The New York Times is eating itself: Why is the world’s most liberal newsroom being accused of racism?

I’m far from a statistics maven. I hew more to the line, first spoken by some dead white guy, that ‘There are lies, damned lies and statistics’. But I can’t help but notice some language games at work in the report. For instance, ‘being Hispanic’ and ‘being Black’ is said to have ‘reduced the odds of receiving high ratings’ by 60 per cent and 50 per cent respectively. Isn’t there something in statistics about correlation not indicating causation? Even the questions in the evaluations – which focus on whether employees meet undefined ‘expectations’ – seem too vague to draw too many conclusions.

So what does the wider context show us? As has been well documented, in recent years the Times has been a huge purveyor of race-based storylines (the 1619 Project being the most famous example). And it has rigidly upheld the new racial orthodoxies in its internal culture. See: the departures of James Bennet in 2020 and of Donald McNeil in 2021, who each fell afoul of the woke code espoused by a new generation of staff.

It is, of course, possible that at the same time as the United States as a whole became far less racist, the Times secretly hired a bunch of racist managers. But is it likely?

Remember, this is the same newspaper that published headlines like these: ‘Is the White Church Inherently Racist?’, ‘The Housewives of White Supremacy’ and ‘How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror’. So are we now supposed to accept at face value that this newspaper is punishing staff because of their non-white skin colour?

A far more likely explanation is that the new obsession with racism means we are discovering it in places where it probably doesn’t exist. White liberals, desperate to be seen as ‘allies’, can barely disguise their zeal to unmask the inner racists that apparently lurk deep inside us all.