NY TIMES’ FAILURE BEYOND THE PALE

“Only two of the 20-plus reporters who covered the presidential campaign for The New York Times were black. None were Latino or Asian. That’s 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.”

So begins a scathing column about hypocrisy at the Gray Lady. Carrying the headline “Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It,” the piece was a bombshell — especially because it was written by a Times editor and appeared in the paper itself.

Liz Spayd is the public editor, the in-house representative for readers. The concept is bizarre — shouldn’t all editors represent readers?

Nonetheless, Spayd’s attack on her employer’s “blinding whiteness” opens another gaping wound in the paper’s reputation. As she wrote, “The Times can be relentless in questioning the diversity at other institutions; it has written about the white ranks of the technology sector, public schools, police departments, Oscar nominees, law firms, legislatures, the major leagues and the Ivy League.”

I admire Spayd’s courage and the staffers who attached their names to complaints. The piece included an interview with top editor Dean Baquet, who is black but is charged with paying insufficient attention to the issue.

Yet Spayd’s focus on race misses other kinds of diversity that are lacking, and that are more basic to the paper’s diminished credibility. Although nonwhites make up 22 percent of the staff, it is a given that there are far fewer than that who don’t automatically vote Democrat.

A lack of political diversity and outlook is why the paper was blind to Trump’s rise. Nobody there understood his appeal because liberal groupthink sees Republicans as dumb and evil.

Spayd should turn her talents to getting the paper to follow a single standard of coverage for Democrats and Republicans. That would be the best possible gift to readers.