The NYT has 4,320 employees. If one of them spat on you, never apologized, and denied he did so, would you then judge every employee of NYT the same as you judge that one person?

Edit for clarity, since I'm getting downvoted: My point is that the analogy is not great. You can judge one person for their actions directly towards you. It isn't necessarily reasonable to judge a large number of people by the actions of a single person or small subset of the group, especially when the actions of the NYT are not directed at you specifically, which is pretty different to someone spitting on you.

The Tesla story referenced above is a perfect example. NYT reviewer tells a story about how inadequate the Tesla is and how he ran out of charge and had to be towed. Tesla logs show that he essentially rigged the test drive to get the results he wanted. Tesla calls this out and the NYT basically stands by the story.

You're right that the NYT has a lot of employees. If this were one guy writing a bad review, and the NYT took some disciplinary action against him, wrote a retraction and wrote a new article, then I wouldn't hold it against the NYT and I would probably increase my respect for them. They had a problem, employee did bad work, and they corrected it - that's good.

Instead, they just stood by the bad work and kept on without doing fixing the core issue. "It's just one person" doesn't really make sense because it's actually the whole organization not correcting problems originally caused by one person.

Put another way, if they're willing to lie and district to get a more sensational car review, what else are they willing to lie about? Who knows, perhaps they'll lie about some country having weapons of mass destruction to help trick the country into a pointless war. Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme - obviously they'd have to be extremely far gone to do anything like that.

The NYT wants to lend credibility to all its stories, even if I don't know the particular journalist that wrote the story. If I were to judge NYT journalists independently, the brand would suffer in result.

But regardless of that, the decision to not apologize and admit they lied was an editorial one. It was their choice to die on this hill.

it's really more than one person... there is the journalist but it's the editor that wrote the response and the editor manages several journalists. it's really the nyt's culture and their incentives... it's a system that would promote someone that is incentivized to defend their integrity when they're clearly wrong.

Sure, and you'll notice that I didn't say there's no problem at the NYT, or that the organisation as a whole should be exempt from the actions of some set of it's staff.

I'm just saying that the analogy to an (offensive) action by a specific person, toward a specific person, is a poor analogy for the actions of some subset of a large organisation, which almost certainly isn't directed at a specific person.

And I doubt many people would equate the actions of the NYT with literally being spat on.

He is right to blame the org and “paint them with the same brush” as errant employee if they do not own up to their mistakes; especially if it concerns something that is part of their main product. Can you imagine some tech company having a data breach because an employee was careless and NOT admitting to the breach? People lose their jobs for that kind of mistakes, not get a pat on back.