CHRISTIAN TOTO: NY Times Declares The Woke Movies Era Is Dead.
The New York Times uncorked a withering attack on woke Hollywood movies. The piece flexes its progressive bona fides, but large swathes of the article could have been written by The Critical Drinker or Film Threat’s Chris Gore.
The headline and subhead are stunning and brave in their bluntness.
Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?
The past decade’s clumsiest attempts to cram new faces into old stories now feel like a moment, and a genre, of their own.
The same paper that erupted in fury over a Sen. Tom Cotton op-ed let this missive through?
The biggest takeaway? The woke movies era is over. Done. Kaput. And The New York Times appears happy to report it.
But how can Hollywood even put out product in 2025, what with all of the stars who promised to leave the country if Trump won in November…
UPDATE: So when does the woke era at the New York Times conclude? NYT Puts Menstrual Products in Men’s Bathrooms ‘To Support Transgender and Non-Binary Colleagues.’
The paper’s decision was announced by the vice president for global real estate and facilities, Victor Liu, in a company-wide Slack message. From July 26 to July 29, Liu said, the company would begin “adding menstrual products and sanitary baskets” to the office’s men’s restrooms “to support transgender and non-binary colleagues.” The company also announced that it was “removing gendered imagery and adding language that colleagues are welcome to use the restroom in which they feel most comfortable.”
The move highlights the growing cultural and political rift between legacy media companies and the general public. Polls show that Americans generally support policies that require individuals who identify as transgender to use bathrooms that match their biological sex. President-elect Donald Trump hammered the transgender issue in his successful campaign last fall, which surveys show was one of his most impactful talking points.
The Times declined to comment.
Just 1 percent of the Times’s workforce identifies as “nonbinary,” a category which includes transgender individuals but also those who simply choose not to identify with either gender, according to the paper’s 2023 “Diversity and Inclusion Report.” The number of “nonbinary” employees, the report stated, does appear to be climbing, although they are still a negligible portion of the paper’s workforce.
The Times’s efforts to appeal to a broader swath of Americans are often hamstrung by partisan reporters and junior employees who demand the paper move further left. Staff at the paper revolted in the summer of 2020 after the opinion section published a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that called for sending in the military to quell left-wing riots in the nation’s cities. That column prompted at least one writer, former tech reporter Charlie Warzel, to cry in an emergency staff meeting.
More recently, Times reporters are in the midst of a “rebellion” over the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza, according to the Wall Street Journal. Senior editors, the Journal reported in April, are worried that some reporters “are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests.”
h/t Ed Driscoll