Highly Placed Media Racists

Nicholas Wade was a leading New York Times science writer for three decades. He left the paper weeks after the May publication of his book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, a book many reviewers say is a full-throated defense of "scientific racism." Wade's views raise questions about his tenure at the Times, and about corporate media vigilance on coverage of racism.

There are many reasons media fail to adequately challenge racism, particularly racism in high places (FAIR Blog, 6/27/14). But one rarely discussed reason is that some highly placed corporate media figures are open to racism. I documented this a while back in Extra! (4/05), after New York Times columnists David Brooks (12/7/04) and John Tierney (10/24/04) approvingly cited the work of Steve Sailer, a central figure in the promotion of racist and anti-immigrant theories.

For his part, Brooks praised a Sailer article in the American Conservative (12/20/04) promoting a movement that saw white people, as Brooks would have it, flouting Western trends toward...