David Mastio, a former USA Today deputy editorial page editor, called out the newspaper for allegedly demoting him over a tweet in a Thursday op-ed for the New York Post.
Mastio tweeted in 2021 that it is women, not people, who get pregnant, he wrote. His employers allegedly informed him that he must delete his tweets because they were “causing pain to the LGBTQ activists and journalists on our staff.”
The idea that people who are not women can get pregnant is an “opinion,” Mastio wrote in the op-ed.
“I thought I was authorized to have opinions,” he continued. “The idea that women are the ones who get pregnant has gone from scientific fact to opinion to outright falsehood in the blink of an eye. Nevertheless, it remains my opinion that women get pregnant. Women, after all, come with all the accoutrements — vaginas, uteruses, ovaries and mammary glands.”
He then said USA Today is hiring people pushing a “narrow ‘woke’ ideology” that is foreign to their audience, while conservative writers are being pushed to the side in order to prioritize a liberal agenda.
I’m partially to blame because I didn’t speak up publicly until the axe fell on me. I was demoted for tweeting that women are the people who get pregnant. A braying mob of my colleagues demanded I be fired for making the workplace “unsafe.”
— David Mastio (@DavidMastio) June 24, 2022
“Gannett’s top editors and publishers are filling the company with a cadre of young college graduates who share a ‘narrow ‘woke’ ideology’ that is alien to the value of most of its readers,” he said. “In a closely divided America, Gannett has a grand total of one local conservative staff columnist. There’s one conservative editorial page left in the network.” (RELATED: Twitter Suspends Commentator For Opposing Trans In Military, Tying ‘Extreme Muslim Beliefs’ To Honor Killings)
“In recent years, I’ve watched good conservative editorial pages in Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Oklahoma City wink out to be replaced with bland corporate liberalism. There are zero conservative editorial cartoonists left in the network,” he continued.
Over the last decade @Gannett has purged the conservative voices at its local papers. There used to be dozens of feisty conservative opinion pages, often with a staff of 1 or 2. Now there are none.
— David Mastio (@DavidMastio) June 24, 2022
With little to no conservative content in their opinion sections, Mastio accused USA Today’s diversity committee of intolerance for purging any content that does not fit their ideology.
“The few controversial conservative columns that make it through the gauntlet must be matched with content more amenable to the diversity ideology. Staffers in regional design centers — the people who lay out the papers — have the ability to kill conservative columns that local opinion editors select.”