NYT defends openly racist opinion writer

Apparently it’s tougher than it looks to find editorial writers without a history of racially charged tweets, judging from the recent experience of The New York Times.

Six months after giving the heave-ho to an opinion writer over her insensitive social media comments, The New York Times is standing by Sarah Jeong, its newly hired lead technology scribe on the editorial side, despite the racist skeletons in her Twitter feed.

In a statement, the newspaper chalked up her anti-white blasts, such as “white men are bull–-,” as a reaction to “frequent online harassment.”

“Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment,” said The Times. “For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”

Her hiring was met Wednesday with a spate of criticism over more than a dozen hostile tweets, most from 2014, in which she referred to “[d]umbass f–ing white people” and declared, “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”

Times officials acknowledged that they were aware of her social media history before they offered her the editorial board post, saying it came out during the vetting process.

More