Fox News reportedly scrubbed its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from all its job listings on Thursday.
The change came after former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy reported in the Thursday edition of his newsletter Status the disparity of promoting DEI as an organization while hosts echoed President Donald Trump’s criticism of it.
However, in the Friday edition of his Status newsletter, Darcy reported that every job posting — from Hannity to Fox & Friends — had proudly declared that the company was “deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including attracting, retaining, and promoting diverse talent.” The listings also boasted that “reflecting the diversity of the world around us is critical to our company’s success.”
However, Darcy wrote, that when confronted about the contradiction, Fox promptly erased the DEI language from the job listings.
A Fox News spokesperson told Darcy the move was part of a routine legal review: “Fox News Media routinely reviews our legal obligations including under federal, state, and local law and we have removed this language.”
Trump has stirred a storm of controversy in the aftermath of the fatal collision between an Army black hawk helicopter and a passenger flight, which resulted in the deaths of 64 people on the American Airlines flight that was making its descent into Reagan Washington National Airport, and three members of the military in the U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter, which appeared to be on a routine training flight above the Potomac River.
At a press conference on the topic on Thursday, Trump said the agency is “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities … under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the company’s website”—language that was reportedly on the FAA website throughout Trump’s first term.
The president acknowledged that, with the investigation in just its earliest stages, the formal cause of the collision remains unknown. But he insisted that it’s just “common sense” that promoting diversity in hiring leads to a degradation of talent in the federal workforce—a dynamic he’s suggesting is the likely cause of the deadly collision.
“I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people to do this,” Trump told reporters in Washington.
“For some jobs—and not only this, but air traffic controllers—they have to be at the highest level of genius.”
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