NBC News has faced criticism for years for its often blatant bias against conservatives and against the Trump administration. But now the network's obsession with woke politics over actual news coverage is even spreading to its hiring practices. In a recent memo to employees, Cesar Conde, the new head of NBC-Universal News Group, said his goal is for his division to have 50% "people of color." According to Census figures, non-whites make up only 24% of the U.S. population.
Conde notes in the memo that NBC News currently has 27% racial diversity, which he says is "not good enough." In order to get that number to 50%, the network would have to get rid of current white employees or discriminate against whites in future hiring.
Jeffrey McCall, media critic from DePauw University, believes NBC is missing the point with this arbitrary diversity push. "When you make artificial quotas of how many people you're going to hire from particular identity groups, I think you then leave out a lot of other factors that need to go into the hiring," he tells KTRH.
The goal, according to McCall, should be diversity of skills and viewpoints. "I would encourage news directors, news producers and editors around the country to not be so totally hung up on the ethnicity of the people who work for them, but for their capabilities," he says. "Like do (employees) have a range of ideas, do they have a range of points of view? So I think intellectual diversity is also important."
Ultimately, while news operations are worried about checking racial boxes and virtue-signaling, they lose sight of what should be their core mission. "The big question is whether this is good journalism, or whether this is some sort of a crusade that the news organization wants to wage in what is a broader culture war," says McCall.