Marquette Warrior: Real Diversity at the New York Times?

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Real Diversity at the New York Times?

From Editor & Publisher, a rather astonishing document from the New York Times.

From the Credibility Committee of the paper, an admission that the staff of the paper lacks “diversity.”

What’s so odd about that, you might ask? Liberal journalist types are always fretting about “diversity.”

Quite simply, “diversity” here means actually having people with different and diverse political and cultural views.
NEW YORK In a lengthy memo published on the newspaper’s Web site, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, announced several new policies in response to a recent report by the paper’s Credibility Committee. Among them is a fresh attempt to diversify the Times’ staff and viewpoints, and not in the usual racial or gender ways, but in political, religious and cultural areas as well.

The aim, he wrote, is “to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation.”
Wow!

The report goes on:
“First and foremost we hire the best reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the business. But we will make an extra effort to focus on diversity of religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class.”
Christians working for the New York Times? People who have been in the military?

Wonder what liberals who have been insisting that there is no liberal bias in the Times are going to say about this?

Of course, rhetoric is cheap, and changing the provincial, hidebound and elitist culture in mainstream media organizations will be a tall order. Our guess is that it simply won’t happen.

But the use of the word “diversity” to indicate people with different opinions — and not merely fashionable minorities who have the same opinions — has obvious implications for universities too.

But don’t expect monolithically liberal and leftist departments and schools at Marquette to make any effort to hire conservatives any time soon. The faculty in those places are not really very tolerant, they consider it an imposition to have to deal with dissenting views and they think conservatives are evil.

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