The piece also seemed to divide staff, and reignited years-old internal tensions between some younger, more left-leaning members of staff and management.
“People are really upset,” one Times journalist told Semafor.
In a series of posts on Bluesky, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie said, “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi.” On Friday, he deleted his posts, saying they violated the Times’ social media guidelines. Bouie also deleted subsequent posts on Sunday that also seemed to express frustration at the Times’ decision to publish the story, and shared a post that said “NYT & many of its elite white readers are still obsessed with race-conscious college admissions.”
The paper would not comment on whether it had compelled Bouie to delete the posts.
Times columnist Lydia Polgreen did not comment on whether the story was newsworthy, but wrote that as a biracial person with African parents, she easily understood why Mamdani checked a box on his college admissions form identifying as Black or African American.
The New York Times beat us on the Zohran scoop, but we beat the New York Times on the Somali fraud scoop. Make no mistake: although we have significantly fewer resources, this is a competition between peer institutions and, more often than not, we’re beating them to the story.