New York Times, of all Places, Faults Justice Thomas for ’Favoritism in Hiring’

Plus, the Biden-Obama-Clinton show at Radio City Music Hall

Justice Thomas. Photo by Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.

“Charges of favoritism in hiring” is the front-page, above-the-fold phrase that the New York Times put in a subheadline to justify a news article about Justice Clarence Thomas’s decision to hire a graduate of Antonin Scalia Law School, Crystal Clanton, as one of his four law clerks for next year.

The article jumps to cover an entire broadsheet page inside the newspaper, with five photographs. The gist of it is that “for Justice Thomas’s critics, his selection of Ms. Clanton as a clerk is blatant favoritism, if not nepotism,” because Clanton lived with Thomas and his wife for almost a year and was described on their holiday cards as a “near daughter” and “nearly adopted daughter.”

There’s a side issue in which Ms. Clanton “was previously accused of sending racist text messages,” but her former boss says she was the victim of a smear by a former colleague who fabricated the messages. Thomas doesn’t seem to think she is a racist.

So that leaves the “favoritism, if not nepotism” issue. Is it wrong to hire a “near” relative for a one-year clerkship? Well, the New York Times—whose publisher and chairman, A.G. Sulzberger, is a fifth-generation member of the family that controls the newspaper—sure is on the case.

The current, 2024, Times proxy statement lists 13 director nominees, of whom four—A.G. Sulzberger, Arthur Golden, David Perpich, and Margot Golden Tishler—are members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family. The directors earn fees of about $250,000 a year in cash and stock. Perpich earns about $1.7 million a year and A.G. Sulzberger earns between $3 million and $5.7 million a year.

One of the director nominees, Margot Golden Tishler, is the daughter—not the “near daughter,” but the actual daughter—of Michael Golden, who was vice chairman of the New York Times and worked there for more than 30 years.

Margot Golden Tishler is slated to replace Hays Golden, another Ochs-Sulzberger family member who is stepping down from the board. Hays Golden is Michael Golden’s nephew.

The proxy reports that in addition to the Ochs-Sulzberger family members who are directors, another fifth-generation family member, Michael Greenspon, “was employed as global head of the Company’s licensing and print innovation group” for which he “was paid $490,387 in 2023 and received time-vested restricted stock units with a grant date fair value of $30,000.”

Now, you can say that the Times is a private company and can do whatever it wants. It’s actually a publicly traded company, with non-family shareholders. In its disclosure documents to those non-family shareholders, the company says its Class B stock is controlled by a family trust whose primary objective is to perpetuate the newspaper as “unselfishly devoted to the public welfare.” Unselfish devotion to the public welfare sounds pretty much like what Americans expect from the government, too.

To the extent the Times is attacking Thomas for “favoritism in hiring,” it’s demanding that the justice run his chambers in a different way than the Times manages its own operations. Maybe that would work better, maybe it wouldn’t. It could be that Justice Thomas figures he has a better shot at getting a useful clerk by hiring someone he already knows well than he would by hiring a total stranger.

The Times article isn’ t even a scoop—it’s a follow-up of a similar attack published in the New Yorker on February 29, 2024, under the headline “The Scandal of Clarence Thomas’s New Clerk.” The author of that piece is Jane Mayer. A descendant of one of the original Lehman Brothers, Mayer has made a career of attacking Thomas going back to his confirmation hearing, which was in 1991.

If the real issue isn’t hiring someone for a public-service-oriented job with something other than fully arms-length distance, why is the Times going after Justice Thomas? It’s for the same reason ProPublica went after him and the Times has been hassling him for driving too fancy a motor coach and having upwardly mobile friends. There’s a conservative Supreme Court majority that has been ruling on issues like abortion and race-based college admissions preferences in ways that the liberal press doesn’t like. All of a sudden, the Times has investigative reporters focused on the judicial branch.

If you think this latest New York Times story is really about “charges of favoritism in hiring,” you probably think A.G. Sulzberger would have gotten named publisher of the New York Times at age 37, replacing his own father, even without any family connections.

“The Thomases harbor deep anger at the mainstream media,” Mayer reports in the New Yorker. Who can blame them? Wouldn’t you, too, if it were a bunch of fifth-generation Ochs-Sulzberger heirs blaming you for “favoritism in hiring”?