Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Thursday mentioned former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson when discussing pay equity legislation on the Senate floor.
Abramson was fired from the Times on Wednesday, spurring reports that she was dismissed after she approached management about earning less then her male predecessor, Bill Keller.
“It should not be lost that Republican senators are continuing their agenda by just saying no. Whether it’s something as logical and as important as pay equity, so that a woman doing the same job as a man gets the same amount of money,” Reid said on Thursday.
“Look what happens, it appears, in the New York Times. The woman that ran that newspaper was fired yesterday. Why? It’s now in the press because she complained she was doing the same work as men in two different jobs and made a lot less money than they did. That’s why we needed that legislation,” he continued.
In a memo to staff on Thursday, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said his decision to replace Abramson had nothing to do with compensation, but was because of management reasons in the newsroom.
“Compensation played no part whatsoever in my decision that Jill could not remain as executive editor. Nor did any discussion about compensation,” he wrote. “The reason – the only reason – for that decision was concerns I had about some aspects of Jill’s management of our newsroom, which I had previously made clear to her, both face-to-face and in my annual assessment.”
Abramson wanted wage parity with the man, Keller, she succeeded, nothing wrong with that. Agreeing with the NT Times and its reporting and its slant has to be left out of that conversation.
If this had been a right wing rag, everyone and their cousin on the left would be up in arms. But because it is the NYT, “we don’t have enough information.”
First off, we yet don’t know all the facts. Abramson and her PR folks are suggesting that the wage issue was material in her dismissal. The NY Times says it was not a factor and that Ms. Abramson’s compensation was comparable to Bill Keller, the man she replaced. Looking at Ms. Abramson’s claim, there are two questions that bother me:
I think the entire NY Times staff has gotten (or maybe always was?) snottily unbearable. It’s hard for me to take either side of this situation seriously, as I suspect Sulzberger is as full of himself as Abramson is. It’s just a colossal wreck of egos…which pretty much sums up most of their staff.
It’s up to the employer who is hired and fired…not Harry Reid or anyone else. Period.