Throughout the 2010s, NBC News promised a “robust destination” for Asian American stories. It vowed to produce “comprehensive” coverage for Black audiences. It wanted to become the “brand of choice” for Latino audiences and it was proud to launch “the first LGBTQ news vertical” for a broadcast news organization.
But last week, NBC News gutted all the reporting groups aimed at investing in the stories of underrepresented groups. And they’re hardly alone.
The cuts come at a time when anything resembling diversity, equity or inclusion in media has come under attack by a president who has vowed to dismantle DEI across the country. As more news outlets and media companies roll back commitments to diversity efforts, including reporting on stories about traditionally marginalized groups, the avenues for reporters who specialize in such coverage grow increasingly limited. It effectively puts those same journalists on the front lines of layoffs as economic headwinds shift these companies’ editorial priorities, resulting in fewer stories of these communities getting told.
“In a business that has not had a strong presence of people of color in particular, and women in managerial roles, these big cuts have disproportionately hit those populations, so I think there’s no getting around the idea that we are worse off significantly when it comes to the people actually working in organizations,” said Keith Woods, who served as NPR’s chief diversity officer until he retired in May. “And when you see what NBC does, that’s a double punch.”
“It’s a sad day for journalism and for journalists of color, and for others who are not of color, who have no agenda but covering these communities that have long been underserved and stories that are untold or misrepresented,” Amber Payne, the founding editor of NBC BLK, told TheWrap. “You have reporters who build trust with communities, who break stories, who dig into important stories, and I feel like sometimes this is just couched in ‘diversity.’”
An NBC News executive told TheWrap the sections would continue to publish content even without a dedicated staff, with two editors’ jobs including the curation of such content and a few staffers offered new jobs in the broader newsroom.
Leaders from the journalism trade groups the Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists, the Journalism & Women Symposium and NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists met with NBC last week to discuss their concerns and ask that NBC “recommit to representative newsrooms that reflect the diversity of every community.”
Some of the groups decried the cuts as “a step back in NBC’s longtime commitment to making sure their reporting represents the diversity of this country.”
How we got here
NBC’s recent cuts of dedicated teams for NBC BLK, NBC Latino, NBC OUT and NBC Asian America didn’t happen in a vacuum. Scores of media outlets — and corporate America at large — that had committed themselves to greater diversity and indeed, active anti-racism, after George Floyd’s death and the national protests that followed, began to pull back after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action in college admissions.
The Los Angeles Times published annual diversity reports, which broke down its staff’s composition across gender and racial and ethnic lines, between 2020 and 2022, though they have since ceased. Its persistent layoffs in recent years have affected some of the same junior staffers it hired to diversify its newsroom, including those who worked on its Latino-focused De Los section and one of the paper’s only Indigenous editors, Angie Jaime, who ran the 4040 social media content team. Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, also removed mentions of diversity from its website in April and said it would stop publishing data cataloging the demographic makeup of its staff on its website.
“A lot of us knew that there was going to be a pendulum swing,” Payne said. “I think, for the journalists of color, we’re not shocked and we’re not surprised. We’re disappointed.”
The swing has been stark. After Republican leaders across the country worked to dismantle DEI or “woke” efforts in specific states, Trump spent part of the 2024 election campaign making DEI an enemy. Upon re-entering the White House in January, he issued a federal order to eradicate DEI from the federal government, something Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, the nation’s top media regulator, appeared eager to enforce.
Carr sent letters to a number of companies, including ABC’s Disney and NBCU’s Comcast, that launched investigations over DEI practices, and Skydance eliminated the Office of Global Inclusion and any DEI-related roles at Paramount, home of CBS News, ahead of its merger.
PBS also eliminated its diversity office and laid off two staffers in February as it tried to “ensure we are in compliance with the President’s executive order” — all as the public broadcaster tried and failed to maintain its federal funding.
It’s evidenced in other elements of the mainstream media. Politico ended its race and politics-focused newsletter, The Recast, last month, and the Washington Post put its “About US” newsletter, which focused on “candid conversations about race and identity in 21st century America,” on an indefinite hiatus in June. Bloomberg also ended its Equality newsletter in May, according to NiemanLab, though it kept its Equality-focused team.
