‘It’s not a coincidence’: journalists of color on being laid off amid Trump’s anti-DEI push

But when Sherman left the conference room and entered the newsroom, he said he learned that his white colleagues had been told a very different story. A white co-worker told Sherman that she found it “messed up” that the people of color on the team had been laid off. Of the nine producers who staffed CBS Evening News Plus, five white people were reassigned to other positions, while the four people of color on the team were let go, according to Sherman and another former staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Later that day, Sherman documented his experience in a viral TikTok video. CBS did not respond to the Guardian’s multiple requests for comment.

Sherman’s role may be the latest casualty in a nationwide crackdown on diversity. Several high-ranking Black officials have been fired from the Trump administration, and thousands of jobs related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have been cut in the private and public sectors. The Guardian talked to seven recently laid off journalists at CBS, NBC and Teen Vogue who spoke of people of color on their teams being let go while their white colleagues were spared, or the chipping away at coverage focused on marginalized communities.

Newsrooms have long been less diverse than the US population, which makes these layoffs in particular especially pronounced. In 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, an organization for media leaders, vowed that the racial makeup of newsrooms would reflect the US population by 2000. As the deadline neared in 1998, the society moved the date to 2025, but newsrooms still haven’t met that goal. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 12,000 journalists, 76% of respondents were white, 8% were Latino/Hispanic, 6% were Black and 3% were Asian. The survey showed an overrepresentation of white journalists, since nearly 58% of the population was white, about 19% were Hispanic, 12% were Black and 6% were Asian in the 2020 US census.

Some journalists see the layoffs as capitulation to the Trump administration’s war on DEI. After Trump’s January executive orders calling for an end to DEI programs and the termination of affirmative action in the federal government, Sherman said that “one by one, we saw companies get rid of their DEI initiatives”.

CBS and NBC are subjected to regulatory scrutiny by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees radio, television, cable, satellite and wire communications. During his first week in office, Brendan Carr, the FCC chair, announced that the FCC would end its DEI efforts by, among other things, removing it as a priority from the agency’s budget, and quashing its advisory group and taskforce.

Several weeks later, Carr launched an investigation into Comcast and NBC Universal’s diversity initiatives, followed by a similar inquiry into Disney and ABC. Disney told employees in a February memo that it would stop Reimagine Tomorrow, a platform that amplified underrepresented voices, and the corporation’s 2025 annual report eschewed the word “diversity” for the first time in six years.

In July filings to the FCC before the merger, Skydance promised that it would eliminate Paramount’s DEI initiatives and workforce diversity targets. And in October, Bari Weiss, an opinion journalist who advocated to “end DEI for good”, was appointed the editor in chief of CBS News. Some CBS News employees have been on edge since Weiss’s appointment.

Then in early November, sources allege that most Teen Vogue employees – many of whom were women of color – were let go as publisher Condé Nast announced that the outlet focused on politics, fashion and news would join Vogue’s website. A Condé Nast spokesperson said it was inaccurate that most of the staff had been let go. Those reductions came several weeks after NBC News laid off 150 employees, and gutted teams on verticals that exclusively covered Black, Asian American, Latino, and LGBTQ+ communities. The equity-focused sections will continue to exist, though without a dedicated staff, drawing from content around the newsroom.

Some institutions within the journalism industry have also steered away from DEI in their company language since Trump entered office. In April, Gannett removed demographic data and mentions about diversity from its website, citing Trump’s executive order calling for an end to DEI.

The Trump administration “has used its power to exert more control over the media than maybe we’ve ever seen”, Sherman said. “It so happens that part of their agenda is to, let’s be real, not just get rid of DEI initiatives, but to get rid of diversity in and of itself.”

In a political climate that’s hostile to diversity, people of color must start their own media outlets and podcasts, said political commentator and National Association of Black Journalists board member Roland Martin: “These companies are going to learn a hard lesson: if you continue to remove Black, Latino, Muslim and Asian American voices, those consumers are going to go elsewhere.”

‘It’s not a coincidence’

After speaking to his white colleagues, Sherman went to Reiter’s office to confront him about the layoff discrepancies. Sherman said that Reiter told him that he chose to keep people he had previously worked with. After Sherman posted his video recapping the conversation with Reiter on TikTok, he said he received messages from former employees at other media outlets who had similar stories. Mary, a woman of color who is using a pseudonym out of fear of jeopardizing future job prospects, said that she was shocked when she watched Sherman’s video.

She was laid off from another CBS team on the same day as Sherman, and soon realized that out of the dozens of people on her diverse team, the only four who were laid off were people of color. “We certainly have white producers, we have white reporters who could have been laid off as well,” Mary said. They had to have “known that would not look good”.

