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As bad as the New York Times can be right now, that will be nothing compared to how truly miserable it can become if it institutes the asinine race quotas and other demands that the paper's worker union is demanding.

In a series of tweets on Friday, the News Guild of New York, representing the New York Times editorial staff, laid out several race-based items for the paper's leadership to start working on.

Among them were for the company's workforce demographics to reflect that of New York City (race quotas); for each stage of the hiring process for a new position to have at least 50% of the candidates be minorities (race quotas); and for the establishment of "mentorship programs" that create a track for minorities to move from junior positions to more senior ones (race quotas).


Comment: Why stop at race? If demographics should be representative, a certain proportion of candidates should be homeless, left-handed, overweight, underweight, tall, short. The possibilities are endless. To limit oneself to race is simply a lack of imagination and ambition.


Oh, and the union demands that all articles be given "sensitivity reads," the purpose of which would be to censor and edit content that offends or has the potential to offend minorities.

There would be nothing wrong with hiring more black journalists, but it's hard enough to find one good journalist, let alone 18 who meet additional exclusionary criteria. Black people only account for about 12% of graduates with a journalism degree each year. Just as with every other race, only a very few will go on to get a job at a newspaper, and even fewer will get a job at a major metropolitan newspaper.

As for "mentorship programs" that function solely to promote minority journalists, what would you call that other than affirmative action? People who advocate for those policies never want to call them that because it's rightfully associated with quotas, but we're getting to the point in which the social justice crowd has shed all pretense as to what it is they're after. So, how about the rest of us do the same and call the spade for what it is?

Requiring that a consistent number of positions be made available only to minorities would inevitably lead to lower quality, as management fret not over whether the best person was found for each job but, first and foremost, whether that person hit the race mandate.

That's not a list of demands to make things more racially equal. It's a list of demands to seize control of all of the paper's hiring and all of its content based entirely on race.