Washington Post advertising salesman David DeJesus is disgusted that nobody else reported new developments with the News Guild study of huge race and gender pay differences at the liberal broadsheet which he helped put together.
“There is a problem with discrimination in my building and nobody else is talking about it,” said DeJesus. “That is part of the problem.”
DeJesus, currently suing the paper for employment discrimination, declined to name names. But his comments were an obvious rebuke to media blogger and News Guild member Erik Wemple.
Nearly four weeks ago, Wemple told the Washington Gadfly he would immediately look into a News Guild communique demonstrating that the paper’s previous claim that pay gaps are due to non-discriminatory factors, like experience, is bogus.
But no wonder he is trying to deep-six his own union brothers’ message. The News Guild email from last month shows that the Washington Post official Wemple quoted favorably when the study was released in May was incredibly deceitful.
“Deputy managing editor Tracy Grant’s reported comments in the news have focused on the [study’s] shortcomings, particularly in regard to its lack of data on experience.”
But the Post has “since confirmed that it has virtually no data to track experience, other than employee-submitted job application resumes.”
And they don’t use the resumes to keep such metrics anyway. In other words, Wemple let Grant claim the union study was flawed based on supposed exculpatory factors that were really a mirage. She claimed the Guild failed to weigh information on employee experience that the paper provided.
Except not it turns out WaPo not only didn’t provide such information they don’t have it. They only track employee tenure, not their overall career experience as Grant implied to Wemple.
So there you have it. The guy who writes a “reported” media blog is refusing to report his own union’s rebuttal to management spin that he earlier repeated unquestioningly.
Meanwhile, the National Association of Black Journalists is also keeping quiet about the new pay gap developments. But, hey, if NABJ won’t object to white male WaPo reporters making an average of 20 percent more than everybody else maybe they are not such a racially exclusive organization after all!