What do you do when, nearly 45 years into your career as a journalist, you find yourself the top reporter on the biggest story in a generation, and then you are driven out by your own colleagues over a single word?
If you’re Donald G. McNeil Jr., you move to the beach and take up fishing. You buy a car that can go off-road. You learn to be stoic, but you also get a little bit more defensive, perhaps refusing to agree to talk to reporters by phone because you have “a tendency to pop off,” your “thoughts are sometimes libelous,” and you “can’t afford a libel lawyer.” (Know thyself, as the oracle said.) Also, you keep reporting, on the Web site Medium. And you write a book.
Early in that book, The Wisdom of Plagues: Lessons Learned from 25 Years of Covering Pandemics, McNeil writes, “I have a history of getting in trouble by speaking my mind.” It’s a bit of an understatement. “The McNeil thing is the most explosive scandal I’ve seen at the paper. It’s chaos,” one unnamed New York Times reporter told media journalist Joe Pompeo in February 2021. Since few people allow themselves to remember the 12 crazy months that ensued from March 2020 in very close detail, let’s back up.
McNeil had been a global-health reporter at The New York Times for more than two decades when, in 2020, he suddenly became one of the most prominent people on planet Earth: chief coronavirus reporter at the most important media organization in the world, looked to by me and almost certainly you for advice on masking, for a sense of how afraid to be, and for somewhere to stop doomscrolling and click. “I worked a fascinating but obscure beat for 25 years, and then the biggest story of my life fell in my lap when I was 65” is how McNeil puts it.
But within a year of his rise to global celebrity, he became the target of one of that year’s many “reckonings” that seem in hindsight to have been about something other than social justice.
The short version of l’affaire McNeil goes like this: An organization called Putney Student Travel offered trips to high-schoolers in partnership with The New York Times. For several thousand dollars, instead of summer camp, your teen could get a travel-and-volunteering experience chaperoned in part by veteran journalists, thus combining a luxury experience with a résumé-building item for college-admissions purposes.
McNeil, a brilliant if gruff old-school journalist driven by genuine curiosity about the world and hatred for the suffering of its poor, may have been a great candidate for being one of these chaperones once. But he had apparently not gotten the memo about some generational changes. On a 2019 trip to Peru, a student asked McNeil about an incident in which a classmate had been punished by her school for having used the n-word as a 12-year-old. McNeil, asking for clarification, said the word.
As he would later recount the events in a 2021 Medium post, McNeil believes that someone on the trip reported the incident to Putney Student Travel, which made its way back to The New York Times, which gave him a “slap on the wrist, a letter in my file and no more student trips for me. (As if I was begging to go on more....)”
Two years passed. Then, McNeil woke up one January morning in 2021 to news that the Daily Beast was running an article about his alleged racist misdeeds, which had since multiplied to include the claim that he had mocked a traditional shaman the student group had visited. McNeil, a former labor activist and negotiator for the New York Times Guild from the days when unions tried to prevent management from firing fellow employees, now found himself at odds with more than 150 of his colleagues and fellow Guild members who co-signed a public letter alleging he was guilty of racism.
“Our community is outraged and in pain,” it read in part, over McNeil being “given a prominent platform—a critical beat covering a pandemic disproportionately affecting people of color.” One week later, McNeil resigned under pressure.
(Around the time of McNeil’s resignation, a spokesperson for The New York Times told The Washington Post, “Our system is based on second chances and progressive discipline, and learning from one’s mistakes. As more recent information about his behavior emerged, it became clear that Donald had not learned from his prior mistakes and could no longer effectively work in our newsroom.”)
“I worked a fascinating but obscure beat for 25 years, and then the biggest story of my life fell in my lap when I was 65” is how McNeil puts it.
“All the racism charges,” McNeil told me in an e-mail this month, had been “explained or debunked, except that I had said the forbidden word (in private, in response to a student’s question, at a time when George Floyd was still alive.... and at a time when the Times itself used the word fairly regularly). But the Times wouldn’t let me tell the Beast my side of the story. So bizarrely un-Timesian.”
