Well, gosh, let’s see. If you hire people on the basis of anything other than competence, you should not be surprised by this result. That is to say, if a middling performer who happened to be a Person Of Color got the job over a Person Of Paleness who was more qualified, you should not be surprised to find that the diverse employee can’t do the job as well as those who were hired on the basis of competence alone.

Think about it: if white people with blue eyes had a significant hiring advantage over all other white people, because the newspaper decided that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion required increasing the number of blue-eyed white employees in the newsroom, it stands to reason that the blue-eyed would not rate as highly on performance as the other whites, overall, because they were selected for an attribute that had nothing to do with their ability to do the job.

Seriously, does anybody really think that The New York Times is racist? I guess those who believe that the only possible explanation for racial disparities in job performance is racism must believe it. The report I linked to above, from NPR (naturally), doesn’t even mention this as a possible explanation for the disparity. It is inconceivable to the liberal/progressive mind that this could be true.

Therefore, the evaluation system at the Times will have to change to reflect DEI priorities. Newsroom managers will have to figure out another way to determine who among their workers can actually get the job done.

I don’t feel a bit sorry for the Times, or any newspaper that has promoted the DEI ideology. I spent years working for a variety of newspapers, and it was common knowledge that people were hired and promoted beyond their ability to do a job because they filled a diversity quota. I remember arguing with a (white) newsroom manager over this, back when it was still safe to say such things in newsrooms, and pointed out that you can either follow an ethic of “diversity,” or you can put out a top-quality newspaper, but you couldn’t do both. This manager, who had totally bought into the DEI ideology, said that, and I quote, “Diversity is a component of quality.”

No, it actually isn’t. Newsroom managers are liberals — often disproportionately white — who are desperate to be morally clean. I once had a conversation with a white liberal second-tier editor who took a step down and went back to reporting, because he said he was afraid he was going to be named in a libel lawsuit someday. Why? Part of his job was to rewrite and re-report news stories that had been badly done by diversity hires — stories that routinely had factual errors. He told me that he was constantly anxious that he was going to miss something in his rewrites, and was going to open his newspaper up to a lawsuit. But the higher-ups at his paper were unwilling to listen to his complaints about the risk they were taking, to say nothing of the fact that he was expected to do extra work to compensate for the sense of moral righteousness the senior editorial hierarchy enjoyed for hiring diversely….