The retreat leaves fewer opportunities for reporters who specialize in coverage of race or gender to tell stories at a mainstream level, restricting them to smaller outlets that focus on those stories but with a smaller audience.
Lack of commitment
Woods did not leave NPR due to Trump’s DEI order, saying he had initially planned to retire in the fall of 2024, but he agreed the optics weren’t great: PBS made its announcement to comply with the order a week before he planned to meet with NPR CEO Katherine Maher to finalize his retirement date.
“I can’t tell you how irate I was with PBS for doing that, and I knew that I was getting ready to have this conversation with the CEO,” he said. “Yeah, optics were really bad, but this is my life that I’m talking about here. It was only going to get worse from there. The optics were going to look worse and worse as we went.”
Woods said leaving in the middle of a national retreat from diversity efforts was “hard,” but he didn’t believe staying would have changed anything at NPR. The public radio broadcaster lost its federal funding this summer, and Woods said it no longer maintained a race and identity vertical. Woods has not been replaced, and NPR said in May that the remaining staff in its Office of Diversity would report to its chief operating officer. It did not respond to a request for comment.
Such a change is part of a “rise and fall” in coverage of different communities, Woods said. Dedicated coverage of Black communities increased in the 1960s in the midst of the civil rights movement, and other markers came in the 2010s after the riots in Ferguson, Missouri and Floyd’s death in 2020. A larger embrace of LGBTQ+ populations flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, contributing to the birth of Out magazine in 1992 and the U.K.-based Attitude in 1994.
But the current moment, Woods said, represented a “fall,” one he’s unsure the media industry will pull itself out of. He criticized newsrooms’ overreliance on journalists of color to cover stories related to their respective communities, saying organizations like NBC News have substituted training their general newsrooms to cover these communities with depth for community-specific verticals (NBC BLK, NBC OUT, etc.) that end up targeted by political pressures or subjected to budget cuts.
“It’s those pronouncements that are followed by a couple of years of good stuff, followed by cuts and apathy, followed by crisis, followed by pronouncements. You can’t find a more clearer scientific pattern in journalism than that,” Woods said. “The answer is that that commitment with a capital ‘C’ lasts through lean times. It lasts through political times. It is deeper. It’s embedded deeper in the organization, and therefore can survive these moments. And what we have seen is that we’ve been playing small ‘c’ commitment from the start.”
What remains
While the diversity efforts in larger media organizations are facing a reckoning, that doesn’t mean that kind of coverage will disappear completely.
“There have always been other outlets and spaces where journalism has been done across history, and those spaces will continue to exist and probably thrive as they become more essential, things like Spanish-language newspapers and the Black press and, you know, specialty-niche reports,” said Danielle Brown, a professor of community and urban journalism at Michigan State University. “I think we’ll continue to see those, but it is sort of disappointing to see it fall out of the purview of the mainstream.”
For those that persist, there are new signs of growth.
Out and the LGBTQ-focused news website The Advocate, both owned by Equal Pride Media, continue to publish regularly, and there remains a number of news outlets — them., the Condé Nast-owned outlet focused on LGBTQ+ issues; the 19th, a nonprofit newsroom that reports on gender and politics; the Patreon-based Queer News Daily and Attitude — focused on LGBTQ+ news. Democratic political strategist Ashley Allison brought the Black-focused news outlet The Root under Black ownership for the first time, and Telemundo and Univision still actively report for Spanish audiences.
The Craig Newmark School of Graduate Journalism at the City University of New York also put together a directory of more than 650 news outlets dedicated to telling Asian American and Pacific Islander stories, with more than 480 focused on local communities. NBCUniversal also continues to operate the Spanish-language channel Telemundo, with its programming syndicated across the globe.
But as major companies retreat from roles dedicated to covering such communities, those that remain will find a smaller pool of journalists with the required expertise and institutional knowledge. Brown said that her students still have a hunger to do such types of reporting, but their aspirations dim when they consider their future job prospects. “Scarcity will be a problem in the future even if these roles exist,” she said.
Payne, the original NBC BLK managing editor, said she hopes larger newsrooms return to their original commitment, noting that such ebbs and flows can be “cyclical.”
“I haven’t given up on legacy newsrooms,” Payne said. “But I think what we’re seeing right now is how politics and business interests have finally trickled down and impacted newsroom coverage, and that’s scary.”
