The New York Times Magazine acknowledges in an exhaustive feature that Breitbart News has amassed a news and editorial staff with more racial and gender diversity than most American media outlets.
“[…] Alex has a pretty good record of promoting women and minorities, at least by the industry’s abysmal standards — including the lead defense correspondent, the national security editor, and the copy chief, all of whom are women of color,” Wil S. Hylton writes in the near-nine thousand word expose published Wednesday.
“In fact, the masthead is more varied and international than most of the news organizations where I’ve worked,” notes Hylton, whose byline has appeared in GQ, Esquire, and Harper’s dating back to 2003.
Of course, loyal Breitbart News readers are well aware, if not particularly obsessive, of the gender and racial composition of this news network.
For the uninitiated, however, there is Breitbart People, a newly-launched page housing a collection of more than two dozen videos from Breitbart News editors and correspondents. Breitbart People is an illustration of the aforementioned diversity, where we tell our own stories about who we are rather than allow our people to be defined and maligned by a dishonest media. More videos are forthcoming.
Breitbart People features revealing videos from Breitbart Israel bureau chief Aaron Klein, Breitbart London bureau chief Raheem Kassam, and Breitbart editor Sam Chi, as well as profiles from lead defense correspondent Kristina Wong, national security editor Frances Martel, and chief copy editor Adrienne Ross.
It is ironic, then, that the recognition of Breitbart News as having more racial and gender diversity than most establishment media newsrooms comes from a paper whose public editor recently revealed that the Times has “less diversity than you’ll find in Donald Trump’s cabinet thus far.”
“Of the Times’s newly named White House team, all six are white, as is most everyone in the Washington Bureau.” wrote Times public editor Liz Spayd in December. “The whiter the newsroom is, the whiter it will stay,” she noted, adding, “I can tell diversity isn’t a priority here by looking at what is.”
Three months later, Spayd exposed the “declining fortunes” for women at the New York Times.
“Women have skidded down the power structure since Jill Abramson was dismissed as executive editor three years ago, with fewer females leading big news departments and fewer coming up the pipeline,” Spayd wrote in March. “Among reporters, men often outnumber women, in some cases by significant amounts: three to one in the Washington bureau and in sports, almost two to one in metro.”
Despite the many harmful and unfounded allegations lobbed at Breitbart News, Andrew Breitbart’s namesake has, Hylton notes, come to “dominate the political conversation” in America.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson