New York Times public editor Liz Spayd called out the liberal newspaper for lacking diversity even as it acts as the self-appointed diversity police in a column this weekend titled “Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It.”
“Only two of the 20-plus reporters who covered the presidential campaign for The New York Times were Black. None were Latino or Asian,” Spayd wrote. “That’s less diversity than you’ll find in Donald Trump’s cabinet thus far.”
Spayd listed several examples where the Times policed the diversity (or lack thereof) in the technology industry, public schools and police departments, among others. “The newsroom’s blinding whiteness hit me when I walked in the door six months ago,” Spayd added.
Spayd’s language echoes that used by the Times’ editors in an editorial last summer titled, “The G.O.P.’s Surreal Diversity Show.”
“The unrelenting whiteness of the Republican National Convention — perhaps the whitest in 100 years — is stunning in itself. Donald Trump has tried to mask its segregationist flavor by strategically featuring African-American speakers to colorize the hall and validate the pronouncements of white speakers like Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, who have ceaselessly lectured black people on criminality,” the editorial wrote.
The Times has run similar opinion pieces like the ones titled, “Trump: Making America White Again” and “What Whiteness Means In The Trump Era.”