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.”
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Ethics Alarms 
I dabbled in journalism as an undergrad. Admittedly, that wasn’t exactly last week: the newsroom was stocked with manual typewriters, if that gives you a rough idea. There was no journalism department, and, I believe, only a single introductory course–which virtually no one on the staff of the newspaper took. A bunch of my colleagues turned out okay, though: three that I worked with ended up in senior management positions: one with the Wall Street Journal, one with the International Herald Tribune, one with Newsweek.
I did some day editing, mostly on the arts page; I had a weekly column, and I did a little news reporting. I never sought an upper-level editorial position. It’s possible, perhaps even probable, I could have been arts editor if I’d really wanted the job; I didn’t.
But I did have a lot of conversations about journalism with some people who were subsequently to be very successful in that business. The consensus was that objectivity was a goal, but one it was impossible to achieve. The reasons for this were two-fold. First, you can’t entirely suppress your own life experience, perspectives, and (yes) prejudices. Second, you inevitably interpret the significance of events. If X happened and Y also happened, there are manifold ways of framing the story, using variations on the theme of “despite” or “therefore,” for example. Even saying “X and Y” instead of “Y and X” often betrays a bias.
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