This reporting appears as one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
The “rogue employee” who “hacked” the New York Post’s website last week and published a series of racist and lewd phony headlines has broken his silence, explaining his actions to Confider and calling them “the utmost betrayal.”
On Thursday morning, Post digital producer Miguel Gonzalez had what he described to Confider as “an emotional tantrum” and, with relative ease, used his credentials to access the paper’s content management system to post the vile fake headlines, which included a few calling for the slayings of Joe and Hunter Biden as well as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“I let my own stupidity get the best of me,” Gonzalez told Confider on Sunday afternoon from his home in New Jersey, where he had carried out the “hack.”
The incident, he stressed, was not at all politically motivated but rather a reaction to troubles in his personal life. “I deserved to get fired for a very volatile, irresponsible, and disgusting action and an utmost betrayal of the New York Post,” he said. “I disrespected them at that moment. It’s my responsibility to now apologize.”
Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Confider newsletter here and have The Daily Beast media team’s stellar reporting sent straight to your inbox every Monday night.
The headline hijacking caused confusion and panic within the Post as editors worked to determine who was behind it, according to multiple people familiar with the situation. The paper initially described the incident as a hacking, but within an hour, our sources said, it became clear it was an inside job and Gonzalez was soon fired.
The 25-year-old started working at the Post in 2019 as his first job in journalism right out of college. He described his grueling shifts for the website—during which he’d build stories and insert photos—as intense to the point where he was responding to Slack messages from editors while he was in the bathroom.
https://news.yahoo.com/ny-post-hacker-breaks-silence-223052847.html
