New Yorker Editor Goes Scorched Earth After Getting Fired, Calls Magazine ‘Ground Zero’ for ‘Class Exclusivity’

Sarah RumpfJul 25th, 2022, 12:12 pm
 
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Erin Overbey, the Archive Editor and Classics newsletter editor for The New Yorker who has been posting Twitter threads highly critical of her employer on issues of diversity and inclusion, has now been terminated, according to a new Twitter thread she posted Monday morning.

In one such past thread from September 2021, Overbey dissected the racial diversity of The New Yorker’s editorial staff and published writers. “Most white people at prestigious magazines don’t ever want to talk about race or diversity at all,” she wrote, “primarily because they’ve been allowed to exist in a world where their mastheads resemble member registries at Southern country clubs circa 1950.”

She argued that white people were “rarely actively racist at these publications” but “simply never bother to challenge the status quo—typically out of concern that they will be inconvenienced or made to feel uncomfortable,” meaning that the status quo “often remains entrenched for literally decades.” These “otherwise friendly, decent white people are really the bedrock upon which passive racism maintains its grip on media mastheads & editorial departments,” so when people “look up to you as an example for an entire industry, this shit is just embarrassing.”

Subsequent tweets claimed that less than 0.01% of the more than 40,000 features and critics pieces published in the 96-year history of The New Yorker’s print edition had been edited by a Black editor, 3.6% of the book reviews published in the last 30 years were written by Black writers, there were more profiles articles written by women in the first 30 years of the magazine’s existence during the last 30 years, and other statistics showing a very small percentage of contributions from writers and editors who were women and/or Black, Latino, Asian, etc. She did acknowledge that The New Yorker website had “published a comparably impressive array of diverse bylines, easily eclipsing the print mag in terms of representation and inclusivity.”

Another thread from July 19 focused more on gender issues, with Overbey writing that being a “female whistleblower” on “diversity & gender inequality in the media industry is not easy” because of the “tremendous pressure” on anyone who questions or seeks to change the status quo.

“I’ve been under a tremendous amount of pressure lately due to my persistence & consistency in speaking up and refusing to stay quiet about workplace inequality,” wrote Overbey.

Overbey included several tweets outlining the “minutiae and the almost granular detail” of some of the critical feedback she had received from her supervisors, which she framed as retaliatory “to make you never want to speak out again…meant to make you understand the cost of raising your voice–to your career & to you professionally” and “meant to keep you so preoccupied and distracted that you become too exhausted or overwhelmed to keep speaking out.”

She also complained about “factual errors” for which she was reprimanded during a performance review, saying she had not made the errors herself and they were “added to my copy by a male colleague who knew that I was under a performance review & could be penalized or reprimanded severely for them,” identifying the colleague as editor-in-chief David Remnick.

Overbey announced her termination in a new thread shortly after 8:00 am ET Monday, writing that The New Yorker had fired her “effective immediately” and she was speaking with her union about “potentially filing a grievance on the termination.”

In subsequent tweets, Overbey wrote that the New Yorker “has never contested the facts as I have stated them” regarding her complaints about being reprimanded for errors put into her writing by Remnick, that she was put under a performance review “shortly after sending an email raising concerns about gender inequality & inclusion at the magazine,” or the statistics she had cited about the lack of diversity, something she said she had been tracking since 2019.

She touted her work on two “top-performing” weekly newsletters for The New Yorker, building an “avid” subscriber base of around 270,000 and vowed to “defend myself in the strongest of terms.”

Last summer, Overbey had learned that her male predecessor had made a higher salary, despite lacking key qualifications that she possessed, she wrote.

Overbey declared that she had “the documentation, screenshots & emails to back everything up” she was asserting, and while she viewed The New Yorker as “in many ways, a wonderful institution,” it was “also ground zero for a kind of regressive literary gatekeeping, class exclusivity & old-school cultural thinking that simply no longer have any relation to, or frankly relevance in, the modern world as we know it.”

“Legacy media” was “incapable of accurately reflecting the world that it covers” because the industry “is comprised primarily of white employees from privileged backgrounds,” Overbey continued, calling for the “bursting” of bubbles that were “insular, privileged & white af,” instead of “teaching a new generation exactly how to become dinosaurs.”

Mediaite reached out to Overbey and The New Yorker for comment but did not receive a response.

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Sarah Rumpf - Contributing Editor

Sarah Rumpf joined Mediaite in 2020 and is a Contributing Editor focusing on politics, law, and the media. A native Floridian, Sarah attended the University of Florida, graduating with a double major in Political Science and German, and earned her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the UF College of Law. Sarah's writing has been featured at National Review, The Daily Beast, Reason, Law & Crime, Independent Journal Review, Texas Monthly, The Capitolist, Breitbart Texas, Townhall, RedState, The Orlando Sentinel, and the Austin-American Statesman, and her political commentary has led to appearances on television, radio, and podcast programs across the globe. Follow Sarah on Bluesky and Threads.