The Knight Foundation scrubs DEI section from its 'About' page

[Nicole Froio at The Objective]

My reporting colleagues at ProPublica recently noted that over a thousand non-profits have scrubbed diversity, equity, and inclusion language from their mission statements in the wake of new threats from the Trump administration.

“The changes reflect a broader retreat underway in the nonprofit world. After President Donald Trump ordered his administration to root out “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion efforts earlier this year, opening the door to investigations and funding cuts for offenders, more than 1,000 charities rewrote their mission statements in forms they filed this year with the Internal Revenue Service, removing or minimizing language tied to race, inequity and historically disadvantaged communities, ProPublica found.”

Now, The Objective has found that one of these is the Knight Foundation, one of the biggest funders of journalism in the US:

“One executive director, Casey, who is using a pseudonym in this story to protect future funding relationships of their organization, said they were “ghosted” by the Knight Foundation this summer — even after building a relationship for two years. Casey’s nonprofit newsroom covers news for marginalized communities.

“We had two meetings and exchanged emails regularly back and forth,” Casey told The Objective. “Then it was between May and July that we were ghosted.””

On the other hand, as the article notes, URL Media received a $5M grant. URL Media works on building sustainable, inclusive community media for Black and Brown audiences. It’s complicated, in other words, and I suspect that none of these organizations has crisply figured out what the real risk is and where any lines can be drawn.

What shouldn’t be in doubt: journalism can’t truly be of service unless it is inclusive. The industry doesn’t have a long history of navigating this well; gains over the last few years were a long time coming, and it’s disappointing to see backpedaling — but maybe not surprising. As Delano Massey wrote for NiemanLab:

“It didn’t tell the truth about Black Power; it called community programs militant and ignored COINTELPRO until the leaks made denial impossible. It didn’t tell the truth during the Reagan years. “Law and order” and “states’ rights” were ideological, not racial strategies. It didn’t tell the truth in the 1990s, when “superpredator” mythology, mugshots, and crime panic dominated the airwaves — helping justify policies that devastated Black communities while ignoring white drug use and the rise of mass incarceration.

And when 2020 forced newsrooms to confront institutional racism, the honesty lasted only as long as the pressure did.”

So maybe part of the solution is to turn the pressure back up. I can think of a few words for people who are removing their commitments to diversity in the face of a resurgence in American fascism: cowards and collaborators among them.

[Link]