The iconoclastic news site The Free Press had a Monday evening scoop, courtesy of an inside tipster, that taxpayer-funded news network PBS was trying to conceal its DEI program from President Trump’s executive order and Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
FP’s Josh Code reported:
Just before 5 p.m. on Monday afternoon, PBS CEO Paula Kerger sent a staff-wide email announcing the departure of the company’s two DEI executives: “To ensure that we are complying with the President’s Executive Order we have closed our DEI office, and Cecilia Loving and Gina Leow are leaving PBS. I know you join me in wishing them well in their future endeavors.”….But the timing of the announcement raised several eyebrows in our newsroom. That’s because earlier this morning, we wrote to PBS asking them about a tip we received from a high-ranking executive at the network. The tipster had told us that PBS was planning to move both Loving and Leow to the network’s station services department in order to skirt Trump’s executive order calling for the elimination of DEI-focused positions and grants from government-funded institutions.
(The station services department facilitates communication between local PBS stations and PBS HQ in Northern Virginia.)
PBS established its DEI department in 2021 with the now-departed Loving and Leow, who served, respectively, as Senior Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The move came partly in response to woke criticism about the racial makeup of PBS’s stable of filmmakers, including the sainted liberal documentarian Ken Burns. A subhead from an August 2021 story on The Wrap: “The network had faced criticism for allotting a disproportionate amount of airtime and funding to Ken Burns programs.”
According to FP’s source: 'Loving introduced weekly 'meditation Mondays' and regular 'indigenous healing circles' for PBS employees to 'resolve conflict' and 'create a safe space for courageous conversations'…."
PBS’s inside source spilled the slides:
The high-ranking source told The Free Press that Loving spoke “'like she was at a pulpit,' using the language of spirituality to bring a moral heft to her DEI sessions. Slide decks from Loving’s presentations encouraged leaders to 'anoint' employees, which would help other team members 'view them as worthy.'"
Yikes!
PBS’s federal funding is also under scrutiny from DOGE, with Elon Musk eyeing that “$535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” as he noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Code’s source emphasized: “Race is a major determining factor in decision-making” at PBS, which bragged about its legally questionable hiring practices in a February 2023 press release boasting that in 2022, “BIPOC employees comprised 48% of new hires and 35% of promotions in FY 2022."
(For you philistines out there, “BIPOC” stands for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”)
Interestingly, clicking to the promised “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report for Fiscal Year 2022” takes one back to an internal home screen. Where did it go? That 48-page report can be found here, for now.
