Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside The Times Won’t Stop

To some, he embodied the swagger of the mid-20th century Times man, whose very presence rendered a story news. He could be a generous colleague, and blunt honesty is welcome in a newsroom, but he also sometimes alienated his bosses and colleagues. He asked sharp questions of the former publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., at the company’s annual staff meeting, and was a union activist who attacked management during brutal contract negotiations in the dark years of 2010 and 2011. He was a devoted, effective organizer, others in the News Guild recalled, but also drove his brothers and sisters in labor crazy with his imperiousness, and voted against the union’s 2016 contract, arguing that the union should have held out for more.

His impolitic views were also hardly a secret. When he published a book on the Zika virus in 2016, a puzzled reviewer in The Quarterly Review of Biology noted passages about feminists and gay sex, and wrote that “it is McNeil’s seniority and journalistic experience that makes the occasional misstep, or indelicate deviation from the science, all the more surprising.”

The sorts of views that raised eyebrows in The Quarterly Review of Biology had shocked the teenagers. And when a furious Dean Baquet, the executive editor, read the complaints about the Peru trip in 2019, he said he initially wanted to fire Mr. McNeil. But the union played its traditional role, fighting aggressively to protect him. The union, a person involved in the conversations said, was ready to take The Times to arbitration if the company attempted to terminate Mr. McNeil for his conduct on the trip. Mr. McNeil received a formal reprimand instead.

Mr. McNeil, who was not far from retirement, returned to his role as a reporter on the relatively unglamorous public health beat. He talked openly about taking a buyout the next time The Times offered them, and his career could easily have ended that way.

But then, just over a year ago, a strange new virus began spreading around the world. Mr. McNeil suddenly became a regular guest on The Times’s popular podcast, The Daily. His doomsaying was electrifying — stark, certain, sometimes alarming. He emerged as the voice of The Times’s coverage of the crisis.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/business/media/new-york-times-donald-mcneil.html