Journalist Zaid Jilani says union tweet represents employees ‘policing their colleagues’

Journalist Zaid Jilani discussed a recent tweet by the union representing New York Times employees following a column by Bret Stephens critical of colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The Stephens column critiqued the accuracy of The 1619 Project, a series produced by Hannah-Jones for The New York Times Magazine. In response, the Times Guild tweeted a condemnation of the Stephens column as an attack on a colleague.

The union has since deleted the tweet and said it went out without authorization.

“With more and more media unions, you see them sort of policing their colleagues or treating it like a modern university campus in some ways rather than doing the traditional bargaining over wages, benefits, so on and so forth,” Jilani said in a HillTV interview Monday. “I think it’s kind of a white-collar union trend that’s happening… I don’t think steelworkers are doing this, I don’t think fast food workers are doing this.”

“I think a better approach to this would have been for The New York Times to have a more honest, more open, transparent debate amongst itself,” he added. “It would have been nice if The New York Times had held a forum on the subject where alternative views were posed and processed and maybe Nikole Hannah-Jones would debate with someone like Bret Stephens.”