Former New York Times journalist reports he’s ‘disgusted’ by newsroom cancel culture, says newspaper enabled it

Nellie Bowles landed what she thought was her dream job as a New York Times reporter in 2017, but when the progressive “movement,” as she described it, took over the newsroom, a cold reality set in.
Bowles, once a staunch progressive and a proud member of the so-called “movement,” is the author of the new book “The morning after the revolution“, which documents how the leftist ideology that has gained so much momentum in recent years hasn’t really worked in practice. And that includes inside the Times.
Bowles was working at the Times during the fallout from Sen. Tom Cotton’s now-infamous op-ed that sparked an open revolt among staff in June 2020, many of whom took to social media and posted the phrase “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
“I wasn’t going to tweet the tweet that we all had to tweet that day, and that was really the final moment for me in the movement within the newspaper,” Bowles told Fox News Digital in an interview. “Because once people saw that I wasn’t going to tweet the tweet, that for them was choosing a side. And we all had to speak up together and try to get the editors fired… We all had to shout together to get them fired. “Everyone who touched that thing shot it and I just wasn’t willing to do that.”
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Free Press’ Nellie Bowles spoke about the “movement” that hit the New York Times in an interview with Fox News Digital. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Dropbox/Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
Cotton’s op-ed, titled “Send in the Troops,” argued for then-President Trump to deploy the military to quell the George Floyd riots that wreaked havoc in cities across the country.
Days later, after intense backlash both inside and outside the Times newsroom, the paper’s management said the op-ed “did not meet our standards and should not have been published.” As a result, two Times Opinion staff members, James Bennet and Adam Rubenstein, were eventually ousted from the Times. Another staff member, James Dao, was reassigned to a different department.
“I lost friends immediately, friends who demanded that I publish [the tweet]” Bowles said. “Anyone who didn’t post that was seen as very suspicious from that day on. “In hindsight, it was crazy.”
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Another moment that deeply impacted her was the February 2021 ouster of veteran Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr.
“It was very dirty the way they smeared it,” Bowles said. “He was someone I really respected and his work I really respected. For example, this is a guy who was covering AIDS when everyone was afraid to talk about it. This guy was doing in-depth reporting. He’s incredible and he had given his life for institution and in many ways I was having the kind of career I thought I would have as a longtime Times person.”

Donald McNeil was the longtime New York Times science reporter and one of the star journalists who covered the coronavirus pandemic before being forced to resign in 2021. (Getty Images)
McNeil, who had worked at the Times for 45 years, came under fire in the newsroom after it was reported that he had used the “n-word” in a discussion about the slur itself on a college educational trip he led in 2019. Resigned shortly after.
“To see this man slandered and to see how casually they did it, and slandered in such a way, it’s like a deep shame… they’re trying to do it like that for their children and grandchildren. He will be embarrassed. They are trying to frame it as if this man yelled an insult. It’s simply not true. It’s false,” Bowles said.
“And seeing that had a big impact on me, not just in a selfish way like, ‘I don’t want to let them do that to me.’ Basically, when the movement wants to find out something you’ve done wrong, they’ll find something. There’s no one good enough pure enough to survive a complete investigation of the movement.
“Part of me was also just disgusted by an institution that would allow someone to be treated that way. And for someone who had given their life to the institution to be treated that way. And that really hit me hard. And it helped me become less naïve. about the nature of any for-profit enterprise,” he continued.
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As Bowles details in her book, she herself admits to participating in cancel culture, and even playing a pivotal role in canceling one of her own friends.
“Making a cancellation is a very warm and social thing to do,” Bowles writes. “It has the energy of a shared meal. Everyone contributes what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends. What you’re doing is a positive thing, and it doesn’t feel so much like a battle as it does to nurture love for friends, By stoking the warm fire of a cause, you have real power when you do it and with enough people, you can overthrow someone very powerful.”
In the book, Bowles recalls how he tried to cancel one of his Times colleagues who had a reputation in the building for holding unorthodox views. She “failed spectacularly” in the cancellation attempt and instead “fell in love immediately.”
That colleague was Bari Weiss, then the Times’ opinion page editor and now Bowles’ wife.
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“At that time, I was very useful at the newspaper, I was a good progressive, and I knew that Bari was a dissident liberal and… I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just met her and I fell in love,” Bowles told Fox NewsDigital. “And I liked the debates. I mean, one debate we had at the beginning of our relationship, which we still have, is about Gawker. Was Gawker good? Was Gawker a force for good? And I was very pro-Gawker. I thought, in general, force for good. And she argued that it was a force for evil. And that was funny to me! It’s okay if there is a little friction in relationships and if there is a little difference. They have to be completely in unison with each other, and it’s so boring!
“I had a friend from college come up to me and tell me that I had to publicly disown Bari, that to stay good, if I want to keep dating her, I had to publicly disown her. And I was like, ‘Oh! what are you talking about?! In what world?!’ It was crazy”.

