BRINGING THE HEAT

NYT Correspondent Nixes Eyebrow-Raising Climate Change Post

David Gelles touted remarks he made at a dinner in Davos about climate change—but some of his colleagues questioned whether he violated the newspaper’s ethics guidelines.

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New York Times climate correspondent David Gelles has deleted a LinkedIn post in which he touted remarks he made at a Times dinner in Davos about climate change.

“After the year that was the hottest in recorded history, with climate change ravaging every corner of the globe, I implored a room full of CEOs, diplomats and NGO leaders to step up their urgency and begin considering truly radical political and economic interventions,” he wrote in the post, which was also added to his Instagram stories.

“Rather than more of the same, it’s time to begin imagining what a society truly transformed will look like, and to start identifying the hurdles that make disruptions to the status quo appear uneconomical, impractical or politically untenable. The hour is late, and it’s incumbent on those with the capital and the clout to start deploying the whole of their resources toward the climate crisis.”

Some Times staffers who spotted the posts and spoke with Confider questioned whether it violated the Times ethics guidelines by crossing the line into advocacy. After Confider reached out to Gelles and the paper for comment, he deleted the post.

“As he has produced some of The Times’s most vital and wide-ranging journalism on the politics and global impacts of climate change, David's approach to reporting has always been impartial, unflinching and incisive,” a Times spokesperson emailed Confider.

“While he brought this same ethos to his role speaking at an event at the World Economic Forum, subsequent social media posts about the event may have been misunderstood to convey something other than impartiality, and as such have since been deleted.”

Gelles did not respond to a request for comment.

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