The New York Times is defending the creator of its controversial 1619 Project after she doxxed another reporter — and then wiped her entire Twitter history, including messages she had first been challenged over.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, 44, tweeted out Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium’s cell number after he asked her about old tweets where she spelled out the N-word amid uproar over the ouster of a veteran Times colleague getting fired for once using the word.
Sibarium said the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist kept his number online for 71 hours before deleting it — with a jokey exchange with another reporter suggesting she was aware it was up.
He said it was “more annoying than alarming,” with “some nasty voice messages but nothing serious.”
A spokeswoman for the Gray Lady defended Hannah-Jones, claiming to the Free Beacon that she had “inadvertently posted Aaron’s number when she tweeted an email she received from him.”
“She’s deleted that tweet,” Eileen Murphy emailed at 9:28 p.m. Monday — just four minutes after the Free Beacon last saw its reporter’s number still online.
By the next night, Hannah-Jones had not just deleted the offending tweet but her whole Twitter history — including the 2016 N-word message she had first been asked to elaborate on.
She claimed it was purely coincidental and had nothing to do with the controversy.
“Some of you may be aware, as I said this on here more than once, I auto delete my tweets at regular intervals now,” she tweeted Tuesday night.
“This is an informal writing platform — it’s called social media. My permanent work gets published in articles. I don’t need to delete entire history over one tweet,” she insisted.
“I know people want to take credit for things that have nothing to do with them, but if I had already deleted a particular tweet, why would you think I’d need to delete all my unrelated tweets?
“I’m ever amused by this place,” she said of the Free Beacon’s report on her vanishing feed.
Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson told National Review that “the behavior and the Times’s disingenuous response speak for themselves.”
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from the New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.
The Times says it “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”