I guess there’s an easy answer: she’s female, she’s black, and the fact that she’s an anti-white, race-baiting bigot who isn’t very bright isn’t outweighed by those things because diversity. If that’s the best excuse the Times has, then we should all agree that its claim to being a responsible news source, never mind the creme de la creme it purports to be, if it was ever true, is no longer.
Gay regularly bloviates on MSNBC, where the standards for fairness, objectivity and accuracy are irrelevant, like a laser-pointer is to a snail. There her manifest bias and cognitive flaws don’t matter much: anyone who watches that network doesn’t want information, but partisan, emotional, red-meat hate, and Facts Don’t Matter. Still, a Times writer introduced as a Times writer is representing the Times in public. How can the paper allow her to make the “Gray Lady” appear to be a den of hacks?
I guess because that’s what it is now.
I’ve only used the Mara Gay tag twice. but she’s shown up in many posts, never well. Check them out: it’s either funny or depressing. I liked the time in 2020 when Mara ridiculed how much money Micheal Bloomberg reportedly spent on campaign ads when he was trying to take the Democratic Presidential nomination. “Somebody tweeted recently that actually with the money that he spent, he could have given every American a million dollars,” Gay said on MSNBC (or course). “I’ve got it. Let’s put it on the screen,” said bone-headed anchor Brian Williams. Williams then read the tweet: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. Population, 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and have had lunch money left over.” Morons. 500 million dollars divided by 327 million people is about a dollar and 56 cents. Williams, at least, has been sacked by the network despite its loose standards of professionalism. But the Times still employs Gay.
With Mara, stupid is always in a race with racist. In 2021, the Times even defended this rant on “Morning Joe”:
“You know, the reality is here that we have a large percentage of the American population — I don’t know how big it is, but we have tens of millions of Trump voters who continue to believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by simple virtue of having to share the democracy with others. I think as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy, but how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness. Until we can confront that and talk about that, this is really going to continue. I was on Long Island this weekend, visiting a really dear friend. And I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with you know, expletives against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases, just dozens of American flags, which you know is also just disturbing, because essentially the message was clear, this is my country. This is not your country. I own this. And so until we’re ready to have that conversation, this is going to continue…Because, you know, the Trump voters who are not going to get onboard with democracy, they’re a minority. You can marginalize them, long-term. But if we don’t take the threat seriously, then I think we’re all in really bad shape.“
This is typical of Gay, not an anomaly. When Colin Kaepernick quoted part of a Frederick Douglass speech as his defense for declaring the Betsy Ross flag a symbol of racism—an opinion Gay obviously agrees with— Senator Ted Cruz replied to the Kneeler-in Chief by linking to Douglass’s whole speech, which proved that the cherry-picked quote didn’t mean what Kaepernick was claiming. Mara Gay tweeted to Cruz, “Frederick Douglass is an American hero, and his name has no business in your mouth.”
Nice
But that’s Mara.
Oh! I almost forgot what prompted this post! Here is what Gay said-–on MSNBC, natch—about Facebook permitting Donald Trump to post his views like anybody else.
“You don’t want to, whether you’re a company or an institution, you don’t want to hand over the keys to democracy to have someone destroy that democracy. So do you want to be that institution that really helps take down the country? I mean, this is a business so yes, it’s a little bit different than a public institution, but we should still be asking the moral question. Years ago, we would be asking the moral questions, do we want a chemical company, should we be supporting weapons of war? These are questions that are not new in American history but we should be asking them. And Facebook or Meta may not have the same responsibility. As a business, it has a responsibility to its shareholders, fine, but we can still ask those moral questions and we should,”
That goes into the “Mara Gay, Hysterical Hyper-Partisan Censorious Idiot” file, not the “Mara Gay, Anti-white Racist” file. She’s really and truly saying that allowing Donald Trump to post his views will “take down the country.” This is how all totalitarians justify imprisoning political opponents, punishing their supporters, having state-run media publish lies about them, find excuses to try them for crimes, rig elections so they can’t gain power.
And we can only conclude that the New York Times has no problem with that, telling us all we need to know about the New York Times.
Ethics Alarms 
How can the NYT defend her? Because they agree with her.
As Cruz pointed out during the whole Douglass tiff, she represents her employer well.
As well has her fellow employees!
“’Frederick Douglass is an American hero, and his name has no business in your mouth.’”
This is a perfect example of the “conversation” that Gay and her type want to have about race relations in the United States (and individual rights generally).
As is true in many cases where historic figures are sanctimoniously either blessed or blamed by moderns, I have to wonder how knowledgeable Gay really is about Douglass. I have read about a half dozen books by and about him, and I know there have to be at least a dozen more. History in general has no business in the mouths of ill-informed idiots and demagogues.
Fortunately, it seldom ends up there, because they usually don’t know any. Gay might have mixed Frederick up with William O. Douglas. Or Kirk Douglas. Or Oliver Douglas from “Green Acres.”
Let me see if I understand the logic here.
This is coming from a progressive that wants, in essence, a pure democracy where the majority makes the decisions. Yet, somehow, she finds it objectionable when society reflects the majority culture. Apparently, it is unfair for the majority culture to dominate society because she is not in this majority. She clamors to preserve minority interests but only when she is in the minority. Because of this she has no credibility.
