MEMO TO NEW YORK TIMES: 1984 WAS NOT A HOW-TO BOOK. It’s almost as if re-writing history and secretly purging material when they go off the rails is something embedded in The New York Times’ culture.

As you’ve seen elsewhere, The Old Gray Lady has been called out for revisionism and flawed research inherent in its controversial “1619 Project.” The Times, true to form, circled the wagons and “stood by” the work. Except they didn’t. In fact, historians and journalists pointed out that The Times used undisclosed “stealth” corrections to significantly alter the original piece:

“The announced intention of reframing the country’s origin date struck many readers across the political spectrum as an implicit repudiation of the American revolution and its underlying principles […] Rather than address this controversy directly, The Times—it now appears—decided to send it down the memory hole—the euphemized term for selectively editing inconvenient passages out of old newspaper reports in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.”

You’d think that is bad enough. Nope. It gets worse. Bret Stephens, the house “conservative” so hated by his fellow Times editorialists was raked over the coals by the News Guild unit representing those journalists. As Glenn Greenwald explained:

“THE NEW YORK TIMES GUILD, the union of employees of the paper of record, tweeted a condemnation on Sunday of one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens. Their denunciation was marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company “rules” against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people, is to woefully understate the case[…] They are demanding that their own journalistic colleagues be silenced and censored. What kind of journalists plead with management for greater restrictions on journalistic expression rather than fewer?  (Emphasis added).

Now, the big reveal: the union has deleted the tweet Greenwald refers to. It never happened:

This is to me, as a journalist, media ethicist and lawyer, indicative of a culture that is more Orwell than Murrow. It’s in their DNA. Allow my colleage to explain. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

**DISCLOSURE: I was for many years a member of the then-called Newspaper Guild, now the “News Guild.”**

UPDATE (From Ed): This is the since-deleted tweet from the Times’ union that Smith is referring to:

(Updated and bumped.)