As contrived, agenda-setting journalism goes, the Beltway-based whiteboard Axios has recently given the mainstream press a run for its money.
On Wednesday, the outlet gave readers a first look at a survey of U.S. employees conducted by Daniel J. Edelman Holdings, which found that the vast majority of Americans across all political affiliations and racial demographics believe corporate America is “not living up to promises to address racism.” That figure includes supermajorities of self-described Democrats and independents, Asian, black, and Hispanic Americans, and a majority of whites and Republicans.
The article spends all of two sentences describing the existence of this research before lurching wildly toward a partisan conclusion that this data in no way supports: “The findings suggest that most employees favor diversity and equity initiatives even as Republicans in Congress and officials such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) want to punish companies and agencies over what they dismissively call ‘woke’ policies.”
Axios’s jeremiad goes on to litigate more objections it has with the GOP, which are only tangentially related to the survey data that supposedly inspired the piece. Axios tears into Governor DeSantis’s attacks on “ESG” (environmental, social, governance) investing, which subordinates the fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns for individual investors to the ideological goal of advancing progressive politics in America’s boardrooms. It also accuses Republicans of executing a campaign designed to “stop private companies and corporations from pursuing policies supporting racial justice, LGBTQ rights, and the fight against climate change.” To preserve its peculiar commitment to brevity, Axios had no choice but to allow these wild partisan accusations to speak for themselves.
It requires an impressive amount of divination to summon all this deep meaning from a poll indicating primarily that Americans really don’t like racism.
Set aside the convenience of the notion that a firm dedicated to championing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives “within the PR, marketing, advertising, and communications industries” found that the vast majority of Americans believe the cure for America’s racial ills are more DEI initiatives. Firms with markedly less skin in the game have found that the public has a more nuanced view of DEI and its associated initiatives, and applying accidents of birth as a metric for evaluating candidates for employment or matriculation has a bad odor about it.
Americans don’t like discrimination and bigotry. And, to the extent they associate DEI with good things, they’re unlikely to look upon it with contempt. But those are assumptions on the part of the public. There is no basis for extrapolating from the public’s distaste for racism that they also disapprove of the suite of Republican policies, which are based on a philosophical opposition to one of DEI’s core predicates: that the remedy for negative discrimination in the past is positive discrimination today.
The Edelman survey provided Axios with a springboard to litigate a variety of preexisting grievances with Republicans in relation to cultural issues. But, given the loose relationship between the survey’s data and Axios‘s conclusions, it’s reasonable to assume that the nearest tool at hand would have served the same purpose. We can expect a lot more of this sort of journalism when the 2024 presidential campaign begins in earnest.