A white male New York Times employee filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging the paper had discriminated against him by not giving him a promotion because he is a white male. On Tuesday, the EEOC, now controlled by a Trump appointee who has vowed to help wage the president’s war against DEI culture, filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the Times arguing that the paper’s efforts to satisfy its diversity goals amounted to “unlawful employment practices.” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha has dismissed the allegations as “politically motivated.”
The paper itself was first to break the news of the suit but did not name the employee who made the complaint. Reporters at the paper have been scrambling to figure out the employee’s identity, driven in part by bafflement that one of their own colleagues would sell out the paper to the administration, which has used tools of the federal government to attack the press. “You’re giving the Trump administration a weapon while they’re trying to persecute journalists,” said one reporter.
“This has been kind of a shitshow behind the scenes — people trying to figure out who the aggrieved person is,” said another Times staffer. The release of the complaint on Tuesday narrowed the speculation to Bryant Rousseau, a senior editor and producer on the Times’s international desk who has been with the paper for more than a decade. Rousseau’s LinkedIn résumé is identical to that of the charging party in the lawsuit.
According to the EEOC suit, the complainant had been passed over for the deputy real-estate editor position despite meeting “all requirements” for the job, including experience with real-estate journalism. “He was not among the candidates given a final panel interview for the position” because he “did not match the race and/or sex characteristics NYT sought to increase in its leadership through its diversity actions and aspirations,” the complaint argues. The final pool of candidates was composed of a white female, a Black male, an Asian female, and a multiracial female. The multiracial female ultimately got the job even though “her experience did not meet all its stated basic requirements, including the job description’s stated requirement for experience with real estate journalism,” the complaint states.
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New York Times word Frequency: 1970 – 2018