News/Commentary

‘Sweeping changes’ at CNN — layoffs hit 100, network ‘quietly’ disbands ‘Race and Equality’ team

July 12, 2024 | | Print Article

CNN chief executive Mark Thompson “unveiled a set of sweeping changes” on Wednesday, which he described in a memo to staffers as a “key milestone in CNN’s transformation.”

That’s according to the network itself, which reported that Thompson announced “plans to build a billion-dollar digital business, experiment with artificial intelligence, and overhaul key newsroom structures.”

CNN reported that the far-reaching measures will result in the layoff of about 100 employees, or about three percent of the workforce. But the network also “quietly disbanded its ‘Race and Equality’ team of reporters,” according to the New York Post.

“There were three reporters that made up the unit, which was created by former CNN president Jeff Zucker in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020,” the newspaper reported. “One of the journalists was fired while the other two were reassigned to other departments, according to a newsletter written by black journalist Phil Lewis.”

A CNN spokesperson came up with a creative approach to explain the move.

“For all intents and purposes, the team is not a team anymore,” the spokesperson said, according to the Post. “They’re assigned to different areas so that [their] perspective and work is brought into all of our types of programming. It’s not a unit in the way it was before, but [race and equality] is very much still their focus.”

The move comes as corporations and universities are slowly abandoning diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) initiatives, which equate to discrimination against white people. A development brought about almost single-handedly by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow and director of the initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute.

“DEI is slowly unfolding into a system in which all groups are offered protection, with the exception of European whites—which, in practice, means abandoning the much better system of natural, unalienable rights in which all individuals are protected, regardless of ancestry,” Rufo posted on X in November. “The proper way to conceive of DEI is as a system of racial spoils, in which one group is singled out as the scapegoat and denied the full protection of the state and the institutions.”

He also offered this:

CNN  viewers accustomed to a hard-left slant were not too pleased with the latest news:

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On the other hand, some on social media eagerly awaited news that CNN itself would be disbanded — here’s a quick sampling of responses to the story, as seen on X:

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Tom Tillison
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