A reporter for The New York Times took down a LinkedIn post calling for “truly radical” climate action after colleagues complained that it may breach the outlet’s ethical code, according to The Daily Beast.
David Gelles, the NYT’s climate correspondent, authored the post in question after participating in the recently-concluded World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, where he was joined by numerous other business, political and media elites from around the world, according to The Daily Beast.
Gelles later took down the post after several of his colleagues at the NYT apparently complained that his words may have amounted to political advocacy instead of objective reporting.
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“After the year that was the hottest in recorded history, with climate change ravaging every corner of the globe, I implored a room full of CEOs, diplomats and NGO leaders to step up their urgency and begin considering truly radical political and economic interventions,” Gelles wrote in the post, which he also shared to his Instagram profile, according to the New York Post. Gelles also wrote that it is “time to begin imagining what a society truly transformed will look like” and “to start identifying the hurdles that make disruptions to the status quo appear uneconomical, impractical or politically untenable.”
“The hour is late, and it’s incumbent on those with the capital and the clout to start deploying the whole of their resources toward the climate crisis,” Gelles added in the post.
Gelles’ post on climate policy is the latest example of NYT staffers pushing the boundary between objective reporting and outright political advocacy.
In the first half of 2023, an internal conflict raged within the outlet as 200 staffers wrote an open letter criticizing the NYT’s occasionally critical coverage of sex changes and gender transitions for young people. Numerous other staffers, including some of the outlet’s highest-profile reporters, defended the NYT’s coverage of that particular issue.
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“As he has produced some of The Times’s most vital and wide-ranging journalism on the politics and global impacts of climate change, David’s approach to reporting has always been impartial, unflinching and incisive,” a spokesperson for the NYT told the New York Post. “While he brought this same ethos to his role speaking at an event at the World Economic Forum, subsequent social media posts about the event may have been misunderstood to convey something other than impartiality, and as such have since been deleted.”
The NYT did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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