Following the recent article in the New York Times investigating conditions for workers who constructed NYU Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Campus, new allegations are surfacing regarding media censorship in the UAE.

At 6:29 p.m. Gulf Standard Time, New York Times Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard tweeted a screenshot of an email from the International New York Times Company’s Dubai office. This email was sent to subscribers to the paper edition of the International New York Times in the UAE. The email, dated May 20, 2014, stated that Tuesday’s edition of the newspaper was not printed “due to an article on labour relations in the region which our printing and distribution partners at the Khaleej Times deemed too sensitive for local printing.”

The email said that the edition would be fully available to subscribers online.

The edition left unprinted contained the original investigation, which had been printed in the May 20 edition of the International New York Times.

New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said in a statement that Tuesday’s paper was not printed because of the local printer’s objection to one particular article, which Murphy told Jim Romenesko was the report on workers at NYUAD.

“We’ve been in touch with our local printer in the UAE to express our profound disappointment in this decision,” Murphy said in the statement. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this has happened in the UAE.”

 

Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that the original investigation had been printed on the Monday, May 19 version of the International New York Times, and that the unprinted edition contained a different story about NYUAD. The Gazelle regrets this error.