Peters departs biz desk for national team at NY Times

Jeremy Peters, who has been covering media at The New York Times, is leaving the business news team to join the paper’s national desk to cover campus culture and politics.

He was the lead reporter covering the landmark defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, which resulted in a record $787.5 million settlement. Along the way, he helped break stories about what Fox hosts and executives said during their private depositions and the news of a racist text message from Tucker Carlson that precipitated his firing.

Peters has covered three presidential campaigns (2012, 2016 and 2020) and spent two years as a correspondent for The Times on Capitol Hill. After the 2016 election, the Washington bureau enlisted him to cover the seemingly improbable bond between Donald Trump and the conservative movement, which became the basis for his first book, “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.”

His first assignments for The Times came when he was a senior at the University of Michigan and helped out the bureaus in Chicago and Detroit as a stringer.

With that experience on his résumé, he landed a reporting gig at The Virgin Islands Daily News, based on St. Thomas, where he stayed for two years and learned the bread-and-butter of local journalism, covering subjects as varied as the territorial legislature, late-night shootings and the island’s carnival festivities.