NYT’s Own Staff Member Blasts The Publication For Lack Of Diversity

Liz Spayd is the Public Editor of the New York Times. I wouldn’t recognize her, if not for her appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.

She actually surprised me. Carlson got her to concede. She recognizes that NYT has a major problem with liberal bias. She also admits that the entire publication’s staff members are giant hypocrites.

In an op-ed for the paper titled “Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It,” Spayd slams NYT for keeping diversity tabs on everyone else but ignoring their own shortcomings.

ONLY two of the 20-plus reporters who covered the presidential campaign for The New York Times were black. None were Latino or Asian. That’s less diversity than you’ll find in Donald Trump’s cabinet thus far. Of The Times’s newly named White House team, all six are white, as is most everyone in the Washington bureau.

Ya hear that? Let me repeat that. That’s LESS diversity than you’ll find in Donald Trump’s cabinet so far. Ouch.

Spayd even went department by department and arrived to some shocking conclusions.

Traveling to other departments, Metro has only three Latinos among its 42 reporters, in a city with the second largest Hispanic population in the country. Sports has one Asian man, two Hispanics and no African-Americans among its 21 reporters, yet blacks are plentiful among the teams they cover and the audience they serve. In the Styles section, every writer is white, while American culture is anything but.

 

The executive editor, Dean Baquet, is African-American. The other editors on his masthead are white. The staff with the most diversity? The news assistants, who mostly do administrative jobs and get paid the least.

Talk about awkward.

The Times can be relentless in questioning the diversity at other institutions; it has written about the white ranks of the technology sector, public schools, police departments, Oscar nominees, law firms, legislatures, the major leagues and the Ivy League. Fixing its own problems comes less easily.

Spayd said everyone at NYT claims to care deeply about this issue of diversity, but the concern ends there. Nothing ever changes.

They begin by saying this is an industrywide problem, not just a New York Times problem. That is true, unquestionably. On the other hand, it’s also true that data from the American Society of News Editors shows that The Times is less diverse than large papers like The Washington Post (31 percent), The Los Angeles Times (34 percent) and The Miami Herald (41 percent). The Times is more diverse than The Boston Globe (17 percent) and The Philadelphia Inquirer (14 percent).

 

Given The Times’s ambitions across global cultures and languages, it would seem that instead of being a lagger, it would insist on being a leader — and make that an explicit goal. I see no sign that this is happening. Nor do I get the impression from many journalists of color I spoke with that they believe progress is on the horizon.

This concerns her.

This issue has challenged most every newsroom manager, myself included. The newsroom I came from, The Washington Post, is quite diverse, but its leadership is heavily white and male. At The Times, on the other hand, people of color seem shut out of all sorts of coveted jobs: the top digital strategists, the top managers, the precious ranks of cultural critics, the White House press corps, the opinion columnists, the national politics jobs — all are overwhelmingly white.

 

It is possible to change this. But The Times will need more humility, introspection and openness than has been its habit in the past.

I personally couldn’t care less about filling diversity quotas. Choose the best person for the job. I don’t care if it’s a man or woman. I don’t care if the individual is black, white, Asian or Hispanic. Pick the most qualified person, period.

While I fundamentally disagree with Spayd on this diversity quota nonsense, I appreciate that she’s calling out her own publication and recognizing that NYT– the one publication that loves to hound everyone else for their supposed lack of diversity– is comprised of giant hypocrites.