NY Times Adds Automatic Editor’s Note To Every Diaa Hadid Submission

Prior to her work with the Times, Hadid wrote for Electronic Intifada, a site known for its anti-Israel and antisemitic prejudice.

New York, January 26 – The paper of record will from now on address recurrences of overt and frequent journalistic bias from one of its Mideast correspondents by implementing an automated script that attaches an Editor’s Note to every story submitted by her, the organization’s Public Editor announced today.

Margaret Sullivan, the “readers’ advocate” at the New York Times, wrote on her official blog today that to save time, the company will now flag all Diaa Hadid articles when they come in, and each of those articles will always feature an accompanying box listing the factual inaccuracies, lies by omission, one-sided accounts, and anti-Israel assumptions behind the article.

“Following near-constant complaints over the accuracy and apparent prejudice of Ms. Hadid’s writing, the Times has decided for efficiency’s sake to use a simple automated script that includes an Editor’s Note feature for every story of hers we publish,” Sullivan wrote. “Good writers are not so easy to find and retain, and I believe the Times is making a genuine effort to balance journalistic ethics and integrity with very real personnel challenges.”

Hadid, who formally began writing for the New York Times last March, has racked up an array of articles that required the issuance of subsequent corrections by editors, corrections that point to the writer’s systematic minimizing of Palestinian culpability for violence and magnifying of alleged Israeli misdeeds. Prior to her work with the Times, Hadid wrote for Electronic Intifada, a site known for its anti-Israel and antisemitic prejudice. With the new automated script, the paper hopes to retain its correspondent’s talents and fluency in both Arabic and English while trying to filter out the obvious anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli slant that suffuses her writing.

Also factoring in the decision to retain Hadid and add disclaimers to her stories instead of dismissing her outright for compromised journalistic integrity is the current changeover at the organization’s Jerusalem bureau. Bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, under whose leftist-slanted watch Hadid made her mainstream journalism debut, has been promoted to the International Desk in New York. A rapid shift in Jerusalem personnel at this delicate time would be disruptive, said Sullivan, and the automated Editor’s Note, while somewhat clumsy, will have to suffice, at least for the time being.

Hadid was unavailable for direct comment, but tweeted that “anonymous sources” were claiming the blow to her integrity  is actually a Zionist plot to undermine the noble Palestinian struggle against colonialism.

(h/t @JudgeDan48)