NYT’s Kristof: Trump Is Racist, But No Mention of Bias Lawsuit Against Paper

June 11th, 2016 3:05 PM

The latest from the New York Times is exactly the kind of media double standard that the American people have become sick of, doubtless one of many reasons Americans don't trust the liberal press. 

The other night I appeared on CNN for anchor Don Lemon’s show. The conversation was to be about Trump and race. Our actual conversation was terrific - thoughtful, engaging, and necessary in what is, in my view, a much needed and genuine conversation about race.

While I was waiting to go, I watched New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof being interviewed. (He was not in my segment.)  Here’s the headline and part of the story from the Mediaite account: "NY Times‘ Kristof: Yes, Donald Trump Is a Racist." 

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opined on CNN Wednesday night that yes, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump really is a racist.

“So in your estimation, is Donald Trump a racist?” asked host Don Lemon.

“Yeah, frankly, I would say that,” he responded.

“I think we probably make too much about any one comment, where you have this whole pattern of comments,” Kristof said……“When you have this broad pattern over decades and behaviors, reports about discriminating against blacks in housing, then yeah, frankly I would say that that is racist,” he concluded.”

Hmmm.  Now well aside from the fact that this is the standard go-to for liberals when discussing any Republican or conservative (to Google just Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney alone instantly turns up accusations that all three are racists) there’s something else in this Kristof appearance. What was missing in his discussion? What did Mr. Kristof conveniently leave out?

That would be the fact that his very own newspaper, the New York Times itself, stands accused in federal court of - wait for it - racism, sexism and ageism. As reported by the Courthouse News Service, here is a description of the suit filed in April of this year:

MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal class action lawsuit accuses the New York Times of widespread internal race, age and gender discrimination, favoring younger, white "handsome men.”

The 61-page complaint filed Thursday by Ernestine Grant, 62, and Marjorie Walker, 61, accuses the New York Times Company, along with CEO Mark Thompson and executive vice president Meredith Levien, of multiple violations of the Equal Pay Act, the Civil Rights Act and the New York State Human Rights Law.

The lawsuit claims the discrimination practices manifested in the company's failure to compensate and promote older, black and/or female employees at the same rate as younger, white and/or male employees.

Grant and Walker say the Times selected "older, black and/or female employees" for buyouts during company-wide layoffs at "rates that are statistically unlikely to have occurred by chance.”

According to the complaint, since her hiring by Thompson in 2013, Levien made statements that were "shockingly rife with racially charged innuendos" and pushed for the Times staff to be "people who look like the people we are selling to." She even allegedly told staffers "this isn't what our sales team should look like.”

There’s more, but let’s turn to the actual original document, found here thanks to the Daily Caller, and take a few excerpts from the 61-page lawsuit: 

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK                                      
NATURE OF THE CLAIMS

The New York Times, widely touted as the “paper of record,” has been engaging in deplorable discrimination that has remained largely off the record. Unbeknownst to the world at large, not only does the Times have an ideal customer (young, white, wealthy), but also an ideal staffer (young, white, unencumbered with a family) to draw that purported ideal customer. In furtherance of these discriminatory goals, the Times has created a workplace rife with disparities. Unfortunately, the Times’s Advertising staff on the business side is systematically becoming increasingly younger and whiter. Plaintiffs Grant and Walker (together, “Class Representatives”) are employed in the Advertising division at the Times and have experienced discrimination, and were retaliated against, when they complained about such discrimination.

19. At the beginning of her tenure at the Times in 2013, Ms. Levien made it very clear that she was looking for a very particular workforce, one that was filled with “fresh faces,” i.e., younger employees without families, and who were white. Ms. Levien’s speech to various Times personnel also was shockingly rife with racially charged innuendos, such as references to the need for employees to be “people who look like the people we are selling to” and even going so far as to say “this isn’t what our sales team should look like.” Ms. Levien’s remarks gave cover to and outright endorsed increasing disparate treatment against older, female and/or non- white employees in the Advertising division

20. True to form, under Mr. Thompson and Ms. Levien, age, gender and race discrimination became a modus operandi at the Times,….

There’s more here…oh so very much more in these fascinating 61 pages. But you get the flavor. The New York Times, at its very highest levels, is directly accused by its own employees - who by-the-by are black and female - of overt racial discrimination as well as conducting the paper’s own very private “war on women.”

And yet there sits Mr. Kristof on national television this very week blithely accusing Donald Trump of being a racist without a whisper of acknowledgment that his own paper is accused - in a federal lawsuit no less - of outright racist and sexist behavior in its employment practices.

Why does this matter? Because the New York Times plays the race card - as Mr. Kristof just demonstrated in that interview - with obsessive regularity. Donald Trump alone is regularly accused by an indignant Times editorial board of being a racist. As here in November 2015 when the Times editorial board hissed: "America has just lived through another presidential campaign week dominated by Donald Trump’s racist lies." 

Back in January of 2016, NewsBuster’s own Tom Blumer caught them at it again, headlining: "NY Times Correlates Trump Support With Racism — Based on Decade-Old Google Searches." 

Blumer wrote in part:

On Wednesday, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, who by some accounts is being anointed the next Nate Silver of polling, made a clumsy and despicable attempt to inject race into his political "analysis" of the Donald Trump phenomenon.

Cohn's tediously long writeup, which made Page A3 in the New York version of the Old Gray Lady's print edition on Thursday, attempted to identify and characterize Donald Trump supporters. Apparently troubled by finding that Trump's support crosses into a number of groups with whom Republican presidential candidates have usually fared poorly, he felt the need to go far afield for evidence of something sinister. Thus, he attempted to correlate the level of current support for Trump's presidential candidacy to regional levels of racism as seen in Google searches. That's right, Google searches — from 9-12 years ago.

Got that? The Times was doing Google searches “from 9-12 years ago” to say that Trump is a racist.  Meanwhile, a mere four months after Blumer's report - on April 28, 2016 - the paper is slammed with this lawsuit in federal court - by its own black and female employees - accusing  the paper and its top executives in vivid detail of the vilest of racism, sexism and discrimination.

And there sits Nicholas Kristof on CNN just days ago - and not a peep from him about any of this.

Typical. But you know the paper’s motto: All the News Fit to Print. Apparently, the racism of the New York Times is not fit for Mr. Kristof to even discuss, let alone put in print.

I’m shocked. Aren’t you?