“We demand that The Times cease what has become a destructive and racially targeted witch hunt,” DeCarava wrote in the letter to Times publisher and chairperson A.G. Sulzberger.
In a separate statement sent late Friday to Guild members, union leaders said that Times managers had questioned employees about their involvement in an affinity group for employees of Middle Eastern and North African heritage and “ordered them to hand over the names of all of the … active members, and demanded copies of private text-message conversations between colleagues about their shared workplace concerns.”
The leak probe was launched after the Intercept reported that the Times’s flagship podcast, “The Daily,” had shelved a planned episode about the paper’s major investigative report describing a “pattern of gender-based violence” during the attacks, after staffers and outside critics raised questions about the story’s credibility.
The Times has defended its reporting of the December story, both in statements to other news organizations and in a Jan. 29 follow-up story.
Yet the storm of criticism and questions has triggered tensions in the newsroom. And in the weeks following the Intercept report, Times managers have called employees in for meetings to try to determine how internal discussions about the shelved Daily episode were leaked. According to DeCarava’s letter, employees who were called in for questioning asserted their right to have union representatives present in these meetings.
The existence of the leak investigation was first reported by Vanity Fair.
A spokeswoman for the New York Times did not immediately respond for comment about the Guild letter.
With graphic details and a headline suggesting that Hamas had “weaponized sexual violence,” the Times story by correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman and two Israel-based freelancers caused a sensation when it published Dec. 28.
But questions about the story quickly circulated. Relatives of a woman slain in the attack, whose story became a central focus of the Times report, cast doubts on reporting suggesting that she was raped, while other critics have pointed to discrepancies in various accounts offered by an eyewitness cited in the story.
According to the Intercept, the Times had originally intended to showcase its reporting on Oct. 7 sexual violence in a Jan. 9 episode of “The Daily.”
But “as criticism of Gettleman’s story grew both internally and externally,” the Intercept wrote Jan. 28, “producers at ‘The Daily’ shelved the original script and paused the episode, according to newsroom sources familiar with the process.”
Instead, the Intercept wrote, the staff prepared a new script that “offered major caveats [and] allowed for uncertainty.” Still, no programming about the sexual violence story has aired yet on the podcast.
The Times declined at the time to confirm or deny that an episode had been canceled. “As a general matter of policy, we do not comment on the specifics of what may or may not publish in The New York Times or our audio programs,” the company said in a statement to the Intercept. “There is only one ‘version’ of any piece of audio journalism: the one that publishes.”
This week, the reporting came under new scrutiny following revelations about social media posts that one of the Times’s freelancers had previously “liked,” including one that called for Israel to turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse” if hostages were not returned immediately and referred to Palestinians as “human animals.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, the Times called Anat Schwartz’s social media activity “unacceptable” and said the company was reviewing the matter. The Intercept’s follow-up story from this week raised questions about whether Schwartz, a documentary filmmaker who had not previously worked as a reporter, had relied on dubious sources.
The article focused heavily on Schwartz’s remarks in a Jan. 3 podcast interview with an Israeli media outlet. The Times, in a statement to the Intercept, said the story took Schwartz’s quotes out of context.
The existence of a leak investigation surprised observers inside and outside the…
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