credible because of other stories I know doesn’t mean it’s true, nor justified.

I’m curious to know if those are the only tweets, or if she has tweets preceding/intermingled that explain where she’s coming from when she writes them. Not because that makes them any less stupid, just because it would have given the tweets a much needed context in-the-moment, a context that could be resurfaced for the present.

I hadn’t heard of this before I saw this question. I looked it up briefly online and found a statement from the NY Times about this. It notes that Sarah had been a recipient of “frequent online harassment,” which seems a step above simply receiving “racist tweets.”

“Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment,” The Times said in its statement. “For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She sees now that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media.”

Again, I’ve heard stories of people who have similar experiences: they’re a member of a minority group, and in a job that’s publicly facing, and receive prejudiced harassment as a result. So it seems at least credible to me.

The above excerpt also addresses my biggest issue with her tweets, that it “only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media,” and says she recognizes that fact.

The Times said that it did not condone Ms. Jeong’s tweets and that there had been a conversation about her social media history as part of the hiring process.

“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,” the statement said.

Source of those specific excerpts

Given that account, I imagine there should be a way to better put the tweets in context—showing some of her own contextualizing tweets, for instance. Perhaps better would be to show examples of the harassment she had been receiving—not to “justify” her actions, but to show the kinds of abuse that she and others in similar circumstances experience.

And in this story shows some examples of both. (Both as in: other tweets of Jeong’s that give context to the “satirical” ones, and examples of the harassment that she faced.)

Jeong also writes:

“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.

Her explanation seems well supported by the facts, and her apology reads as sincere to me.

The article I linked also provides a different perspective on the whole incident by explaining how this controversy started (and, significantly, who started it). The tweets were compiled and decontextualized by a group of people deliberately targeting Jeong (to know the group, read the article). Ironically, this group was simultaneously “launching a torrent of violent, racist, and misogynistic speech at both Jeong and the New York Times to voice its displeasure.” Further, she’s not the only one this group targets with this “disingenuous” method of “baiting.” I won’t summarize the article here, but I will recommend it to anyone reading this, especially because it dives a bit more into the cultural moment of, as you put it @Demosthenes, “zero tolerance, swift punishment, firing at the first offense.”

At this point, I feel like the NY Times did its due diligence in this situation. It dug up the full story, and addressed with Jeong the fact that her past behavior would not be tolerated (behavior she agrees was the wrong response). And if we’re worried about how reactionary and quick-to-falsely-condemn we’re becoming as a society… Then based on this incident, we might consider trying to imitate the NY Times’s more careful and thoughtful approach.