Complicity Is a Choice: Corporate Media’s Anti-DEI Capitulation
The corporate retreat from diversity, equity and inclusion has been quick, frictionless and pervasive
Media companies have the right and responsibility to oppose the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. Instead, at every turn, they have turned their backs on the diverse communities they claim to serve — and from which they profit.
Last month, I published Complicit, a report that tracks corporate media’s capitulation to the Trump regime and abandonment of DEI policies. My findings show that corporate media CEOs have quickly and willingly betrayed our democratic values by bowing to Trump’s demands.
I found that 26 of the top 35 U.S. media companies shifted their DEI efforts within the first nine months after Trump issued his anti-DEI executive orders, with companies like Amazon, Meta and X abandoning their efforts right after the 2024 presidential election. I also found that eight of the remaining nine companies exist in a gray zone, that every major telecom company capitulated within the first six months and that many of the 35 companies deploy doublespeak — the Orwellian language of distortion — to obscure their DEI backpedaling.
And the examples keep piling up:
- In November, Advance Publications laid off six staff members at Teen Vogue, most of whom are BIPOC women or trans, including Teen Vogue’s politics editor. The company later fired union employees who demanded answers about these layoffs.
- The hundreds of Washington Post layoffs disproportionately impacted people of color. On Feb. 13, The Washington Post Guild noted that 50 percent of its Latinx members were laid off, along with 45 percent of Black members and 43 percent of Asian members. “These numbers aren’t just statistics,” the Guild said in its statement. “They reflect careers, communities, and a profound shift in who gets to shape the journalism and mission of The Washington Post.”
- Warner Bros. Discovery blocked professional wrestler Brody King from appearing on AEW Dynamite because it didn’t want his fans’ anti-ICE chants to go viral. With a huge merger pending before Trump’s Department of Justice, WBD silenced a star from standing up against ICE’s domestic terror.
These retreats are not based on any legal imperative. These moves are rooted in racism, fears of threats and retaliation from the Trump regime — and the desire to secure approvals of proposed deals or other regulatory favors.
Trump made me do it
Trump has weaponized the FCC to threaten and coerce the media into compliance by putting a corrupt loyalist at its head. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has been doing Trump’s dirty work as his media extortionist. He’s using Trump’s punitive and anti-democratic executive orders to position DEI efforts as a bargaining chip in exchange for regulatory favors. Carr is doing everything he can to ensure that the media ecosystem will serve as MAGA’s disinformation-and-propaganda megaphone.
There are plenty of examples. In a letter sent last May to the FCC, Verizon promised to end its DEI programs; like clockwork, the agency approved its merger with Frontier the very next day, pointing to Verizon’s “commitment to end” its DEI practices as a key factor in this decision.
But caving to the regime’s demands doesn’t mean the administration will back off. In December 2024, Disney settled a spurious Trump defamation suit, and the company informed its employees in February 2025 that it was changing its DEI programs. Even with this capitulation from Disney, Carr still opened an investigation into Disney/ABC’s programs and pushed to yank Jimmy Kimmel off the air.
Or take the case of Paramount, which ended its DEI efforts to help win approval of the Skydance merger. In the wake of the merger, the company disbanded CBS News’ Race and Culture Unit. And as we saw this week, CBS blocked Stephen Colbert’s interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, claiming that airing it would violate the FCC’s equal-time rule. This cowardice distorts this rule — from which talk shows are exempt — as time only for pro-MAGA views.
Timothy Karr
To be clear, Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders are legally toothless and lack any real enforcement authority. In other words, corporate media has the right of refusal, yet they choose to be complicit. The threat alone was enough to coerce these companies into abandoning their DEI efforts. This backpedaling can have huge implications on who gets to work and whose stories get told.
The media shape how we understand the world and how we perceive one another, which is why diverse and equitable representation matters. And that’s why the Trump regime has so aggressively moved to capture the media: to control the message, misinform, erode trust and erase diverse people and perspectives from view — hindering our ability to fully participate in our democracy.
One notable exception
Netflix is the only big media company I researched that so far has refused to bend the knee on DEI. The company rejected an anti-DEI proposal that a conservative shareholder group brought to the company’s annual shareholder meeting in 2025. The proposal asked the Netflix board to “produce a report assessing how the company’s ‘affirmative action initiatives’ impact discrimination risks to the company.”
The Netflix board responded: “The proposal is unnecessary as Netflix already has a well-established compliance program and relevant policies and practices. Netflix is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate in recruiting, hiring, training, or promoting on any basis protected by law.”
After the Netflix board weighed in, 99 percent of the company’s shareholders voted to reject the anti-DEI push. Unlike companies that refer to a “changing legal landscape” to justify folding or scaling back their DEI programs and initiatives, Netflix delivered a legally grounded response.
Every corporate media CEO could have done the same, but didn’t. As the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights notes, “equal opportunity and antidiscrimination obligations are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and our federal civil-rights laws. [Trump’s] executive orders do not and cannot change that. The president’s role is to implement laws; he cannot rewrite them.”
Correcting the record
In an authentic democracy, the diverse and equitable inclusion of peoples and perspectives are the very foundations of a free and fair society — they are not optional. DEI principles and efforts continue and expand the work of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, providing a way for companies to fulfill their civil-rights obligations. These efforts are aimed at correcting our country’s history of discrimination, erasure, segregation and marginalization of diverse communities — and to fulfill our promise of becoming a true multiracial democracy.
This inequitable concentration of power is why whiteness has always been overrepresented in our media while diverse communities are stereotyped, underrepresented or erased from view. And that’s why progress toward equity has been lethargic and uneven while attempts at accountability fail to be enforced.
What you can do
Our collective assignment is to reimagine, restructure and rebuild our media ecosystem.
One simple but critical step you can take is to help document corporate media’s complicity. I invite you to share — via this form — examples you find of how the media is harming diverse communities and betraying our democratic values by advancing MAGA disinformation, lies and propaganda.
Continuing to track and expose media capitulation shows corporate media that we are aware of their betrayals — and that we will not allow them to erase their complicity.
About the author
Ruth Livier is a campaign manager at Free Press. She works with the democracy and digital civil rights team to strengthen community engagement in efforts to co-construct a safe, fair and equitable media ecosystem. Ruth has more than 20 years’ experience in the entertainment industry, which drives her commitment to fight for media equity. Follow Ruth on Bluesky.
Teamwork
Compiled by the Pressing Issues team
Earlier this week, Free Press published its 2025 Annual Report, highlighting all the work our organization accomplished in a year that was devastating for our country. As the Trump administration sabotaged our First Amendment rights, it was also a year of collective resistance. The fight to combat authoritarianism, protect free speech and expose the media and tech billionaires caving to his administration continues.
We’re shouting out Free Press’ Vanessa Maria Graber for launching the Comunicadores project to support and uplift Spanish-language journalists and communicators in Philadelphia. The Center for Community-Engaged Media at Temple University published a write-up about the initial Comunicadores event on Feb. 14 and interviewed Graber about it. “We’re trying to make things language-accessible and advocate for Spanish-speaking communicators and journalists,” Graber said.
The kicker
“Diversity, equity and inclusion is not illegal; it’s not a ‘favor.’ In fact, diversity, equity and inclusion programs are really just ways for companies, workplaces, schools … to comply with their federal and state civil-rights obligations. So, the question I have for so many of these groups that are dismantling their initiatives is: How are you going to comply now? … Because the thing that hasn’t changed is that you’re still obligated … By and large, the law hasn’t changed much at all.” —Damon Hewitt, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
