There really is a lack of diversity at the New York Times.
AP Photo/Richard Drew
Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 1/06/17
Download
Three weeks ago, Liz Spayd, the public editor of the New York Times, wrote an opinion piece in her own newspaper decrying the lack of diversity among Times reporters who covered the 2016 presidential campaign. Only two of 20 reporters assigned to the campaign were black, she laments. There were no Asians and no Latinos.
Ms. Spayd goes on to say that the lack of ethnic diversity at the New York Times is emblematic of the universal lack of ethnic diversity that plagues nearly the entire American newspaper industry.
‘Diversity’ is, of course, one of the most holy words in the liberal liturgy. It ranks right up there with ‘social justice’ as one of the most fundamental tenets of the liberal faith. To say that anything or any organization lacks diversity is to utter a severe condemnation.
The liberal faithful believe that the ethnic makeup of every institution and every business – save for such institutions as the NFL and NBA which are both majority black, and save for think tanks and lefty charities comprised 100 percent of pasty white liberals – should “look-like-America.” This is to say that the statistical ethnic distribution of the people that comprise a business or an organization should mirror to a decimal place the statistical ethnic distribution of the country as a whole.
To the extent that any organization’s employee census deviates from this mathematical ideal is, to the liberal high priests, manifest evidence of institutional racism.
Like much that flows from the Left, it’s pure baloney. To the extent that African Americans and Latinos are under-represented in big city newsrooms, it’s highly unlikely that it’s because of newspaper management bias against blacks and Latinos. It’s more likely because an insufficient number of qualified blacks and Latinos are interested in working for a newspaper. This is particularly likely to be true of late, when everyone of every race knows that the newspaper industry is dying.
To the extent that a lack of diversity is contributing to that decline, it’s certainly not a lack of ethnic diversity, it’s a lack of ideological diversity.
Today’s newsrooms are so monolithically liberal that all who work in them are utterly blind to the blatantly and overwhelmingly biased product that they produce. Out of that blindness, they have forfeited the trust of their readers. Of this, there is no better example than the New York Times.
Thus when Gallup reports that more than two thirds of Americans distrust the so-called ‘mainstream’ media, reporters, editors and managers at the Times simply dismiss it as evidence of just how ignorant and unsophisticated those rubes in ‘flyover country’ really are. There’s never even a fleeting moment of introspection.
Ms. Spayd, if you truly want the Times’ newsroom to “look like America,” you’ll call for the Times to relentlessly recruit reporters and editors until something close to half of the newsroom staff willingly admits to voting Republican.
That would not only ‘look like America,’ Ms. Spayd, it might just help save your paper.
Diversity is the problem in America, not the lack there of. Hiring people because they are of one race or the other is not right because it bases everything entirely on what color your skin is and not what you can or can not do. We need to go back to hiring people based on what they can actually do for the company they are being hired for.
You are spot on Mr. Gleiser that there is indeed a complete lack of “ideological diversity”–meaning in the case of America’s newspaper of record (so-called) they are most surely lacking in any meaningful number of conservatives and republicans on their staff. Many other newspapers sadly have the exact same problem, and that, is, the problem in a nutshell.
As our recent Presidential election proved, the American people, had had enough of the liberal bias entrenched in journalistic circles, and intelligently voted for Donald Trump. WE THE PEOPLE, of The United States of America, rejected the jaded opinions of the liberal main stream media as reporting the opinions does not meet the threshold of reporting the facts.