The sewer pipes of Twitter were teeming with righteous indignation and bloviating from legacy media types after Texas A&M University reneged on a contract with a University of Texas professor to head up its journalism school revamp.
“Texas A&M recruited a UT professor to revive its journalism program, then backtracked after ‘DEI hysteria,’” reads a Texas Tribune headline.
Kathleen McElroy, an A&M grad and director of UT-Austin’s journalism program for six years, was announced as the new hire by A&M to take over its own journalism program.
“What a shameful, baseless, self-inflicted loss for A&M,” wrote one local Austin journalist. “McElroy was director of the J School [at UT] when I was there and we were all better for it.”
But the “DEI hysteria” mentioned by the Tribune is only part of the story. They completely ignored some important context of a June 15 article by Texas Scorecard, whose author Valerie Muñoz is an A&M student, that detailed past statements made by McElroy.
There are a lot of outrageous statements made and positions taken by McElroy in that piece. But in my opinion the most egregious of them all is this tidbit from an NPR spot.
“We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore. I think we know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting two sides of a story or 3 sides of a story, if one side is illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover criminal justice, you can’t cover all of these institutions without recognizing how all these institutions were built.”
Not only is that straight up hogwash! It’s THE VERY REASON THE AVERAGE PERSON’S VIEW OF THE MEDIA IS SO POOR.
For years, the legacy media has treated one side, half of the country, as “illegitimate,” and now this professor is saying the quiet part out loud!
How does anyone think this is a good outlook to have in someone heading up a journalism school??
Well, good news followed. After Scorecard’s article made the rounds, A&M started to alter their offer to McElroy. Eventually, it was altered enough for her to reject the offer and return to UT.
After Scorecard, the ire of the legacy media became the The Rudder Association (TRA) — an organization of 1,400 A&M alums that is “committed to exposing and offering an alternative to campus DEI ideology.”
Multiple outlets have stated that The Rudder Association is the Big Bad Conservative organization responsible for “pressuring” the university into altering its decision to hire McElroy. TRA said it expressed concerns to A&M hierarchy, along with “many others,” specifically highlighting McElroy’s “illegitimate views” statement.
“We were ready to engage in good faith with Dr. McElroy had she taken the opportunity to prove her critics wrong, but it appears that she was not a good fit for this role,” TRA President Matt Poling said in a statement.
But rather than ask McElroy to justify her position about “illegitimate views,” the Tribune and other outlets just take it as gospel, turning their attention to this collection of alumni who had the gall to question her hiring.
In that, the Tribune practiced exactly what McElroy preached: telling only one side of the story and leaving out a MASSIVE chunk of important context.
The righteous and bloviating liberal media all deserve each other, but average Texans deserve better.
That’s why I founded The Texan. We report the facts and do so without the moral preening frequently found in the progressive legacy media.