On Tuesday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a federal lawsuit against The New York Times, alleging the newspaper passed over a white male employee for a promotion because of his race and sex. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, says the Times’s “stated race and sex-based representation goals” drove the decision not to advance his candidacy for a deputy editor role.
The Times called the suit “politically motivated.” On X, Harvard professor Maya Sen posted the complaint with a punchy observation: “Very short hop, skip & jump to academia.”
Whether others view that as a warning or a welcome, the connection is hard to argue with. More on that later. But let’s stay with journalism for a moment — because the EEOC lawsuit isn’t the revelation. It’s the confirmation. The discrimination has been happening in plain sight, announced in press releases and class photos, for years. The only news is that a federal agency finally decided to look.
The Class Photos
If you want to understand what’s happening in American journalism hiring, skip the mission statements. Look at the pictures. Try finding a white male in a recent intern class photo. It’s like a game of Where’s Waldo — except in most of these cohorts, Waldo isn’t hiding. He’s just not there.
This has been visible for years. In 2016, a Huffington Post executive editor tweeted a photo of an all-female editors meeting as a celebration of diversity. The backlash wasn’t about the absence of men — it was that the women were too white. The missing men weren’t the bug. They were the feature. A decade later, the pattern has only intensified.