On Sunday, Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Arizona’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, posted an entirely innocuous joke on Twitter:
Finally a compelling explanation for why our economy is doing so well https://t.co/Ub2CeiyjCs
— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) August 29, 2022
The tweet — itself delivered in an obviously not-very-serious tone — was clearly poking fun at the focus on diversity at the Federal Reserve in a moment of severe economic woes.
Record-breaking inflation is, in fact, a much more serious issue than the number of LGBT people of color that the Fed employs. But the New York Times ran a completely humorless piece today, titled “Blake Masters, a G.O.P. Senate Candidate, Links Fed Diversity to Economic Woes” — subtitle: “The sarcastic barb from Mr. Masters, which was widely condemned, was in response to a report of increased diversity at the Federal Reserve” — dedicated to reporting on the apparently controversial nature of the sentiment.
Of course, the only figures that I’m aware of who “widely condemned” the tweet were other journalists and pundits at left-wing outlets. If there were others, the Times doesn’t mention them. (All it notes is that “Mr. Masters was swiftly condemned by some as dismissing the value of diversity”). As with so many “[X] thing a Republican said causes controversy” reports in the legacy media, the “controversy” that the Times is reporting on is only a controversy among progressive journalists.
But more to the point, the entire premise of the piece — that Masters was arguing that the Fed’s increased diversity caused the economic downturn — is patently absurd. The Times itself actually implicitly contradicts itself on this front. The first sentence of the piece argues that Masters’s tweet “suggested . . . that the nation’s economic struggles were connected to increased gender and racial diversity in Federal Reserve leadership.” Two paragraphs later, the article argues that “his opinion aligned with some of his fellow Republicans, who also criticized the focus on diversity at a time of high inflation.” Those are two wildly different things, actually: Suggesting that diversity is causing an economic recession, and arguing that diversity is a silly thing to focus on in the midst of a recession, are not the same. The Times isn’t just writing entire pieces about a tweet — it’s writing entire pieces about a controversy over a tweet that only occurred within a very small, insular subset of Twitter.