America’s New Ruling Class: Washington Post Edition

Written for Bacon’s Rebellion by James A. Bacon

That didn’t take long. In the wake of Washington Post articles alleging systemic racism at the Virginia Military Institute, the Board of Visitors voted Thursday to remove the statue of Stonewall Jackson from its campus. The action follows the Monday resignation of J.H. Binford Peay III, the institute’s superintendent, who had resisted calls to remove the statue on the grounds that Jackson, one of America’s iconic military geniuses, had been an instructor at the Institute before the Civil War.

After the board’s capitulation, Chairman John “Bill” Boland told the Washington Post, “It’s time to move forward. [The monument] was drawing a lot of fire and distracting from what our true mission is. The most important thing to me is to maintain our mission and our methods.”

The board also voted to create a diversity office and a diversity inclusion committee. Of its 17 board members, three are black, noted reporter Ian Shapira. Also, he observed, “All of the school’s top officials, including the VMI chief of staff, the faculty dean and the inspector general/Title IX coordinator, are White men.”

I got to thinking, how diverse is the Washington Post editorial staff? Does the Post live up to the standards it imposes on others? The newspaper lists its newsroom leadership here. You can click on the names, and in most cases you will find a photograph by which you can discern the individual’s gender and race. But I’ll save you the trouble. Scroll down and see if you detect a pattern. (To read my wrap-up, scroll all the way to the bottom.)
These names are listed in the same order as presented on the WaPo newsroom leadership page. The higher on the page, the higher the rank in the newsroom hierarchy.

In his reporting on VMI, Post reporter Shapira deems it noteworthy that only three of the military school’s 17 board members are black. I find it noteworthy that only one of the Washington Post’s top 17 senior editors is black — and she’s pigeon-holed as managing editor of “diversity and inclusion”! One senior editor is Hispanic. All the rest are white.

In other words, the senior editorial staff of the Washington Post is less ethnically diverse than the VMI Board of Visitors, which oversees an institution that the Post has labeled as “relentlessly racist.”

The newsroom leadership page lists 51 individuals, 43 of whose photos are available. Five are black (one of whom has a West Indian background), four are Asian, and two are Hispanic (one of whom has a European Spanish background). That count may not be 100% accurate; one or two individuals may be biracial. It’s not always easy to tell from the photos. But those numbers are pretty close to the reality.

Most of the minorities who are on the Post’s editorial leadership team are low on in the hierarchy. Besides of the diversity & inclusion editor, the highest ranking African-American on the staff, the deputy director of photography, ranks 36 on the list. Most minority positions are in digital or ancillary operations. The men and women who set the newspaper’s editorial tone and shapes its narratives are overwhelmingly white.

Bacon’s bottom line: The Washington Post, like other cultural institutions that increasingly dominate our lives, is dominated by super-woke white liberal men and women bent upon transforming American society. As they heap opprobrium on the few remaining conservative institutions in our society, super-woke white liberals do not apply the same standards to themselves that they impose upon others. In other words, they are appalling hypocrites.

Worse, they have abandoned traditional journalistic standards in favor of building narratives which they pursue relentlessly with no pretense of fairness. The result is disgracefully one-sided articles such as those depicting VMI as a racist hell hole.

America’s cultural elite won’t rest until it has neutered or destroyed every conservative institution in the land. The Washington Post is conducting war on middle America, and its time middle Americans fought back.