The NY Times announced today that it is being sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against The New York Times on Tuesday, claiming that the paper had engaged in “unlawful employment practices” and had discriminated against a white male employee who did not get a sought-after promotion.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, says The Times’s “stated race and sex-based representation goals influenced the decision not to advance” the man’s candidacy for a deputy real estate editor role in 2025.
So what happened here is that a white male employee filed a complaint saying the Times had refused to promote him because his promotion would be contrary to their equity goals.
The complaint quotes from Times diversity and inclusion reports in recent years, including a 2021 “Call to Action” that set a goal of increasing the number of Black and Latino employees.
The reports “detailed N.Y.T.’s express efforts to make employment decisions on the basis of race and sex to achieve its desired demographic goals,” the complaint says. “A decrease in the percentage of White male employees (whether new hires, existing employees or those in leadership, as appropriate) was a necessary consequence for the N.Y.T. to achieve these results.”
The complaint also quotes from exchanges on the messaging platform Slack among newsroom leaders about trends in diversity hiring, and from internal correspondence related to the hiring process of the deputy editor role.
Naturally, the Times is denying the allegations and claims the attack is politically motivated.
Danielle Rhoades Ha, senior vice president of communications at the New York Times, dismissed the EEOC suit.
“The New York Times categorically rejects the politically motivated allegations brought by the Trump administration’s EEOC,” she said in a statement. “Our employment practices are merit-based and focused on recruiting and promoting the best talent in the world. We will defend ourselves vigorously.”
What is not in doubt is that the white male individual who has been with the Times for a decade did not get the open job in the real estate section, despite interviewing for it. In fact, he didn’t even make it to the list of final candidates.
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.
But the NY Times offers its own explanation for not promoting the male employee in their story.
The complaint asserts that the white man was more qualified than the person who ultimately got the job. The person at The Times said the job listing specifically sought somebody with experience in service journalism, which the person who got the job had, in addition to experience as a supervisor.
Service journalism basically means writing consumer focused How-to articles. Based on the description, it appears the person hired was Monica Burton:
Monica brings to the desk a deep background in lifestyle and service journalism. She has spent the last eight years at Eater, where she was most recently the deputy editor on Eater’s national site. Starting at Eater on the restaurant beat, she’s covered subjects within the world of dining and food culture with a mix of reported features, opinion, and a ton of service journalism. She also wrote the site’s weekly shopping-focused newsletter.
In other words, by the Times’ own admission, she had no experience whatsoever in real estate journalism and they picked her over the guy with ten years experience. And there’s more according to the EEOC press release.
The company ultimately hired an outside candidate for the role — a non-white female with little to no experience in real estate journalism, despite such experience being a requirement for the real estate editor position. Further, the hiring manager greenlit this external candidate for inclusion in the final interview panel without her first going through the standard interview processes for the position. Moreover, The New York Times selected this candidate for the position despite the company’s own final interview panel rating her less favorably than two other final candidates.
Maybe there’s some way to make that make sense but I’m not seeing it immediately. It does seem like real estate journalism experience would be a requirement for someone applying for a job in real estate journalism. And the fact that Burton didn’t go through the standard interview process and didn’t get rated highest in the final round of interviews suggests the fix was in. Is she a buddy of someone doing the hiring? That’s how it comes across.
Anyway, I’d like to see more details but it will be interesting to see how this case develops.
