Like many other establishment media outlets, The New York Times has broadly been recognized over the past few years as a stalwart defender of the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement.
In just the past few months, the outlet reported favorably on civil rights groups suing the Trump administration over the rollback of DEI, complaining that the move “imperiled funding for groups that provide critical services to historically underserved groups of Americans.”
The outlet also raised the alarm when some Wall Street firms backed away from hiring quotas, saying that “it meant something over the past half-decade or so when the biggest names in finance said, over and over again, that they would pour dollars and effort into lending to, hiring, promoting and working with underserved communities.”
But the End Wokeness account on social media platform X brought back a blast from the not-too-distant past, showing that the Gray Lady relatively recently did not mind panning the performative but baseless claims that “diversity is our strength.”
“Oops,” End Wokeness wrote alongside a screen shot of a 2007 article. “They forgot to scrub this.”
Oops… they forgot to scrub this pic.twitter.com/y6jpzpxeLv
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 14, 2025
The post from End Wokeness has racked up over 2.3 million views since it was published Saturday.
Rather than a missive in favor of diversity gestures, the 2007 article about a study of diversity by political scientist Robert Putnam warned that “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.”
In the same way, the article, titled “The downside of diversity,” offered the clear-eyed conclusion that “virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.”
The article even noted how relevant the findings were to American life at the time, noting that “with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.”
Today, the New York Times would consider these questions, which they themselves were asking less than two decades ago, virulent right-wing hate speech that probably came from the presses of Alex Jones, not the paper of record.
Social media commenters were quick to notice the pivot.
“This is what a real newspaper does,” one user said.
“Did the NYT just [accidentally] commit some truth?” another asked.
“NYT is going to get boycotted by the Left now for this,” a third predicted.
Whether the left in any way observes this hypocrisy, the drastically more left-wing coverage of the diversity issue shows how much The New York Times, and therefore the media and the nation at large, has shifted leftward on that issue.
The only question is how long the current shift back rightward will continue, and at what point we can expect The New York Times to be somewhat truthful once more.
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