DEI dies in darkness, taking integrity with it

By the end of 2024, I knew my days as an editor-in-chief were likely numbered.

Not because I was a poor performer, or because of any issue with my parent company. In fact, our relationship was, and still is, quite good. I’d been editor-in-chief for nearly four years at HuffPost and had a track record of success. I was very happy there. But like many digital news companies, we struggled to generate revenue as more and more advertisers shied away from news. Eventually, there was simply no way to make up for the shortfalls so many newsrooms, including my own, were facing.

It was my job or even steeper cuts for my team, so I laid myself off. But the move hurt on multiple levels, from how much I loved my job to the optics of how it wasn’t like there were a lot of Black women leading news organizations in the first place, and now there would be one less.

Around the same time I announced my departure, Rashida Jones left what was then still called MSNBC, and before that, Nekesa Mumbi Moody had left Hollywood Reporter. The names just kept being added to the list of powerful Black women stepping down from their roles, often due to the revenue crisis we all inherited.

When media was high on the hog, still in its Graydon Carter, multi-million-dollar budget heyday in the late 1990s, it was hard to find any real diversity at the top. Most of us who’d been toiling away for more than a decade in the trenches wouldn’t get our chance at leadership until the party was almost completely over. Now, instead of us building our careers, the good-time money and over-the-top investments are long gone, and our industry is rapidly disintegrating while autocracy grows.

We’re dying at a time when we are needed most.

But with the 300,000 Black women pushed out of the workforce this year, the message is clear — there’s no place for us because there was never a place for us. This is the end result of tolerance, as in, we were merely tolerated, not fully appreciated or integrated. And all our hard work meant nothing in the end because we did not have the complexion for the protection.

Many corporate newsrooms have moved away from diversity, equity, and inclusion, shuttering diverse news verticals like NBC BLK or eliminating roles once held by Black people and other historically marginalized groups like CBS News. They’ve essentially run away from even the appearance of fairness to return to a white male status quo that, let’s be honest, never really left in terms of who was leading most major newsrooms.

Most newsrooms’ “commitment” to diversity was superficial at best — either a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, or all tell and no show, as it was always seen as a “nice to have” as opposed to essential for the growth and health of an organization. But now that the mask is off, there’s no need to pretend that the racial reckoning’s results post-2020 were anything more than window dressing. To paraphrase Marshawn Lynch, we were there just so our corporate overlords wouldn’t get fined by a public that had called for more fairness. Once the penalties started going the other way, we were escorted out.

This is happening despite the fact that America continues to become more diverse, not less, even with the best efforts of this administration to inhumanely round up immigrants and shuffle them off to every corner of the world, whether they’re from those corners or not. This is even though many of us made money for our respective organizations and grew their reach tremendously. The message was loud and clear from so many mainstream outlets. It’s better to capitulate and feed the shareholders than uphold journalistic integrity. The best example of this is the once-storied CBS News division being taken over by someone who’s never led an organization this size and plans to “right-size” it, literally, away from everything that made CBS News a leader in the first place. But this move is unlikely to yield more revenue or eyeballs on CBS. Instead, it’s more likely to alienate whatever audience they have left, while they duke it out with Fox and Newsmax for conservative viewers who already see CBS as the “liberal media,” and aren’t going to watch it no matter what Bari Weiss ultimately does.

But maybe that’s the point. Coming for diversity was just the beginning, as integrity and ethics are also under assault and under threat to be thrown out right along with us.

The end result of the death of DEI and the promises it made is a poorer, less fair, less equitable news product read by even fewer people and trusted by no one, causing the demise of those organizations, a loss of public trust in them, and eventually, the death of those institutions.

Killing DEI was just the first step in destroying what is left of the free press.

So my prediction for 2026 is a bleak one. If corporate, conglomerate-owned news organizations are willing to abandon their principles around diversity, equity, and inclusion, they’ll happily abandon their principles around almost anything. Many have demonstrated they want to stay in favor with this administration, even though eliminating diversity doesn’t improve their bottom lines or coverage. It doesn’t make a newsroom more accurate. In fact, it will likely make it less so and more error-prone as the next time there’s a crisis or issue that arises involving people who aren’t white males, that newsroom will be ill-equipped to cover it, let alone see it coming. Meaning major stories will go uncovered until public outcry forces biased, uneven coverage that will continue to erode what little trust people have left in our media institutions. Disinfo and misinfo will continue to reign supreme, AI slop will proliferate, and there will be few healthy mainstream alternatives. But out of this mess, I do believe more news alternatives from media nonprofits, local news sources, and independent newsmakers will arise — for the better — and that they will try to fill the gaps the mainstream will definitely have. But as long as all our social media platforms are owned by entities hostile to the press, who deprioritize news and tank the social ranking of anyone posting links to accurate news sites, it will be difficult for those brands to get their message out amongst the noise.

But I believe we will persevere, because what is the alternative? Diversity has gone in and out of style so many times in my career. But it always comes back around because, at the end of the day, diversity dollars are still desired because people still want to sell things to Black and brown people. They still want those eyeballs on the page. Corporations are, right now, trying to figure out how to keep the gains gotten from DEI without enraging the current anti-DEI administration. Can we call it something else? Can we repackage it and keep it going? Because, again, diversity simply makes sense. It’s a strength of our country, not a weakness, no matter how many times those who wish it were a weakness scream this.

So once again, everything is changing, yet nothing has changed. I can’t wait for the pivot back to diversity two years from now after everything has gotten demonstrably worse than it already is.