Inside Condé Nast’s Gaza war

As horrific details about Oct. 7 spread last year, higher-ups at media companies debated whether they should join the chorus of corporations releasing statements condemning the attack.

Then-chief revenue officer Pamela Drucker Mann argued that Condé needed to say something and that employees were calling on the company to do so. Others weren’t so sure. While he did not object to releasing a statement, New Yorker top editor David Remnick raised some concerns about the ramifications of releasing one.

Ultimately, the company’s statement pleased no one. Condé was one of the only news media companies to explicitly condemn Hamas in its statement. But some staff leaked to the New York Post their complaints that it didn’t go far enough. “People are pissed because it was a terrorist attack and Stan’s note is like, ‘Oh, both sides are being hurt,’” a Condé Nast insider told the Post, referring to a memo sent by the company’s head of human resources.

The war’s reverberations also had an immediate impact on the company’s talent pipeline.

Last year, then Vogue editor-at-large Gabriella Karefa-Johnson was supposed to appear at Vogue’s Forces of Fashion, a signature event for the magazine that brings together top designers and A-list celebrities. It was intended to be a major moment for Vogue and one of its rising young stars, who made history in 2021 as the first Black woman to style a Vogue cover.

But after Oct. 7, Karefa-Johnson publicly criticized Israel over its retaliatory bombing of Gaza on her Instagram, in comments that were screengrabbed and written up in the New York Post. In a meeting, editor-in-chief Anna Wintour asked her not to participate in the panel, a decision that one person at Condé Nast clarified was “mutual.” Karefa-Johnson resigned shortly thereafter — a choice she told The New York Times in February was entirely hers, but was in part a “material action of solidarity” with the Palestinians.

Karefa-Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the last year, certain publications have been a particular source of friction within the legacy magazine publisher.

Since the 2016 election, Teen Vogue has been an unabashedly progressive and at times proudly socialist part of the media company, a conscious decision that staff have attributed to the strong political views of its young readers. In previous flare-ups of violence, the magazine has drawn the ire of pro-Israel media commentators, who scoffed at its tone and argued that it had “determinedly pursued an anti-Israel agenda.”

As the war intensified after Oct. 7, the publication ran sympathetic pieces pointing out the impact of military action on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and how the conflict was playing out in the 2024 presidential campaign. It chronicled the crackdown on anti-Israel protests across college campuses in the US, as well as the celebrities who have come out in support of the Palestinians or a general ceasefire.

Teen Vogue’s pro-Palestinian bent has particularly irritated the talent booking side of the business, which has taken issue with some of the writing and told other staff within the company that it is damaging relationships with celebrities. Earlier this year, Vogue entertainment director Sergio Kletnoy sent an email to Wintour, CEO Roger Lynch and Duncan that was deeply critical of Teen Vogue’s writing about Gaza. In February, Siri Garber, the president of Platform Public Relations, a Hollywood PR agency that represents celebrities who have been on Teen Vogue covers, sent a private letter to Condé Nast criticizing Teen Vogue’s coverage.

“There is growing concern within the industry, and many like me, who feel that Teen Vogue is one of the most influential outlets for the young generation - and we feel that Jewish representation has been wiped out completely by Teen Vogue in terms of its coverage,” she said.

The publication also rubbed up against the company’s Content Integrity Group, which handles standards and fact-checks most non-New Yorker articles published by Condé Nast publications. The department objected to Teen Vogue’s inclusion of the words “apartheid” and “genocide” in articles about Gaza earlier this year, and at various points held up pieces about the war, believing that the language was too biased against Israel.

Condé’s struggles over Gaza played out behind-the-scenes, but they echoed some of the themes of the tensions that played out in public last week at CBS News. The news network was embroiled in an internal feud stretching up to its outgoing non-executive chairwoman, after a contentious interview between CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil and Ta-Nehisi Coates over his new book about Israel and Palestine resulted in a weeklong debate about editorial coverage of the war.

Coates remains one of the most well-known journalists and public intellectuals of the 21st century, and his provocative writing about race helped lay the groundwork for the 2020 reckoning about racial inequalities in American life. It’s notable that his return to American public conversation comes at a time when much of those post-2020 changes face an intense backlash.

The CBS incident was also a public reflection of an ugly and uncomfortable rift that some people I spoke with felt had played out at Condé Nast: a rift between the nonwhite staffers who have expressed support for Palestinians or advocated editorially for more critical coverage of Israel and the white Jewish staffers who’ve objected.

On Friday evening, New York Times reporter Ben Mullin reported that a group representing Southwest Asian and North African Paramount employees sent an email to CBS CEO George Cheeks criticizing Dokoupil and praising Coates.

“In the interview, Coates was informing viewers of facts cited by both human rights groups and officials in Israel, and what he had seen in his own experience: That Israel is an apartheid state,” the group said. It described the conversation as “an eye-opening exposure of how the state of Israel runs” and “important for all viewers to see.”

The war in Gaza has tested some of the systems put in place after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. That year, Condé announced that it was establishing a company-wide anonymous tip line to raise concerns about any business or workplace misconduct. It was a direct reaction to the complaints about diversity that played out over months at Condé Nast.

But over the last year, the tip line has taken on a different tenor, according to people familiar with complaints. Often, it has been used to level allegations of antisemitism against staff — particularly nonwhite staff — who have expressed sympathy for the Palestinians.

To some readers, it may seem somewhat silly for media consumers to care about the prose with which fashion publications write about a messy and horrifying geopolitical conflict.

But with young people driving much of the opposition to the war, it matters how media aimed at younger audiences covers the war. And a year on, the war’s impact on public life has permeated the American news cycle so much that even attempts to avoid controversy have pointlessly backfired.

On multiple occasions, Vogue and Vanity Fair’s decisions to edit Palestinian flags out of pictures of celebrities have prompted complaints from those same stars. In May, for example, Guy Pearce criticized Vanity Fair France for editing an image of him to remove a Palestinian flag pin.