The Washington Post reports:

The union representing New York Times employees accused the company Friday of targeting employees with Middle Eastern or North African backgrounds in a weeks-long investigation into leaks from its newsroom regarding the paper’s coverage of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel.

In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava said that managers have singled out particular employees — “targeted for their national origin, ethnicity and race” — who had raised concerns about the paper’s reporting for “particularly hostile questioning”

“We demand that The Times cease what has become a destructive and racially targeted witch hunt,” DeCarava wrote in the letter to Times publisher and chairperson A.G. Sulzberger.

In a separate statement sent late Friday to Guild members, union leaders said that Times managers had questioned employees about their involvement in an affinity group for employees of Middle Eastern and North African heritage and “ordered them to hand over the names of all of the … active members, and demanded copies of private text-message conversations between colleagues about their shared workplace concerns.”

The leak probe was launched after the Intercept reported that the Times’s flagship podcast, “The Daily,” had shelved a planned episode about the paper’s major investigative report describing a “pattern of gender-based violence” during the attacks, after staffers and outside critics raised questions about the story’s credibility. [Continue reading…]