Readers slam The New York Times for 'sympathetic' profile of a suburban neo-Nazi

AP Photo/Steve Helber

White supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

• The New York Times faced immediate backlash over a profile of a Nazi sympathizer.
• The paper addressed the criticisms in two separate stories.

The New York Times faced backlash over the weekend for publishing what critics said was an overly sympathetic portrait of a suburban neo-Nazi.

On Saturday, the New York Times published a profile online by reporter Richard Fausett of Tony Hovater with the headline "In America's Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door."

The piece depicted Hovater as an average American adult who liked the 90s television sitcom "Seinfeld" and thriller "Twin Peaks," ate at Applebee's and Panera Bread, and was "polite" with "Midwestern manners [that] would please anyone's mother."

Critics immediately blasted the Times, wondering why the paper profiled a relatively obscure white supremacist, and saying it normalized Hovater, who participated in the neo-Nazi rally earlier this year in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In the profile, Hovater stereotypes Jews, shares memes positively depicting Nazi Germany, dismisses facts about the death toll from the Holocaust, and describes Adolf Hitler as "a lot more chill" about gays (a popular, though factually inaccurate, theory among some on the right).

The online backlash was swift

The piece also had its defenders

Some said the profile was effectively terrifying, and that it was not sympathetic to Hovater's beliefs.

The Times responded

The Times acknowledged the dustup in two separate stories.

Fausett penned a first-person essay about his frustration trying to figure out what motivated someone to become a neo-Nazi in a separate piece on Saturday. The Times also changed the online headline of the story to "A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland," and removed a link from the original story to a webpage that sells Nazi armbands.

And in a response to reader comments, editor Marc Lacey both defended the piece and apologized for offending readers, saying the paper "agonized over the tone and content of the article."

"The point of the story was not to normalize anything but to describe the degree to which hate and extremism have become far more normal in American life than many of us want to think," Lacey wrote. "We described Mr. Hovater as a bigot, a Nazi sympathizer who posted images on Facebook of a Nazi-like America full of happy white people and swastikas everywhere."

He continued:

"We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That's what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do."