Pinch Sulzberger Responds to Backlash Over Jill Abramson's Ouster

In denial.

At NYT, "After Criticism, Times Publisher Details Decision to Oust Top Editor":

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, released a statement Saturday afternoon detailing his decision to fire the newspaper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson. He was responding to a growing controversy over accusations by Ms. Abramson’s supporters that gender played a role in her dismissal.

The decision to remove her, announced on Wednesday, “has been cast by many as an example of the unequal treatment of women in the workplace,” Mr. Sulzberger wrote. Instead, the statement said, it “was a situation involving a specific individual who, as we all do, has strengths and weaknesses.”

The statement by Mr. Sulzberger came three days after he told a shocked newsroom that Ms. Abramson had been replaced by her No. 2, Dean Baquet. During the announcement, Mr. Sulzberger delivered brief remarks and said, “There is nothing more that I want to say about this.” But Saturday’s statement, which was about 500 words long, is the second public comment that he has made since her ouster.

Driving Mr. Sulzberger’s increasingly public posture has been an escalating debate over pay equality and the treatment of women. Two articles in The New Yorker have said that Ms. Abramson’s base salary when she took the job in 2011 was lower than that of her male predecessor, Bill Keller. On Sunday, NBC’s “Meet the Press” is scheduled to have a round table on “the equal pay debate” and is expected to discuss Ms. Abramson.

On Saturday, Mr. Sulzberger said, as he did in an earlier public statement, that Ms. Abramson’s pay package in her last year in the job was 10 percent higher than Mr. Keller’s.

“Equal pay for women is an important issue in our country — one that The New York Times often covers,” Mr. Sulzberger wrote. “But it doesn’t help to advance the goal of pay equality to cite the case of a female executive whose compensation was not in fact unequal.”

Ms. Abramson has not made any public statement since her dismissal, and has not responded to messages and emails seeking comment. Her first remarks on her dismissal could come on Monday, when she is scheduled to give the commencement address at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, N.C.

Whatever. It was handled badly.

ICYMI, see Jonathan Tobin's response earlier, at Commentary, "Judge the Times the Way It Judges Others":

It is a terrible thing to see any veteran journalist get turned out on the street in this kind of manner and I don’t think anyone—except perhaps for Thomas—would be justified in exulting about has happened to Abramson. But for the Times itself, I have no compassion or sympathy. The Times deserves to be judged and condemned as the classic example of liberal hypocrisy.

Ain't it the truth.