Whatever Timesian means, or meant, to McNeil, the actual Times was clearly a-changing.
Last month, McNeil’s erstwhile colleague, former New York Times opinion-page editor James Bennet, who was pushed out in 2020 after a staff uprising over an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, advocating that the National Guard be ordered to stop rioters and looters, wrote a long and damning remembrance in The Economist’s 1843 magazine describing that episode from the inside. “The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist,” Bennet wrote.
(In response to Bennet’s essay, A. G. Sulzberger wrote, “I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about The Times.”)
When I ask him about Bennet’s piece, McNeil says he “loved it” and tells me that he and Bennet had compared notes over a drink this past April. “I sent him a note saying how much I liked it, and he was nice enough to say that our talk helped him resolve to write it. Some people felt his tone was defensive. I disagree—I wanted all the details. I’m a journalist. I don’t want the version synthesized by the Times or by other reporters—I want to make up my own mind.”
“I thought he was absolutely right to print the Tom Cotton op-ed, and it needed an inflammatory headline,” McNeil says. “Cotton was an influential U.S. senator espousing a highly controversial view. That’s exactly the kind of thing that belongs before the eyes of educated Times readers.... Cotton’s ‘errors’ were a red herring, an excuse to shove James out. They were semantic and could have been fixed with a correction.”
“Another aspect,” McNeil reflected, “really bothered me. Young employees claimed the Cotton op-ed ‘made them unsafe.’ My reaction was: Who becomes a journalist expecting safety? That’s the job. You usually won’t be paid much, you’ll occasionally take crazy risks—but you’ll have a more interesting life than your friends who went to law school.”
Though a longtime NewsGuild backer, McNeil said he “strongly disagree[s] with its new ploy of claiming everything is a workplace-safety issue,” adding that “they even tried that, half-heartedly, in my case, saying working with me could make some employees ‘feel unsafe.’ That was bizarre. I can understand fear of being shot by a National Guardsman, but I never came to work armed with anything more lethal than sarcasm.”
The New York Times’s coronavirus reporting won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, thanks in large part to McNeil’s work. McNeil has written that representatives from the paper had taken the precaution of contacting the Pulitzer jury and board to reassure them they had already looked into the matter. And yet “I wasn’t invited” to The New York Times’s in-house celebration, he told me, except via a streaming link sent an hour before the newsroom ceremony. Is McNeil bitter? “I tend to just wipe my nose and move on,” he wrote to me.
That’s easier said than done, of course. He notes, “After I resigned, I heard from inside that A.G. [Sulzberger, chairman and publisher of The New York Times] ordered the Bret Stephens column about me killed but had the editorial-page editor take the blame, and that many letters to the editor were deep-sixed.” (A spokesperson for The New York Times said opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury decided not to publish the column. “I have an especially high bar of running any column that could reflect badly on a colleague and I didn’t feel that this piece rose to that level,” Kingsbury has said.)
McNeil also claims “they refuse to change the misleading headlines that say I ‘Used a Racial Slur.’ That’s a blatant violation of the Times’s own fairness standards.”
“I guess,” McNeil says, reconsidering, “that answers your earlier question as to whether I’m bitter. I am, yes, but I knew the Times. I was hurt when top management turned on me, but not shocked.” When he started at the paper, as a copyboy in the mid-1970s, The New York Times could be counted on to stand by its employees, at least in public. “There were consequences: corrections ran, people were taken off beats, people were fired. But they weren’t publicly flogged,” he says.
“Certainly there were no press releases saying ‘Don’t worry—we’re going to flog him, as soon as we finish investigating’—which is more or less what A.G. [Sulzberger] and Meredith [Kopit Levien, C.E.O. of the New York Times Company] said in my case,” he adds. “And no anonymous quotes to Vanity Fair that ousting me was ‘the end of the asshole era at The New York Times.’ (A serious flaw in the epidemiology of asshole detection.)
