#The New York Times’ outrageous, arrogant hypocrisy on who gets to be ‘anonymous’

How exactly does The New York Times decide who gets to remain anonymous? Our question is prompted by its move to reveal the full name of an anodyne blogger — threatening serious disruption of his life — apparently just because it can.

The blog is The Slate Star Codex, written by a Bay Area psychiatrist who shares only his first and middle names, Scott Alexander. For years, he’s written on a smattering of topics, from psychiatry and pharmacology to tribalism in the era of social media and Marxism’s failings as a science.

His posts early on proved prescient about the course of the coronavirus, which is what prompted a Times reporter to come calling — and announce that the story would reveal his full name, because that’s the paper’s rule.

Which prompted Alexander to kill the whole thing, taking down all past posts because, as a practicing psychiatrist, he can’t have patients reviewing those writings. The only post still up is “NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog.”

Hmm. The paper recently reported on a personality from the socialist podcast Chapo Trap House while using only his pseudonym, Virgil Texas, and even granted anonymity to one of the ’casters’ girlfriends.

Heck, it’s run anonymous opinion pieces, such as the self-declared senior Trump official who claimed he/she and several like-minded colleagues were trying to thwart the president’s agenda. The paper’s rationale: The writer’s job “would be jeopardized.”

Alexander shares that fear, that “my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.” Not to mention, “I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down.”

The Times’ standard, Alexander tells us, means “the only people who can [safely] express opinions or participate in civil society are people getting paid to do that, i.e., professional journalists” — or those


allowed anonymity by the pros.

We hear this case is the subject of a hot internal Times debate. Let’s hope the forces of supreme arrogance lose out.