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The last few months have been a not-especially-pleasant reminder that major corporations don’t have principles so much as they have fashion statements; since the election, and especially the inauguration, we’ve all watched companies like Meta, Disney, Walmart, Target, and more race to see who can capitulate the most, the quickest, to the Trump White House in an effort to receive belly scritches from the new administration. That’s especially come in the form of massive attacks on these organizations’ own diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, which were, when it was politically fashionable, touted as core parts of their corporate identities—and which are now being stripped out of said identity as quickly as some poor marketing schmuck can delete the relevant paragraphs. We can now add Paramount to the list of companies rolling over on this front, as The New York Times reports that the media giant is “rethinking its approach to diversity, equity and inclusion” in ways that seem to involve never using those words again in public.
Paramount is, of course, in one of the more complicated positions of the many media organizations now contorting themselves around the White House’s new dictated reality: The company is in the midst of an attempted merger with Skydance Media, and while it’s passed review from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the merger is facing serious scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission and its Trump-appointed leader, Brendan Carr. Carr has not been shy about his willingness to use DEI issues as a cudgel for Trump’s ongoing efforts to bully the media into submission, having previously thwacked Comcast on this score. Meanwhile, Paramount is also embroiled in a lawsuit with Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; the company has signaled that it’s willing to get at least a bit rowdy on that front, suggesting that if Trump drags it to court it’ll go sniffing through his financial records. But today’s statements suggest that taste for resistance is a limited and specific one.
As noted in the memo outlining the abrupt about-face, the practicalities of all this will largely express themselves in who Paramount now hires to fill new roles, and how it works to keep those people: The company has announced that it’s “ending its practices of using aspirational hiring goals related to race, ethnicity, sex or gender.” The company will also “stop collecting gender and diversity data for many U.S. job applicants and eliminate the DEI. component of its employee incentive plan.”