In a memo to employees, the new Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison wrote that the cuts were necessary for the company’s longevity. “In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization,” he wrote. “In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth.”

Mary and Sherman, though, say it’s clear that CBS’s methodology for who they chose to lay off reflects the Trump administration’s assault on diversity. “I’m not accusing any one person of looking at my department and deciding to lay off all the people of color,” Sherman said, “but I am saying that it’s not a coincidence that the layoffs that they chose to do fell along racial lines.”

While Sherman would not comment on whether he was pursuing legal action, Mary said that she and several former CBS employees have expressed interest in filing a lawsuit: “This is very suspicious.”

In mid-October, the entire teams behind NBC BLK, NBC Asian America, NBC Latino, and NBC Out were laid off, but content from around the newsroom will continue to populate the verticals. Curtis Bunn, the only reporter at NBC BLK, a vertical that focuses on Black communities, was one of the people who was let go. Over the past two years, he said, he watched the team dwindle from four people to two until the final purge. The layoffs also come as most of Comcast’s NBCUniversal cable networks spin off into a new company called Versant Media Group, causing NBC News to streamline its operations. (Forty people were also let go from NBC in January. An NBC union representative said it does not have a demographic breakdown of the layoffs.)

Bunn said that he trusts the company’s reasoning, but he is curious about why the teams that covered marginalized communities were eliminated. “When you see what’s happening around you, and you see the nature of even the media companies capitulating to the administration,” Bunn said, “you can’t help but feel like that has some part or some role in what took place.” He said that he was told that he could apply for other roles at the company.

“The journalists behind NBC BLK, NBC Latino, NBC Asian America and NBC OUT have chronicled our communities with depth, nuance and humanity,” NABJ president and co-founder of the 19th, Errin Haines, said in a statement. “If anything, their work has strengthened our democracy and expanded our nation’s understanding of itself.” NBC did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Traci Lee, a journalist who was NBC Asian America’s digital editorial manager from 2015 to 2019, said that the vertical helped elevate Asian American and Pacific Islanders’ experiences to a national sphere. “So often we have other people telling our stories for us, whether it is being glossed over in history books, or perhaps just being excluded from the narrative,” Lee said. “This was a space where we could, on a national level, tell our own stories.” When NBC Asian America wrote stories about the concentration camps that held Japanese Americans during the second world war, readers reached out to say that they had never been taught about the topic in school.

Leaders from affinity groups including the Asian American Journalists Association, NABJ and NLGJA: the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists met with NBC’s executives about the layoffs in late October, during which NBC promised to continue covering their communities.

It was soon after this that five women of color from Teen Vogue were let go. Condé Nast, Teen Vogue’s parent company, would not confirm the number of laid-off staff or their demographics.

Skyli Alvarez, an Asian queer woman on Teen Vogue’s editorial team who was laid off, said that she was in a state of shock when she realized that most of the laid-off employees were people of color. “In the media landscape today, a lot of people of color, a lot of people of marginalized identities, tend to be in these entry-level, associate-level positions,” Alvarez said. “And so to me, I was like: ‘This speaks to a bigger issue beyond all of us.’”

The Condé Nast spokesperson said that the restructure is designed to help the company grow, since Teen Vogue has long faced difficulties in reaching audiences. “Rather than continuing to operate independently, bringing Teen Vogue under the Vogue umbrella allows it to tap into a larger audience, stronger distribution and more resources,” the spokesperson said. “Any organizational changes the company makes are purely driven by business strategy to grow consumer engagement with our titles.”

“Teen Vogue was one of the last really outspoken publications on problems that affect young people, that young people care about,” Alvarez said. She hopes that communities of color and LGBTQ+ people will continue ensuring that their perspectives are heard nationwide despite the publication’s absorption.

In light of the mass layoffs, some Black creatives have begun gathering online to form a collective in their vision. In early November, Aniyah Freeman, a digital marketer based in New York, put a callout on LinkedIn to start a media company with recently laid-off Black journalists. So far, she said, about 200 people have joined a group chat; a core group of 15 recently laid-off Black media professionals from various companies including ABC, Rolling Stone and Condé Nast have met on Zoom several times.

For now, their media company is called Black Media Caucus, and they are working on business plans for a magazine focused on politics, fashion and culture. “It’s going to be giving us perspectives that they’re trying to take away from us,” Freeman said. “We need Black-owned-and-run establishments that are going to stay that way. This current political climate is an inspiration for all of us.”