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By Emmanuel Orjih
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Dear Ms. Ruth Maclean,
On January 18, 2026, The New York Times published your article titled “The Screwdriver Salesman Behind Trump’s Airstrikes in Nigeria.” The piece has since been republished and widely circulated in Nigeria and internationally.
Your article implicates named U.S. Senators, a sitting American President, and a Nigerian civil society organization in matters touching on war, public safety, and mass-casualty claims. For that reason alone, it demands the highest standard of accuracy and fairness. This response is therefore offered as a formal right of reply.
The Times’ own ethical journalism standards are explicit. Accuracy is described as the “foundation of credibility.” Careful checking of facts is a fundamental responsibility. Where questions of accuracy or fairness arise, they are to be investigated promptly and errors corrected without delay.
Measured against these standards, which you have publicly affirmed, your article falls short. What is asserted in your article is not what is shown.
Your piece advances a grave accusation. Through both its headline and its narrative structure, it asserts that President Donald Trump authorized airstrikes in Nigeria on the basis of misleading or unserious information supplied by a Nigerian civil society actor. This is not incidental framing. It is the organizing claim of the article. Yet no evidentiary chain is offered to substantiate it. No decision pathway is shown. No documentary link is established between the cited civil society reports and the specific military action referenced. Extraordinary claims were made, but extraordinary proof was not offered.
The article relies instead on insinuation.
In doing so, it introduces a fundamental contradiction. It hypocritically faults others for inadequate verification while failing to meet the verification burden required for its own headline claim. By as early as the third sentence, in a manner similar to how a magician pulls a rabbit out a hat, your article labels an entire body of work, its reports, its data, and its ideas as “misleading,” deploying a term of serious consequence without ever presenting, or even attempting to present, any single evidence whatsoever to support your position.
Your framing choices deepen the problem. Readers are introduced to Emeka Umeagbalasi primarily as a “screwdriver salesman” operating a “tiny shop” in an Onitsha market. That description is not factually false. But it is not neutral, and it is not innocent. Your description goes into granular details worthy of an A-list Hollywood movie as it strategically substitutes socioeconomic imagery for professional record and allows that substitution to perform the predetermined work of discrediting.
Mr. Umeagbalasi is a university-trained criminologist. He holds multiple degrees in Criminology, Security Studies, Peace Studies, and Conflict Resolution. Alongside human-rights legends Ayo Obe, Abdul Oroh, Olisa Agbakoba and Chima Ubani, Emeka Umeagbalasi was part of the Civil Liberties Organization at a time when Nigeria’s human-rights movement was at its height, and when the CLO represented its most credible and consequential expression. For more than three decades, he has worked continuously in civil-society documentation and advocacy. This context is largely absent from your presentation.
I am myself a rural smallholder yam farmer. But I am also a Wharton MBA and ex World Bank. If one were to introduce me solely as a yam farmer while discussing global finance, that would mislead readers and diminish the seriousness of the discussion. Especially if done knowingly. Reduction of this sort is deliberate. Its effect is prejudicial. The most plausible explanation for such framing is narrative intent.
That intent matters because the reduction is not merely personal. It is instrumental. By diminishing the professional standing of the source, the article retroactively discredits U.S. lawmakers who cited Emeka Umeagbalasi’s work and assigns personal culpability to President Trump. That is an extraordinary chain of implication to construct without standing atop any evidentiary pillars, and while engaging in deliberate reductionism of the principal character.
In this respect, the article departs from The New York Times’ own standard that journalists must work “solely for the benefit of readers.” To any objective observer, it is very clear you were not working solely for the benefit of readers.
It is also essential to situate this discussion within Nigeria’s empirical reality. Nigeria does not publish comprehensive, disaggregated, or authoritative data on killings arising from insecurity. The government is not merely an incomplete source of such data; it is often the least reliable one. Attacks occur in remote areas. Many go unrecorded. Casualty figures are contested across the board. This is not unique to any one researcher or organization. It is the structural condition under which all documentation in this space occurs.
Western audiences accustomed to official datasets may not immediately grasp this reality. Nigerian journalists and researchers do. In such an environment, civil-society documentation is necessarily iterative, contested, and subject to challenge. That does not render it unserious. It makes it indispensable.
Indeed, the fact that multiple U.S. administrations over many years have cited or engaged Nigerian civil-society reporting reflects this reality. It is why researchers are consulted at all. To single out one actor for methodological constraints endemic to the entire field, without explaining those conditions to readers, misleads by omission. This is especially so when the actor in question has been severally praised and engaged by institutions such as the Red Cross and the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program over the years.
The consequences of such framing are not abstract. Nigeria is a fragile security environment. Words shape perceptions. Perceptions shape policy. When a global newspaper of record enters this space, it does more than describe reality. It influences it. Errors do not remain rhetorical. They translate into incentives, delegitimization, and risk for people operating on the ground, including risk to life. And limb. When powerful institutions speak, consequences follow.
You may believe you are just rearranging words. You are not. You are rearranging consequences. Not because you are an individual journalist, but because you are writing under the authority and weight of The New York Times.
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The New York Times’ standards also caution journalists to avoid not only conflicts of interest, but even the appearance of such conflicts. In the week preceding publication of your article, publicly reported disclosures indicated that the Nigerian government committed approximately $9 million to international lobbying and communications efforts. No allegation is made here regarding influence or editorial compromise. But the proximity in timing between those disclosures and your article’s publication heightens the obligation for transparency and evidentiary discipline when drawing such conclusions that carry heavy geopolitical consequences and human costs.
This concern is also personal and immediate for me. I am currently engaged in public-interest work in Nigeria focused on fiscal transparency and the protection of low-income citizens under the country’s evolving tax regime through the initiative, StopThisTax.org. That work depends on serious engagement, credible information, and an environment in which civic voices are assessed on substance rather than reduced by narrative shortcuts. When global reporting flattens complex actors, the cost of responsible advocacy rises for people like me working with vulnerable populations. And if it rises for people like me, it exponentially skyrockets for the vulnerable populations themselves. Your misadventure comes at a heavy cost, Ms Maclean
This brings us to the central question of good faith.
Where reporting choices so consistently favor a single narrative outcome, the publication of a right of reply ceases to be discretionary. It becomes the primary test of editorial good faith. The question is no longer whether scrutiny is permissible, but whether it is being conducted honestly and proportionately.
The core issue can be stated plainly:
“Behind Trump’s Airstrikes in Nigeria” is a serious accusation from NYT.
The article provides no decision-chain proof for it.
It faults others for verification failures while failing to verify itself.
The result reads less like accountability journalism and more like a hatchet job. When accusation replaces evidence, credibility collapses.
The remedy is straightforward. Publish this right of reply with comparable prominence. Correct what requires correction. Clarify what was implied without proof. That is how The New York Times lives up to its own words: “It is our policy to correct our errors, large and small, as soon as we become aware of them.”
I am copying relevant NYT editors and your senior colleagues, including your publisher, to ensure this concern is institutionally visible, in the hope that The New York Times will indeed move to protect and to rectify, by immediately activating its publicly stated commitment to accuracy, fairness, and correction.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Emmanuel Orjih
The Steward, StopThisTax.org
cc:
Standards Editor, The New York Times
Executive Editor, The New York Times
Managing Editor, The New York Times
International Editor, The New York Times
Reader Center, The New York Times
Publisher’s Office, The New York Times