Talking about this doesn’t have as much value as it once had. I say that because now Mara Gay is simply one more egregious example of the conduct of the left and its adherents, and, in light of Charles Blow (obsessive Trump-hater who never went off-duty), Lori Lightfoot (a mayor so incompetent AND hateful as to be scary), and Gabriel Gipe (the now-former teacher trying to make his pupils into revolutionaries), she’s not even the MOST egregious.
When I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s the differences between the two parties were nowhere near as pronounced as they are now, and this is even after Vietnam. Very few people wanted anything to do with the hard left, who were perceived as having gone too far in the final years of Vietnam. I wonder if part of this was the expectation that as the US involvement in Vietnam wound down, the hard left would also wind down, but instead gave this country he Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the disaster that was the Althorp concert, and the Tate-LaBianca murders (Charles Manson was inspired by free love and the Beatles, among other things).
However, that might also be because the vast majority of the elected officials at all levels then, and a good amount of academics still at thar time, were Greatest Generation folks who’d fought or assisted in the fight against actual tyranny, some of them a second time in Korea. Lifelong far-left academics like Noam Chomsky or far lefties who fought the Nazis (as much to open the second front and take the pressure off the Soviets as anything) but still maintained their hard-left outlook like Philip Berrigan and Howard Zinn were the exception rather than the rule. I think that’s why some folks who were students at the time never wanted anything to do with this nonsense (like yourself, Jack, and like my dad and a lot of his classmates) and more than a few others who got temporarily snared by the drugs of free love and the music of the times and the real drugs that became popular then eventually saw their way clear and tuned out, turned off, and dropped back in. However, a bunch of the far left who wanted to avoid Vietnam kept extending their student deferments by working on ever more advanced degrees, resulting in a huge glut of far-left academics. Eventually those folks replaced the previous generation, to the point where a conservative or even a politically neutral professor was a relative rarity by the time I went to college (in fact all those I knew or knew of are now either retired or dead). Eventually those folks also exclusively populated the committees that oversaw promotions and the granting of tenure, where they made damn sure that no one who didn’t think like them saw either. Speaking personally, that’s one of the reasons I became an attorney rather than a college professor. Even though being a college professor might have been a better fit for me for many reasons, the fact is I’m a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and nothing’s going to change that. I really didn’t think spending five years (or more) getting a Ph.D. was worth it just to go from six-year gig to six-year gig and never progress. I did not want to be 50 years old and an Assistant Professor about to be denied tenure and forced to move on for the fourth time.
Now, there’s not a single major university that isn’t exclusively an indoctrination center for the left, and they have been that way for at least one full generation. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the majority of those who graduate from these institutions, and especially those who excel there, should be like-minded, because the surest way to do well is to give your professors’ words right back to them. Contemporaries of mine like National Review writer Dan McLaughlin were the last, I think, of the great conservative thinkers to make it out the gates of those schools thirty years ago. Since then, it’s been increasingly and later all CRT, socialism, and America hatred. To the graduates of that system, America is a villain and the Constitution a racist document to be worked around. This woman, and the folks at the NYT, are par for the course for this system.
This is a tangent, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Is campaign advertising the highest and best use of $500 million? Probably not.
Should we be electing public officials based on who can afford to spend the most on advertising? Probably not…
But was that $500 million just wasted? Was it the equivalent of a bonfire made of 5 million hundred-dollar bills? Definitely not.
Those dollars were spent. They were paid to media outlets: newspapers, tv stations, radio stations, internet services, etc. who depend on those advertising dollars for their very existence and to compensate the employees on their payrolls. In fact, the irony is that some of those very dollars may have made their way into the pockets of the likes of Brian Williams and Mara Gay. (More than $1.56 each? who knows?)
We have completely forgotten how money works… and this is just one more example…
Well spoke. And, from another angle, it is rather important who the United States of America has as its President. Bloomberg was a terrible candidate and is a pretty disgusting human being, but there is no question in my mind that he would be a more capable, trustworthy POTUS than Joe Biden. If the 500 million had saved the US from its current fate, it would have been a bargain. That it did not is just moral luck.
Of course, Gay wouldn’t comprehend either your comment of this one.
Could be worse, we didn’t get Bernie as president, which, of the final four Dems, would have been the worst. Believe it or not, Bernie still hasn’t ruled out a run in 2024. The man is 81 (he’ll be 83 on election day 2024), has already had one heart attack, and hasn’t moderated his far-left thinking even a little bit. He still hasn’t ruled out sitting in the big chair, when he belongs in a rocking chair.
Bernie’s fine.
He’ll never get nominated. If the DNC allows a non-party member to be nominated on its ticket, it is beyond incompetent.
They just want to keep him around so that he can help bring them the hard-left vote.
If they did not humor him, he might pull a Ralph Nader on them. As long as he does not do that, they will let him run until he retires.
-Jut
I think he will probably die in the saddle.
To answer your question of: How Can The New York Times Defend Employing Mara Gay?
I believe it’s because they actively seek out such cognitively inert racists. She represents a desirable presence at the Times, a paper with no difference between them and the supermarket tabloids seen at the checkout lanes.