McCreesh told Krakauer that leadership at the Times “completely lost their nerve” in the face of “angry backbiting staffers” including some Bennet had brought to the Times. McCreesh said he was “so fucking freaked out” by the mob and remarked that the scene “was like a murder.”
McCreesh said:
“There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” he told me. “And all these angry backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on Slack. And the leadership was so horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve.”
“The worst part was that a lot of the people who were stabbing James in the front were the ones that he hired and brought to the newspaper,” McCreesh added. “It was like Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate or something. Just this sort of horrible moment, and I remember closing my laptop and pouring a huge glass of wine, even though it was at like noon. Because I was so fucking freaked out by what we had just witnessed.”