Clay Waters notes that in the report on the Jayson Blair fiasco, Times-appointed reviewer Roger Wilkins put the paper’s “need to pursue diversity aggressively” in the historical context of white male exploitation:

“The Times’s recruitment occurs mainly within the context of the American culture, with all of the extraordinary freight that it had accumulated in the 400 years since Europeans first set foot on this continent and encountered the people who already lived here. Essentially that culture taught that white men were the only people qualified to carry out the serious business of the world. Even down to the seventh decade of the last century, that culture was producing many newsrooms across the nation that were lily-white and all-male….the Times newsroom is an American place and is thus touched–as are virtually all American places–by our culture, including some remnants of hostility to minorities and women.”

BTW, Clay adds our historian Wilkins told the Boston Globe in 1991: “Reagan was just an ignorant, old guy with old-time bigotry, and he didn’t even know how racist he was.”