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The Times, they are a-changin’ their mind.
“Channel 5” host Andrew Callaghan is opening up about The New York Times’ last-minute decision to pull his op-ed, giving Fox News Digital exclusive details on how it all unfolded.
Callaghan revealed he had written a planned opinion piece for the Times that was set to be published the same day he posted Hunter Biden’s defiant response to Melania Trump’s lawsuit threat. However, plans unraveled when the paper abruptly pulled the plug.
“It really wasn’t much of a critical piece. It just addressed the lawsuit. I’ve been working with [The New York Times] for like three weeks. We had near-daily meetings. I was just really excited. And then 24 hours before it was supposed to come out — and it was supposed to be timed exactly with the release of the Hunter Biden lawsuit response — they just said, ‘Hey, sorry, we have to pick our battles here, we can’t put this out,’” Callaghan told Fox News Digital.
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The independent journalist, whose YouTube channel has over 3 million subscribers, told Fox News Digital that a member of The New York Times’ editorial staff informed him that his op-ed was cut. Callaghan believes the decision to kill his piece was made by someone higher up, and not by anyone he was working with.
The op-ed was set to focus on “the pitfalls of new media,” and was meant to be a “survival guide” for new journalists navigating the treacherous waters of social media algorithms that, Callaghan noted, all too often reward “salacious clickbait” and “reactionary, fear-mongering” content.
Yet, after multiple rounds of edits, the Times informed Callaghan that they were pulling his article.
“It was very disappointing, not only for me, but my mom subscribes to it and so does my grandma. I told them, ‘Like, yo, this s— is going to come out.’ And then they were just like, I don’t know, just this feeling of like, ‘What?’” he said.
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Callaghan attributes the Times’ decision to the “climate of fear” created by the Trump family, which has aggressively pursued litigation against media outlets in recent months.
President Donald Trump reached a $16 million settlement with Paramount after he sued, alleging that an episode of “60 Minutes” committed election interference by deceptively editing former Vice President Kamala Harris to make her sound more coherent in an interview which aired prior to the 2024 election.
The Daily Beast also recently withdrew an article that alleged that Melania and Trump met through Epstein, which relied on comments from author Michael Wolff made on a podcast.
Though Callaghan is an independent journalist who earns his living primarily through Patreon, he hasn’t been immune from the Trumps’ ire.
Melania threatened Hunter Biden with a $1 billion lawsuit over the controversial claims he made on Callaghan’s program last month. The former “All Gas No Brakes” host called the amount “preposterous.”
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“The Trump administration has had tension and has received some pretty rough treatment from a lot of these mainstream outlets throughout the past eight years. So, it kind of made sense why Trump would want to settle the scores with his historic ‘fake news enemies.’ But I didn’t expect new media to be a part of this purge,” Callaghan told Fox News Digital.
Hunter, who was issued a wide-ranging pardon by his father after he was found guilty on federal gun and tax charges, alleged that Donald Trump and the first lady were introduced to each other by disgraced New York financier Jeffrey Epstein on an August 5 “Channel 5” episode.
This accusation prompted Melania to threaten legal action against Hunter, calling on him to recant his claims and get Callaghan to pull the episode off the internet. Callaghan said he felt that Trump was trying to “leverage pressure on me through Hunter” via the lawsuit threat.
“Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are like so wide and deep,” Hunter told Callaghan.
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Melania’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, wrote that he would sue Hunter for $1 billion unless he retracted his “false, disparaging, defamatory, and inflammatory statements.” Hunter refused to acquiesce to the first lady’s demands in a subsequent interview on the program, and cited Wolff as the source of his claims.
“F— that. That’s not gonna happen,” Hunter told Callaghan in an August 14 interview.
“I have this to say to them: if they want to sit down for a deposition and clarify the nature of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein — if the president, the first lady, want to do that, and all of the known associates around them at the time of whatever time that they met – I’m more than happy to provide them the platform to be able to do it,” Hunter told Callaghan.
Callaghan told Fox News Digital he had pushed Hunter’s response forward two days to coincide with the publication of his op-ed and even declined to give a comment to any other publications in order to be a good “team player” with the Times. He also said he’s disappointed by what he perceives to be legacy media cowardice in the face of political attacks against the fourth estate — a phrase often used to describe the press.
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“The press is afraid of the president? The whole purpose of the fourth estate in the first place was to hold the other three branches of government accountable. That was the only point of it. It was supposed to be that safeguard against government overreach and press suppression,” Callaghan told Fox News Digital.
Despite the setback, Callaghan said he enjoyed the experience of working with the Times, and empathized with their predicament.
“It’s not as if The New York Times has an infinite war chest of money to go to war with the president’s team, because the president and those people, they have unlimited resources. But overall, it was a good experience working with the New York Times, like to kind of be able to pull back the curtain and see what it’s like. They were actually really courteous and nice to me,” Callaghan said.
“Editors in Times Opinion are in conversation with a large number of writers all the time on potential guest essays, but these discussions don’t always result in publication for a number of reasons including scheduling, news relevance or when the submissions don’t meet The Times’s standards. We don’t have a comment on why any one submission was or wasn’t selected for publication, but any fair reading of our report will show we haven’t shied away from guest essays that challenge the Trump administration,” a representative for the New York Times said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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