Hacker News Reader

Comment by netaustin | Hacker News Reader

After Jared Kushner originally bought the New York Observer, I was hired to lead the tech team, which I did for a year and a half in house then for three more as a vendor. He asked me, out of band, to blackhole articles critical of his commercial real estate colleagues and I complied.

View on HN

You should've used a throwaway.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I've been open about this on Twitter and to a team that wrote a profile of him in the wake of the election. That a newspaper publisher would participate in an administration that labels the press the enemy of the people is a total betrayal of the journalists and other media professionals who worked hard for him for years.

For posterity, Buzzfeed News reported this: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stevenperlberg/jared-ku...

CNN just put this on their front page. Did they ask you for comment?

https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/07/media/jared-kushner-new-yor...

They did not.

Not questioning your story a bit, I'm sure it's true. But shouldn't we all be a little concerned that CNN is posting a story as fact without verification or even talking to the person making the claims? The article even implies heavily that they've talked to you.

That scares me.

The number of people who led that team for a year and a half as an employee and three years after as a vendor is probably sufficient to identify them regardless of the account used.

Beaconhack.com

The way you handled this does not speak well of your character. You should have: 1. Preserved the articles in a safe place. 2. Resigned. 3. Given the articles to another publication and state what happened. What I see here is that you were concerned first about your own finances. That is what makes you look bad. Ethics first, finances second.

Giving the articles to another publication would constitute unethical behavior as well though, considering he didn’t own the content and could not claim any authorship over it, though perhaps alerting authors or editorial staff could have spurred that result. And obviously a question about the most unethical thing a person in this field has done isn’t going to be something that speaks well of their character. I don’t think it speaks well of a person’s character to judge someone for the single most unethical thing they’ve done in their career.

> The way you handled this does not speak well of your character

Given the question asked at the head of the thread, any response for which that was not true would have to be viewed as a kind of humblebrag.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com