The newspaper said award-winning journalist Jazmine Hughes resigned after violating newsroom policy by signing a public statement protesting Israeli actions.
It’s wild that we live in such polarized times that every single comment in this thread is talking about how this is wrong because of some variant of “she’s being fired for calling it like it is.”
That’s not what happened. She was fired (forced to resign, same difference) because she went on record with a political viewpoint and made value judgements. YOU DONT GET TO DO THAT AS A JOURNALIST. It doesn’t matter if she’s right (she is, in my opinion, before someone accused me of supporting apartheid and misses the point). What matters is she has taken away any appearance of being unbiased, both for her and by association for the paper. It’s crazy damaging and the Times should have fired her instead of letting her resign. This is like journalistic ethics 101. My parents were both journalists and wouldn’t even talk to me about who they voted for - and they weren’t even in hard news.
I know these days there are so many biased news agencies and lots of opinions masquerading as news, but for hard news agencies this kind of thing does not, and should not fly. The woman was dumb and I hope she was ready for a career writing op-eds and being a partisan talking head, because she’ll never write hard news at a reputable source again.
This is stupid, she’s a human first, and journalist second. If aliens were committing genocide on humans would you still have the same opinion?
We should be allowed to have and express opinions. How many reporters use the words terrorist? Freedom fighter? You can’t police people’s bias, nor should you.
It’s wild that we live in such polarized times that every single comment in this thread is talking about how this is wrong because of some variant of “she’s being fired for calling it like it is.”
That’s not what happened. She was fired (forced to resign, same difference) because she went on record with a political viewpoint and made value judgements. YOU DONT GET TO DO THAT AS A JOURNALIST. It doesn’t matter if she’s right (she is, in my opinion, before someone accused me of supporting apartheid and misses the point). What matters is she has taken away any appearance of being unbiased, both for her and by association for the paper. It’s crazy damaging and the Times should have fired her instead of letting her resign. This is like journalistic ethics 101. My parents were both journalists and wouldn’t even talk to me about who they voted for - and they weren’t even in hard news.
I know these days there are so many biased news agencies and lots of opinions masquerading as news, but for hard news agencies this kind of thing does not, and should not fly. The woman was dumb and I hope she was ready for a career writing op-eds and being a partisan talking head, because she’ll never write hard news at a reputable source again.
This is stupid, she’s a human first, and journalist second. If aliens were committing genocide on humans would you still have the same opinion?
We should be allowed to have and express opinions. How many reporters use the words terrorist? Freedom fighter? You can’t police people’s bias, nor should you.