Lawsuit Alleges Gannett Fired Whites For Diversity

A new lawsuit claims that Gannett fired white employees and denied them career advancement opportunities in an effort to diversify its workforce. The complaint alleges that Gannet’s diversity policies “resulted in the termination of numerous well qualified workers based purely on their non-minority status,” while other former staffers claim they were told that certain positions could only be filled by a minority, reports The Washington Post.

After more than 20 years of working for his hometown newspaper, the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., Steve Bradley was laid off amid pandemic-induced cost-cutting in May 2020. He was crushed, but he eventually took a communications job for a local school district.

Steve Bradley

Then, two years later, he received a startling message.

Sitting in the bleachers at the school softball field in July 2022, Bradley took a phone call from an unknown number. He listened as J. Nelson Thomas, an employment lawyer he’d never met, presented a jarring claim: Bradley was laid off because he is White.

Now, Bradley is one of five named plaintiffs in a proposed class-action lawsuit that claims the country’s largest newspaper publisher “discriminated against non-minorities” to achieve diversity goals. Filed in August in Virginia federal court, the suit alleges that Gannett fired White employees, denied them opportunities for advancement and replaced them with less-qualified minority candidates as the company sought to diversify its workforce.

The case is among the first to test the legality of corporate diversity practices in the wake of a June Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. That decision has sparked a wave of litigation aimed at racial considerations in the workplace, including claims that corporate efforts to increase diversity have disadvantaged White employees.

For Bradley, 56, the decision to pursue legal action wasn’t easy. He’d always thought it was good that Gannett was working to boost diversity. But he also “wanted to be judged” based on his work and the work of his team, he said, not his race.

“Racism is racism, and right is right and wrong is wrong,” Bradley said. “Decisions should be based on the quality of a candidate and the quality of performance and not protected class issues. That’s really what it comes down to.”