Former NY Times reporter mocks paper's 'disinformation' watchers who viewed her as a problem
"Disinformation experts" populated the New York Times’ newsroom, according to a mocking account by a former reporter.
Released on Tuesday, Nellie Bowles’ book "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History" opened with her describing the situation behind the scenes in 2020 in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.
During this time, she described a "main group of in-house Narrative Enforcers" through "Disinformation Experts" that began viewing her as a "problem" for questioning increasingly radical positions such as defunding the police.
One of the experts, "Todd," was a heavy presence in a #Disinformation Slack channel which featured "some hundred members" who posted conservative news stories "as a sort of group disinformation watch."
"Sometimes people would ask about whether something is Bad, like a picture of some people holding three fingers up—Hey is this white supremacy? (It wasn’t.) He’d post TikToks that were apparently disinformation—like a video made by some nurses making fun of Covid restrictions. He’d drop in tweets calling out right-wing internet activity from accounts with names like @socialistdogmom."
She continued, "Todd was there in Slack to remind everyone that the idea Covid might have come from a lab was a conspiracy theory. He was the authority on these things."
Bowles wrote that she was convinced to incorporate a "disinformation analysis" in her profile piece on the conservative video channel PragerU.
"I needed to chide PragerU for the sin of getting people questioning and for the fact that when you search for Republicans on YouTube, you can also eventually find yourself being recommended videos from people further to the right," she wrote.
Bowles also mocked the paper’s blatant shift from journalism to activism with an open disdain for Republicans.
"Most of the new guard at the paper had come there for that revolution. They entered the building on a mission. They weren’t there to tell dry news factoids so much as wield the pen for justice. It was a more beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time, more compelling for the writer and for the reader. Yes, it was a little confusing to do reporting for a place that was so sure everyone was good, except of course, conservatives, who were very very bad and whose politics only come from hate," she wrote sardonically.
"Asking for coherence is White supremacy. I figured it out. I loved my job."
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Fox News Digital reached out to The New York Times for a comment.
The book was scathingly reviewed in the New York Times by Laura Kipnis, who compared Bowles to "attention-grabbing grifters" and claimed the book was an attack on progressives in favor of conservatives.
"Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams — their ‘beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time,’ for instance. What twits!" Kipnis wrote.
She continued, "[T]he book’s central fallacy is that idiocy on the left requires moving to the right. It doesn’t. It’s eminently possible for people with brains to make distinctions and stick to their principles, if they have any. And, by the way, you’re not going to find any fewer authoritarians and idiots by switching sides."
Bowles announced that she was leaving the paper in 2021. She currently writes for the media company The Free Press alongside her wife and former Times journalist Bari Weiss.