Taylor Lorenz makes wild claim that New York Times journalists are only allowed to espouse 'right wing opinions'

On Monday, Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz claimed that her former employer, the New York Times, only allowed those on its payroll to espouse "right wing opinions."

She cited opposition to online harassment and doxxing as a "left wing opinions," suggesting that she had been barred from speaking out about the topics during her time working at the iconic media company.


 

"Anyone who's worked as a journalist at the NYT knows that journalists there are absolutely allowed to loudly espouse political opinions, you just have to espouse the *right* political opinions," Lorenz wrote in a post on Mark Zuckerberg's Threads app. "Right wing opinions are fine, left wing opinions are not."

She went on to claim that during her time there, she "wasn't allowed to express the 'opinion' that online harassment was a bad thing, in the midst of having my entire family harassed and doxxed," and "also once had to delete a tweet where I said I don't like living in America lol."

"But saying 'wokes' are taking over campus is totally fine in their book," she concluded.

Her Threads post was widely shared on X, where it garnered far more attention.

"The parody writes itself," Elon Musk quipped.

Fellow former Times journalist Adam Rubenstein called Lorenz's claims into question, suggesting she "lives in an alternate reality."

Lorenz's comments were spurred on by an article written by Jack Mirkinson that dove into the Times' rules regarding actions taken by employees involving support or condemnation of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.

In the piece, Mirkinson cited the stories of two employees and claimed that "if you are a New York Time staffer ... and you sign an open letter in support of Palestine, you have crossed a bright red line and gone so far beyond the limits of your job description that there can be no future for you at the paper," but if you "want to directly link protests against the war on Gaza to the idea that left-wing activism at universities is 'dangerous,' ... you not only get to do that, but they will put it on the front page of the newspaper."