Ex-NY Times editor says staffers were worried ‘lending credence’ to Hunter Biden laptop story would hurt Dems
Former New York Times opinion editor Adam Rubenstein said staffers "were clearly worried that lending credence" to the story surrounding Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop would hurt Joe Biden and Democrats ahead of the 2020 election.
In a lengthy piece for The Atlantic, Rubenstein said the paper was essentially failing to fulfill its goal of being "journalistic, rather than activist."
"This, I learned in my two years at the Times, was not a goal that everyone shared," he wrote, noting that the Hunter Biden laptop story is a key example.
"Was it truly ‘unsubstantiated,’ as the paper kept saying? At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism," Rubenstein wrote.
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A former New York Times opinion editor feels staffers at the paper "were clearly worried that lending credence" to the story surrounding Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop would hurt Joe Biden and Democrats ahead of the 2020 election. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)
"If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work," Rubenstein added. "They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy."
The Times famously dismissed the Biden laptop scandal as "Russian disinformation" at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign and claimed in a September 2021 piece that The New York Post's reporting on the laptop was "unsubstantiated." The paper later scrubbed the word from an article after intense backlash over its inaccurate characterization of The Post's reporting.
In 2022, the Times finally confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden's infamous laptop.
But the Hunter Biden saga isn’t the only thing that irked Rubenstein about his former employer. He wrote that right-of-center opinion submissions "faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher-ups" than pieces by liberal writers.
"Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list. Then we would all discuss it. But many of my colleagues didn’t want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments, and early-to-mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publication," Rubenstein wrote.
Rubenstein also revealed that he was scolded early in his Times tenure for praising the spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A when asked about his favorite sandwich during an orientation for new hires.
"The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: ‘We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.’ People started snapping their fingers in acclamation," Rubenstein wrote. "I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. ‘Not the politics, the chicken,’ I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed."
Rubenstein is hardly the first ex-Times leader to accuse the paper of fostering a culture of liberal groupthink.
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In 2022, the New York Times finally confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden's infamous laptop. (REUTERS/Tom Brenner)
Former opinion editor James Bennet, who was forced to resign over the Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco in 2020 that also ensnared Rubenstein, penned a lengthy essay last year for The Economist outlining how liberal ideology had taken over the Times newsroom.
Bennet suggested the paper has "lost its way," and said publisher A.G. Sulzberger forced him to resign with "icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me" because liberal staffers were offended by Cotton's op-ed suggesting the military could be deployed to quell urban riots during the summer of 2020.
Sulzberger strongly disagreed with Bennet’s claims.
However, Bennet’s criticism of the Gray Lady echoed claims made by former New York Times opinion columnist and editor Bari Weiss in 2020, who published a scathing resignation letter saying she was bullied by colleagues in an "illiberal environment."
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Former opinion editor James Bennet, who was forced to resign in 2020, penned a lengthy essay for The Economist last year outlining how liberal groupthink had taken over The New York Times newsroom. (Getty)
Weiss noted that her own "forays into wrongthink" made her the subject of "constant bullying by colleagues" who disagree with her views.
Rubenstein noted that while Cotton’s piece irked staffers, op-eds by the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza, a leader of the Taliban, Muammar Qaddafi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Vladimir Putin never seemed to bother anyone.
Rubenstein resigned from the Times a few months after he was tasked with editing Cotton’s piece. "It had been made clear to me, in a variety of ways, that I had no future there," he wrote.
A New York Times spokesperson defended the paper from backlash related to the Cotton piece.
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"Our Opinion section’s commitment to publishing diverse views — including those that are unpopular, controversial or heterodox — is unwavering. That was true before the publication of Senator Cotton’s guest essay in June 2020 and remains true today. Indeed, we’ve only furthered that promise to our readers, offering an even more diverse mix of voices in Opinion than we did four years ago," Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told Fox News Digital.
"However, the commitment to publishing diverse opinions cannot be used as cover for bad process or shoddy work. In this case, the piece itself and the series of decisions that led to its publication did not hold up to scrutiny. Normally, a piece articulating a controversial argument on a highly sensitive topic would receive significant attention from the senior most editors. But our review found that despite concerns flagged by a number of editors, the review process was rushed through and cut out those editors who raised issues. In fact, the top editor in Opinion agreed not to review the piece so it could be published more quickly," Rhoades Ha continued. "None of that was Adam’s fault. As a junior member of the team, he deserved better editorial support and oversight."
The Times did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.
Fox News’ Brandon Gillespie and Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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