When David Mastio, then the deputy editorial page editor at USA Today, tweeted that “people who are pregnant are also women” last August, it put a target on his back that would send leadership at the paper scrambling to concoct a case against him that could justify a demotion and $30,000 pay cut.
In response to the tweet, opinion editor Kristen DelGuzzi and editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll sent Mastio a memo, obtained by National Review, in which they lambasted the veteran editor and asserted that his decision to question the orthodoxy of gender ideology “calls your judgment into question.”
“There have been other times when we’ve discussed lapses in judgment,” continued DelGuzzi and Carroll. “In 2018, an op-ed from President Trump that you handled was not thoroughly vetted, resulting in deserved criticism and requiring a column from our standards editor as well as a fact check to be paired with it. In 2017, you wrote in an editorial that President Trump was ‘unfit to clean toilets,’ a comment disparaging to an entire segment of workers.”
As a result of his position, they argued, “your lapses in judgment have impact, not only on you and your career but also on your colleagues and on the reputation of USA TODAY. Each of these instances outlined resulted in negative – and avoidable – attention, all of which can call into question our integrity and trust and relationship with our readers.”
“As of Aug. 20, in your new role as opinion writer, you do not have supervisory responsibilities, nor do you have an editing role. If you bring in content, it must have an editor… This is a written warning that any further instances of unacceptable conduct will lead to additional disciplinary action, up to and including immediate termination of your employment without further warning or notice to you,” concluded the memo.
In an interview with National Review, Mastio described that memo as the culmination of an effort to go “back through my career” in search of reasons to sanction him for the tweet.
“They just kind of made it up,” said Mastio.
Mastio drafted a reply to the memo. In it, he outlined a number of recent instances in which the paper had used the word “women” instead of the more inclusive term “pregnant people.” That practice, it’s worth noting, continues to this day. In one column published by Carroll last week, the editor-in-chief writes that her mom, in keeping a record of a journal of her experience having an abortion “wanted to explain why a woman might choose an abortion.”
He also pointed out that they had bungled their account of the prior two examples of alleged poor judgment, neither of which resulted in so much as a conversation with DelGuzzi or Carroll, much less a warning or other disciplinary action.
In the first instance, the offending line reads “a president [Donald Trump ] who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library…”. According to Mastio, he had taken that exact line — which he did not believe to be an insult to anyone but Trump (“it plainly says that Trump is not good enough to count himself among the workers”) — to a superior at the paper for “a gut check” and had received the green light to use it.
And while an article at CNBC did take issue with the line, it also received plaudits from one at the Washington Post.
In the second instance, Mastio noted that it had been his opinion that the paper should not work with the Trump administration on op-eds because it “was utterly devoid of conscience or any respect for the facts,” but was overruled on the matter.
Moreover, while DelGuzzi and Carroll had cited “a column from our standards editor” as evidence that Mastio had erred in publishing the op-ed, that column approvingly quoted Mastio and expressed the paper’s satisfaction with the op-ed, calling it and the response article, written by Senator Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.), “democracy in action, and the beauty of our country and of the First Amendment.” The fact check takes issue with Trump’s characterization of certain aspects of Democrats’ plans and his administration’s accomplishments, but did not directly contradict tangible facts offered by Trump. No correction or editor’s note was affixed to the op-ed.
DelGuzzi and Carroll did not respond to requests for comment.
After some negotiation, Mastio’s salary was restored to its original figure, but he was still demoted with his position settling on “columnist.” The months that followed the incident were difficult.
“It was really awkward working at a place where you felt like your bosses were out to get you and throw you out the door for any perceived slight,” said Mastio, who immediately began to search for an exit ramp and has since landed at Straight Arrow News, where he serves as executive editor. “It was just really hard to write because I was thinking about my family, and my kids, and whether the next thing I wrote was gonna be the thing that got me fired. And it’s hard to be a columnist and write and think clearly when you’re thinking more about your career than you are about writing a good column for your readers.”
That, as Mastio emphasized in a New York Post op-ed last week, is one of his primary concerns. The unforgiving and doctrinaire ideological commitments of the paper’s leadership serve readers and shareholders poorly.
If the animus toward conservatives — even ones unafraid of critiquing Republican politicians such as Trump — is so pronounced as to engender witch hunts of the kind DelGuzzi and Carroll embarked upon against longtime, loyal employees like Mastio (he says Gannett, USA Today‘s parent company, was like home to him), how can Americans trust them to cover current events evenhandedly? Or even to check their work on important topics? After all, DelGuzzi and Carroll didn’t even get around to checking their facts before trying t0 dock Mastio’s pay to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s just so wildly one-sided. It’s like a whole school of thought that’s really common in America is just deleted from our news pages,” submitted Mastio. “And in opinion, the way this this works is kind of twofold. First, conservatives are forced to use the language of their political opponents to write about subjects around identity.”
“And second, all of the staff positions where Gannett invests in building the influence of people gives them a platform multiple times a week — all of those positions go to people on the left,” he added. “I’m really disappointed in the top leaders of USA Today and Gannett for not recognizing what a threat it is to our business model.”
“Lots of good journalists’ livelihoods depend on them getting it right, and they’re letting those people down.”