Bari Weiss, wife of Nellie Bowles, accused former colleagues of bullying her in a scathing resignation letter to the editor of The New York Times. ((Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images))
The animosity toward Bowles’ new love didn’t just come from old college friends. It even came from his own Times colleagues. In her book, Bowles recounts having drinks with her editor and other members of her staff one night and the editor accused her of dating a “fucking Nazi.”
“I felt a little awkward and uncomfortable, and I didn’t know what to do,” Bowles said. “It was so strange that this was happening, and it was so strange how quickly you go from good to very, very bad. And it was surreal. Like I felt a little bit out of my body for a moment.” . And then the moment passed and that editor thought all my ideas were pretty bad after that night.”
“The hard thing is that I liked her. And I still like her on some level… What’s crazy, what’s really crazy is that, even after that, even after an editor called my girlfriend a Nazi and my colleagues agreed and they laughed, even after I thought, ‘I can still stay here, I can still work here.’ I mean, the excitement once you’re inside one of these places and the level of commitment to it. people are willing to come is quite wild.
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Weiss resigned from the Times in July 2020, weeks after the internal eruption over Cotton’s op-ed that engulfed her op-ed colleagues.
In a scathing open letter to Times editor AG Sulzberger, Weiss said he faced constant harassment for having different views and declared: “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its main publisher.” .
Bowles left the Times the following year.
“My parents were very supportive, but they were also like, ‘You guys are going to quit?!? And you guys are starting a Substack called BariWeiss.Substack.com?!? What? Like that sounds crazy!’ “Bowles recalled. . “Even Bari’s family was surprised at first. It was a really strange moment. I think a lot of people in 2021 felt like the hangover from the height of the revolution. And obviously, we were far from being done with the revolution, but “We all realized Mind you, oh wow, there’s been a paradigm shift we’re in. “There is a movement that is happening now, and we have to find our balance in all of this.”

An op-ed written by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., sparked an unprecedented outcry from New York Times staff that resulted in the dismissal of several editors. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Bowles says he is able to forgive those like his former editor, as it is difficult to “resist a mob when it is forming”, particularly in such a hyper-politicized era. But between the growing pushback he received for wanting to investigate stories his bosses didn’t want him to cover (like Seattle’s disastrous CHAZ autonomous zone in 2020) and open animosity toward his partner, he had to withdraw from the “movement” that plagued the newsroom. Times editorial staff.
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“Obviously, becoming frustrated with my reporting but also falling in love with it, I realized that this movement required a purity that is not possible and that is not healthy and that does not contribute to a good life,” Bowles said. “I think any movement you’re in that says you can only be friends or fall in love with someone who is exactly like you is an unhealthy movement.”
The Times did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Bowles and Weiss married in 2021 and launched The Free Press in 2022. Bowles began her book tour about eight months pregnant and her second child was due in late June.
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