The New York Times’s coronavirus reporting won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, thanks in large part to McNeil’s work. And yet “I wasn’t invited” to The New York Times’s in-house celebration, he told me, except via a streaming link sent an hour before the ceremony.
“That never would have happened under A.G.’s grandfather [Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times from 1963 to 1992]. The place was run by grown-ups,” McNeil says. “And the Guild back then demanded that its members be treated with respect. It’s a great newspaper … run by a second-rate company overseen by a third-rate dynasty. All dynasties ultimately devolve from William the Conqueror to Chucky 3. But there hasn’t been a really big mess for a couple of years now, so maybe they’re growing up.”
Some bitterness notwithstanding, McNeil is more focused on the present and the future than on the past, particularly as it concerns the thing that he spent so long reporting on: pandemics. His overall feeling is that individuals and governments are not nearly concerned enough about disease. In terms of the coronavirus, he says he is “back in pre-2019 mode.” He hasn’t worn a mask since February 2022. He would wait until he got a fever before taking a coronavirus test, and if the result was positive, he would take Paxlovid. “Other than that, I don’t panic,” he says. “I’m going to die of something, but probably not Covid.”
The story of the pandemic is still evolving, though. Just recently, communications obtained by journalists revealed that back in 2020, “some top scientists had gotten together at the pandemic’s outset to mislead me about their own lab-leak fears,” McNeil says. “I had to do a rapid rewrite” to the relevant book chapter. (In 2021, Apoorva Mandavilli, one of the health reporters who took over the coronavirus beat after McNeil, tweeted (and later deleted), “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.”)
McNeil’s primary occupation since 2021, despite three job offers in journalism that he says he turned down in part due to low non-union pay, has been writing The Wisdom of Plagues. The new book combines history, a critique of America’s pandemic response, and memoir—the story of a college rhetoric major who, as a foreign correspondent in South Africa, was so horrified to see the way the international health-care and economic system consigned H.I.V.-positive South African babies to death unnecessarily that he wound up spending the next quarter-century covering disease.
McNeil, who considers himself not partisan, lets his distaste for the likes of the Bush and Trump administrations come through clearly while crediting them with their successes in disease prevention when it’s called for, and he offers a handy comparison of AIDS, coronavirus, and mpox policy.
“It’s a great newspaper … run by a second-rate company overseen by a third-rate dynasty. All dynasties ultimately devolve from William the Conqueror to Chucky 3.”
The Wisdom of Plagues concludes with a series of practical proposals for future pandemics. Banning religious vaccine exemptions or public funding of medical-school education may be dead-letter ideas, politically speaking, but McNeil makes a persuasive case for each.
I was a fan of McNeil’s New York Times reporting, and I have read his Medium posts with relish. He presents facts reliably and opinions forcefully, and writes clearly, all in such a way as to be edifying to read whether you agree or disagree—a type of person that journalism will always need but increasingly lacks.
I ask McNeil what he thinks overall about the way the younger American generations sometimes seem to focus more on words than on material concerns. Here, the wisdom of plagues gives way to the wisdom of age:
“About six months after I was ousted, I was stopped on the sidewalk in Brooklyn by a Black Times colleague your age who introduced himself and then told me he thought what happened to me was ‘total bullshit.’ We went out for a beer. About a year ago, I had an email from a young person who signed the group letter denouncing me, who apologized because she later got Twitter-mobbed and accused of racism and now knew how it felt.... I don’t really blame anyone who signed that letter, and I don’t blame the teens who talked to the Daily Beast. Mob justice comes easily to kids—viz. Lord of the Flies. I blame the Times managers who were supposed to be the grown-ups in the room.
“Also,” he adds, “when my peers were in their 20s, they believed sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll would bring about world peace. Now we’re the boomers who ruined everything for you guys. Wait 40 years. [Future generations] will tell you where you fucked up.”
Nicholas Clairmont is a writer based in Washington, D.C., and the Life & Arts editor for the Washington Examiner magazine