Amid the War on “DEI,” a Call to Reaffirm Values

Why we need to stick with inclusion, equity and diversity

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

In our polarized country, one of the two sides has come in recent years to consider “DEI” a slur, and has been pushing to stamp it out, including in the news business. A politicized Federal Communications Commission is investigating MSNBC and NBC parent Comcast for its DEI programs, while ABC parent Disney ended some DEI programs, and substituted “opportunity” for “equity” in others, even as its shareholders voted against a proposal to retreat from a commitment to LGBTQ rights. That line-drawing may have been what earned Disney its own FCC investigation, seven weeks after NBC.

Hedge-fund controlled newspaper chain Gannett has officially buried its corporate head in the sand, saying that it will no longer publish tallies of racial or gender diversity in its newsrooms, and no longer mentions “diversity” on its website. Kudos to Gannett for candor in its cowardice: the moves are admittedly “adapting to the evolving regulatory environment,” even though Gannett, as a newspaper company, is largely unregulated. I guess it’s referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

PBS responded almost instantly to an early executive order by closing its DEI office and laying off its small staff, although that did nothing to head off Trump’s drive to end federal support for the network.

Not just a question of fashion

As the New York Times summed it up, DEI is out of corporate fashion. The Washington Post quantified the shift. And while the Supreme Court has not yet extended to employment its ruling that affirmative action in university admissions is now unconstitutional (after having been constitutional from 1978-2023), everyone seems to understand that such an extension is inevitable.

If you think this image is partisan, you’ve lost the plot.

This is not the place (at least this week) to argue about the Court’s decision, even though I think it was unwise. Nor do I want now to focus on the radicalization of the FCC. Instead, I want to remind us all that even if “DEI” has become politically incorrect on the right, its elements are critical to a decent society, and fundamentally important in our own business of news.

Inclusion and news needs

Let’s try to unpack this by turning the acronym upside down and considering its elements in reverse order. First therefore is inclusion. One of the conclusions from every survey of local news needs for years now has been that a critical weakness of the legacy news business was that it served its communities unevenly, focusing disproportionately on wealthier, whiter, more educated audiences. Redressing this balance is one of the central challenges of the reinvention of the news business now underway.

At the same time, and not unrelatedly, a parallel phenomenon was occurring in too many of our newsrooms, with elements of our own teams feeling alienated. I have never met or observed an effective manager who did not believe in and practice inclusion as a value, whether or not they used the term.

Remember “created equal”

Next on our list is equity. This is admittedly the one of these three dimensions on which I do believe reasonable people can differ. Some believe we need to strive for (or even mandate) equity in results on various dimensions, while others say that equity of opportunities is sufficient. But no matter which view is closer to your own, let’s remember that there are many forms of equity on which all decent people agree: Equal work should be rewarded with equal pay and conducted under equal working conditions. Opportunities must be genuine, rather than merely theoretical, in order to be “equal.”

Our foundational documents require even more. Mandated racial segregation is inherently unequal-- this has now been a constitutional rule for more than 70 years. Much more broadly, the very establishment of this country was premised on Jefferson’s assertion that all people are created equal in their endowment with rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Diversity and the revolutionary temper

Finally we come to diversity. Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows that diversity of all sorts is a strength in doing our work. If we are to understand—and to make understandable for others-- a diverse country and even more diverse world, a wide variety of life experiences is a critical asset. Where we have fallen short, as most recently and notably in understanding the revolutionary temper of much of the nation, the roots lie, I believe, in a lack of diversity—for instance in educational background and attainment—in our own ranks.

Racial and gender diversity is an undeniably important element in this approach, particularly in a nation where Black slavery was legal for almost a century; where the right to vote was widely abridged on account of race for nearly another; where women were denied the vote for almost a century and a half, and key property and reproductive rights for far longer; where Chinese exclusion was the law of the land within the lifetime of millions still with us today.

A denial of diversity is literally a denial of our national motto. E Pluribus Unum asserts that we aim to craft a unified country (still a worthy goal!), but it also acknowledges that we seek to do so out of the differences we bring to the project.

Where does this leave us? Vilify “DEI” if you want to, defend it if you prefer. But no matter the petty predilections of the regime of the moment, it’s essential that all of us stand up for the American values of inclusion, equity and diversity. In our time, in our newsrooms and our coverage, in our companies and other institutions, we need to have the courage not to abandon these commitments, to continue the hard work of holding ourselves accountable for how far we have come in achieving them, and also for an honest accounting of how far we still have to go.