Donald McNeil gives his side

Donald McNeil is the award winning NY Times reporter who was sacked in 2021 because of his alleged behaviour in 2019 as a scientific expert on a student trip to Peru.

He has blogged in four parts what happened. It seems clear he is guilty of not being woke enough for a group of students who see the world in black and white.

His posts are lengthy but worth reading if you have the time.

Also the woke cancel culture didn’t end with McNeil.

One of the issues around McNeil was whether it was appropriate for him to have used the N word in a non derogatory sense (he was asked a questions about a 12 year old being suspended from school fur using it in a video).

Over at Slate, an award winning podcast host Mike Pesca has been sacked or indefinitely suspended. What was his crime? On an internal slack discussion channel for journalists he expressed the view that in some circumstances a white person can use the N word. Now Pesca never used the N word. He merely expressed a view that sometimes it can be appropriate to use it, such as a direct quote from someone. Anyway that was enough to get him effectively sacked.