It is interesting how this thread is 75 posts or so, and the majority of them are debating the integrity, guilty, blame, shame, and state of mind of the
employee... A person who was forced to write a knowingly false article by a company that doesn't just control her pay, her ability to pay bills, but also controls her access to healthcare in the midst of a pandemic.
Sure, we'd all like to think that when pressure to do something immoral at work we'd stand up and do what's right in a moment... "I AM SPARTACUS!" and march out triumphantly, leading a wave of other reporters behind us !! Overthrow Rupert!!
...
But we all have primary needs. A roof over our heads, access to food, medical care during a pandemic, and when your employer holds all of those cards, waiting 3 or 4 days to get all of that settled after being forced to do something immoral at work isn't as much of a grievence as the fact that
her employer is forcing the journalist to write knowingly false stories to please their Republican, conservative political masters at News Corporation.
The focus of this should be that the NY Post forces writers to publish fake stories that they know are false. A secondary discussion is around how many days it took this journalist to resign in the aftermath of it, or if she had the leverage to pull her byline like what happened with the Hunter Biden story last fall, but that should be secondary to the NYPost continuing to publish pure, adulterated trash. If you're working at the NYPost to begin with, your'e probably don't have the most journalistic integrity in the first place, but I think the amount of time it took this person to resign is secondary to the fact that another Murdoch news publication is just completely making up stories.
From when I was a kid in NYC, I remember the NY Post and the NY Daily News both being goofy tabloids that were known as "trash" news amongst many NY Times & Wall Street Journal readers but not necessarily flat-out propaganda pushers until Murdoch bought the Post. Even then, the Post seemed like a Fox-friendly, right-wing tabloid counterpart to the Daily News where its stories were dumber but also still grounded in a subway-rider mentality (once again, in direct contrast to NY Times and WSJ audience).
I haven't lived in NYC (or the US) in almost a decade but I get the sense that the Post wasn't publishing outright lies directed towards a national audience until the Trump era, and one of the articles about this mess mentioned that Murdoch brought in a new editor from a London tabloid within the past few years. This sounds to me like the new editor has no perspective on NYC news, and would focus more on "Fox News Cinematic Universe" -friendly news stories, even when the "news" is just made up shit. So for a long-time reporter who's used to covering NYC events with a tabloid-level snark, she'd have positive memories of the newsroom that would cloud your judgement of recent events.
I think? This is a lot of speculation and trying to read between the lines of NY Post reporting - I only really interacted with NY Daily News reporters when I worked in NYC.
Yeah, same happened with the Boston Herald. The Boston Herald was always a tabloid, pulpier, they had a great sports section... Your dad might read the Boston Globe's sports section, but if you were young and into sports you bought the Herald. The Herald always went for sensationalist stories, but they also did a lot of reporting that the big papers wouldn't spend as much time on... Like if you've seen the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist doc on Netflix, that was a story that most of the big papers mostly dropped, but the Herald kept on it for ages and kept it in the public eye. It was one of those pulpy stories that was fascinating, same with coverage of, like the Massachusetts drug testing lab scandal ~10 years ago where a state employee was basically colluding with prosecutors to put accused drug offenders in jail, and a bunch of other like... low-brow but pulpy sensationalist stories.
Then about 10 years ago the paper took a strong right shift. It always was *more to the right* than the Boston Globe, they hired more sensationalist staff and they tended to write more populist right wing stuff, but it really went in hard on national right wing politics, and now the paper is just a joke... it's all garbage all the time.
It's self-perpetuating too. Like, they publish garbage so they attract garbage writers who then publish more garbage and then it's seen as a job you can get for writing garbage so it attracts more garbage, ad nauseam.
