The senior White House adviser repeatedly ignored journalism ethics when he was publisher of the New York Observer in 2012, according to BuzzFeed News.
Jared Kushner personally ordered the deletion of New York Observer articles that were critical of his friends and real estate colleagues during his time as the paper’s publisher, BuzzFeed News reported Monday.
Prior to assuming the role of senior White House adviser under his father-in-law President Donald Trump, in 2012 Kushner directed a third party software engineer to remove the content, according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The deleted articles included negative coverage of real estate firm Vantage Properties, now known as Candlebrook Properties, and the company’s president Neil Rubler. One of the deleted URLs appears to have hosted an article about Rubler making The Village Voice’s “worst landlords”of New York list in 2010.
Kushner also called for the deletion of a 2012 article about his friend NBA Commissioner Adam Silver buying a $6.75 million apartment in New York, reported BuzzFeed News.
Austin Smith was the software consultant who reportedly fielded and executed Kushner’s deletion requests. He first wrote about the practice on a Hacker News forum.
“That Kushner, a newspaper owner of all people, would participate in an administration that labels news media the enemy of the people,” Smith told BuzzFeed News, “is an affront to the very notion of the freedom of the press and an utter betrayal of those who worked hard and in good faith for him at the Observer.”
Secretly removing articles from a news site is universally considered a major ethics violation in the journalism industry. Elizabeth Spiers, the former editor-in-chief of the Observer, told BuzzFeed News that she was not aware at the time that Kushner had circumvented editorial leadership to remove articles from the site.
Spiers blasted Kushner in a series of tweets Monday, suggesting he was the “worst possible owner of a news operation.” Some readers questioned how the authors wouldn’t have noticed their articles being removed, but Spiers suggested it was understandable given the sheer volume of stories the Observer published.
I found out a few months ago that while I was the editor in chief of the Observer, Jared was instructing our third party tech provider to delete articles critical of his business associates w/out my knowledge. I don’t have enough choice expletives describe my feelings about that. https://t.co/EYyEn0YIKI
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) August 6, 2018
But if you want to be the worst possible owner of a news operation, vindictively and unethically erasing the work of your own your own (severely underpaid, hardworking) journalists solely to lubricate the volume and frequency of your cocktail party invites is a good way to do it.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) August 6, 2018
To the handful of people asking how journalists wouldn’t notice that 20 or so articles might go missing out of several thousand, weeks after publication: I believe you may have answered your own question.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) August 7, 2018
The White House did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.