You will want to get to know David Mastio a bit. He’s a veteran journalist, and an excellent one. A true one. Until last summer, he was the deputy editorial-page editor of USA Today. Now he is the executive editor of Straight Arrow News. I mention him in my column, Impromptus, today. And I have now done a podcast with him, a Q&A: here. Dave was hounded out of USA Today, basically, by wokeness.
I don’t like to use this term, for reasons I could get into. But we need a shorthand — something that people can understand, and quickly — and “wokeness” will have to do.
Dave Mastio was born in Belgium. He lived in ten American states before he graduated from college. He has worked at the Detroit News, the Virginian-Pilot, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and now Straight Arrow News. But USA Today has been his home, really. He has worked for USA Today three times, in three separate stints — all for the opinion section. He started out in 1995. I believe I met him then, for I was starting out at the Weekly Standard. We published a piece by Dave.
Sometime last year, a group of activists at USA Today decided that “pregnant women” would no longer do — it had to be “pregnant people.” (I am giving Dave’s account.) This struck Dave as absurd. And he is an opinion writer, so he opined. He tweeted something like, “The people who are pregnant are also called ‘women.’” Hell broke loose among the activists — on the diversity committee, specifically. The activists demanded that Dave be fired.
What is this “diversity committee”? It’s a bunch of recent college graduates, says Dave, who decide what may and may not be said. I myself think of a word from the past (Cold War relic that I am): commissariat.
Dave was not fired, as the activists demanded. He was demoted. Also, the paper wanted to cut his pay by $30,000. But the prospect of a lawsuit stayed their hand. Dave bided his time at the paper for as long as he had to — he has a family to support. Then he landed at Straight Arrow News.
In our podcast, I ask him whether he had any support at the paper — including “private support.” This is a term favored by Thomas Sowell. Private support is when people scurry up to you and whisper that they support you. But they will not make this support public. Sowell put it to me in a memorable way. “People will say, ‘I’m right behind you, Tom. Way behind you.’” Anyway, Dave Mastio did not really enjoy any support at the paper, private or public. There used to be centrists and conservatives at USA Today, he says. But they have taken buyouts over the years.
Another question for him: Are there liberals at the paper who are scared of, or opposed to, the wokies, or lefties, or militants? There used to be, says Dave. But no more.
Here is a passage from my column today:
If I could tell publications such as USA Today one thing, it would be this: If you don’t have room for a David Mastio — temperate, informed, professional, judicious — you don’t have room for anyone unbeholden to the latest political correctness. And you will go downhill, presto.
Dave is a conservative. He’s also anti-Trump. In fact, one of the things the paper chided him for was a sentence that went something like, “Donald Trump is not fit to clean toilets at the Barack Obama Presidential Library.” What was wrong with that, from a liberal point of view? Apparently, it was offensive to toilet-cleaners.
It seems to me that, in such an environment, a person is unable to write. Unable to give his writing any flavor at all. Bill Buckley, Tom Wolfe, Murray Kempton, Christopher Hitchens — they wouldn’t last a day.
At USA Today, Dave Mastio had to undergo diversity training. In our podcast, I ask him what that was like. I myself have never had to endure it. I’d flunk for sure, or be kicked out. Dave says they teach you about microaggressions, for one thing. Do you know what my friend Barbara Fields, the historian, says, by the way? “If it’s micro, it’s not aggression, and if it’s aggression, it’s not micro.” Anyway, Dave says that all this runs against the journalistic ethic. It’s the job of the journalist, he says, to commit actual macroaggressions, against one and all. You’re not supposed to make people feel comfortable. You make people uncomfortable, by telling the truth, as you see it.
There is a lot more to say, but I’ve gone on long enough in this post, and our Q&A, again, is here. It makes my blood boil, what USA Today did to Dave Mastio. He’s fine — happy to be working where he is. But USA Today really disadvantaged itself by losing Dave, and the story here is a story of our time, which is a lousy time, in so many respects.
You know what David Mastio contributed to USA Today, among other things? Diversity.