The New York Times is investigating itself. Over the past several weeks, Charlotte Behrendt, a top Times editor in charge of probing workplace issues in the newsroom, has summoned close to 20 employees for interviews to determine whether staffers leaked confidential information related to Gaza war coverage to another media outlet. It is the latest internal crisis at the Times, where management has been at odds with factions of the newsroom over union negotiations and coverage of sensitive topics like the transgender community and social justice. Reporting about the Gaza war has been a particular flashpoint, especially over an in-depth article that found Hamas weaponized sexual violence in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Some staffers questioned the reporting behind it and alleged that the suffering of Gazans isn’t getting the same attention.

The internal probe was meant to find out who leaked information related to a planned podcast episode about that article. But its intensity and scope suggests the Times’s leadership, after years of fights with its workforce over a variety of issues involving journalistic integrity, is sending a signal: Enough.

...while its business hums along, the Times’s culture has been under strain. In many ways, it is a story familiar to companies big and small across America, as bosses struggle to integrate a new generation of workers with different expectations of how their jobs and personal lives should mesh—and whose evolving social values can sow discord in the workplace.

Newsroom leaders, concerned that some Times journalists are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests to coverage decisions, are seeking to draw a line. [Executive Editor Joe Kahn] suggested that colleges aren’t preparing new hires to be tolerant of dissenting views. “Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past,” Khan said. The Western Journal, a right wing media outlet, translated this statement as follows: 'In other words, our education system encourages students to say, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” If anybody disagrees, the newly-minted leftist stooges promptly assign a title such as “racist,” “homophobe,” “white supremacist” or “Christian nationalist.”'

But [Khan] said opposition to the Hamas sexual-violence article, penned in late December by veteran correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman and two freelancers, crossed a line when confidential Times work-product was allegedly shared outside the newsroom. Details about staffers’ pre-publication debates were revealed in an article published by nonprofit news organization the Intercept that said the podcast episode was shelved.

Stacy Cowley, a business reporter and Times union officer who sat in on a few interviews to represent staffers, said the Times is targeting employees who have been struggling to get the company to listen to their concerns about war-related coverage. “Instead of taking them seriously, the company is turning around and bullying that group into silence,” she said. The union has filed a grievance alleging that the company was targeting a group of staffers of Arab and Middle Eastern descent. Times leaders said the allegations are false.

Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has become particularly fraught at the Times, with some reporters saying the Times’s work is tilting in favor of Israel and others pushing back forcefully, say people familiar with the situation. That has led to dueling charges of bias and journalistic malpractice among reporters and editors, forcing management to referee disputes. “Just like our readers at the moment, there are really really strong passions about that issue and not that much willingness to really explore the perspectives of people who are on the other side of that divide,” Kahn said, adding that it’s hard work for staffers “to put their commitment to the journalism often ahead of their own personal views.”

Despite the cultural turmoil, the Times’s business keeps growing. The company signed up 300,000 subscribers in the most recent quarter. A weak spot lately has been the online ad market, one reason shares in the Times are down 9% this year after rising 36% in 2023.

The publisher of the Times, 43-year-old A.G. Sulzberger, says readers’ trust is at risk, however. Some journalists, including at the Times, are criticizing journalistic traditions like impartiality, while embracing “a different model of journalism, one guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction,” Sulzberger wrote in a 12,000-word essay last year in Columbia Journalism Review.

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