Reuters Data Scientist Who Rejected BLM Narrative Asked to ‘Reform his Thoughts,’ Then Fired

Looks like the powers that be at Canadian American media conglomerate Thomson Reuters have little tolerance for those who refuse to toe the party line.

The City Journal’s Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, chronicled the last few rocky months of data scientist Zac Kriegman’s six years of employment with Reuters and revealed a company that would not permit dissent from their liberal world view.

The highly qualified Kriegman, 44, holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard. He has “years of experience with high-tech startups, a white-shoe law firm, and an econometrics research consultancy.” 

At Reuters, Kriegman coordinated efforts on AI, machine learning, and advanced software engineering. By the spring of 2020, he was the Director of Data Science and led a “team tasked with implementing deep learning throughout the organization.”

Rufo describes a series of events that started with the death of George Floyd and ended with Kriegman’s “statistical analysis of Black Lives Matter’s claims” that resulted in his termination. 

By June 2021, Kriegman would be locked out of Reuters’s servers, denounced by his colleagues, and fired by email. Kriegman had committed an unpardonable offense: he directly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement in the company’s internal communications forum, debunked Reuters’s own biased reporting, and violated a corporate taboo. Driven by what he called a “moral obligation” to speak out, Kriegman refused to celebrate unquestioningly the BLM narrative and his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programming; to the contrary, he argued that Reuters was exhibiting significant left-wing bias in the newsroom and that the ongoing BLM protests, riots, and calls to “defund the police” would wreak havoc on minority communities. Week after week, Kriegman felt increasingly disillusioned by the Thomson Reuters line. Finally, on the first Tuesday in May 2021, he posted a long, data-intensive critique of BLM’s and his company’s hypocrisy. He was sent to Human Resources and Diversity & Inclusion for the chance to reform his thoughts.

He refused—so they fired him.

Rufo’s lengthy interview with Kriegman can be viewed here. If you have the time, I highly recommend it. If not, here are the highlights.

The death of George Floyd was a watershed moment for much of the liberal media and Reuters was no exception. Kriegman described the company as a “blue bubble,” where “people were constantly celebrating Black Lives Matter, where it was assumed that everyone was on board.”

Like many corporations in the United States in 2020, Reuters went through a quiet revolution in human resources and “diversity and inclusion.” The company launched a series of lectures and training programs, ranging from a study of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory to an interactive panel called “Let’s Talk About Race” to a keynote presentation on “unlocking the power of diversity.” In honor of Floyd, the company asked employees to participate in a “21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge,” which promoted race-based reparations payments, academic articles on critical race theory, and instructions on “how to be a better white person.”

The two discuss a term I’d never heard of – “wypipologist.” According to the Urban dictionary, it is a “humorous slang term for someone, usually a black person, who studies ‘wypipo,’ or white people.”

I can’t even imagine the backlash if I became a “blapipologist.” 

Kriegman tells Rufo that Reuter’s “blue bubble” was responsible for “significant bias” in their reporting. He said, “Reuters is not having the internal discussions about the facts and the research, and they’re not letting that shape how they present the news to people. I think they’ve adopted a perspective and they’re unwilling to examine that perspective, even internally, and that’s shaping everything that they write.” 

Rufo looks at Reuters coverage of the 2020 riots and identifies the obvious bias in their reporting. He writes that “Reuters’ data-based reporting and ‘fact checks’ were also biased, always in favor of the BLM interpretations.” 

Kriegman became increasingly concerned by their coverage. He took a two-month leave of absence and conducted a “careful statistical investigation comparing BLM’s claims on race, violence, and policing with the hard evidence from a range of academic and governmental sources. The result: a 12,000-word essay, titled ‘BLM is Anti-Black Systemic Racism,’ that called into question the entire sequence of claims by the Black Lives Matter movement and echoed by the Reuters news team.”

“At a certain point,” Kriegman said, “it just feels like a moral obligation to speak out when something that’s having such a devastating impact is being celebrated so widely, especially in a news company where the perspective that’s celebrated is having such a big impact externally.”

In the introduction, Kriegman writes:

I believe the Black Lives Matter (‘BLM’) movement arose out of a passionate desire to protect black people from racism and to move our whole society towards healing from a legacy of centuries of brutal oppression. Unfortunately, over the past few years I have grown more and more concerned about the damage that the movement is doing to many low-income black communities. I have avidly followed the research on the movement and its impacts, which has led me, inexorably, to the conclusion that the claim at the heart of the movement, that police more readily shoot black people, is false and likely responsible for thousands of black people being murdered in the most disadvantaged communities in the country. Thomson Reuters has a special obligation to resist simplistic narratives that are not based in facts and evidence, especially when those narratives are having such a profoundly negative impact on minority or marginalized groups.

Rufo explains that Kriegman’s essay tries to “debunk three key claims of BLM activists and their media supporters: that police officers kill blacks disproportionately, that law enforcement ‘over-polices’ black neighborhoods, and that policies such as ‘defund the police’ will reduce violence.” 

When Kriegman returned to work following his leave, he published his essay on the company’s internal discussion forum, called The Hub. “I didn’t know what to expect going into it, but I expected the reaction [to his essay] to be intense. And it was.”

“The essay dropped like a bomb …”

According to Kriegman, content moderators immediately took down the post and called in a “team of HR and communications professionals” to manage the situation. They told Kriegman that they were “reviewing” the document but, according to Kriegman, failed to provide specific objections to what he wrote. The essay, while challenging the dominant left-wing culture at Thomson Reuters, made a reasoned, dispassionate case based on rigorous evidence—precisely what a hard news organization should prioritize internally. Finally, after Kriegman inquired multiple times about the company’s decision to remove the post, senior human resources director Melissa Budde told him that the post was too “antagonistic” and “provocative” and that he needed to work with Cristina Juvier, head of diversity and inclusion, if he wanted to pursue the matter further.

Over the next two weeks, Kriegman went through a gauntlet of calls, meetings, and chat conversations, hoping that he could revise the essay to the satisfaction of the various parties. In all these conversations, Kriegman maintains, the human resources and diversity-and-inclusion employees never offered substantive critique of his piece; they always retreated to vague concerns about tone and the belief that it would offend BLM supporters within the company. The transcripts of the calls and emails from May 4 and May 27, 2021, show a steady escalation of hostilities. Kriegman insisted that he be allowed to repost the essay. Two of his colleagues warned him that he was potentially heading toward disaster; another, according to Kriegman, screamed that he “should f***ing do [his] job” instead of spending time fighting about Black Lives Matter. …

On May 28, after incorporating some of the feedback on tone from human resources, Kriegman reposted his essay under a new title: “BLM Spreads Falsehoods That Have Led to the Murders of Thousands of Black People in the Most Disadvantaged Communities.” This time, the moderators at The Hub let it stay up. Kriegman considered this a victory—and then the comments started flooding in. They began politely, but soon descended into open hostility. 

…

Five days later, Thomson Reuters made the decision permanently to remove the post from the company’s internal servers. Kriegman accused his colleagues of creating a hostile work environment and attempted to complain to that effect on the discussion board; he was then suspended from The Hub and locked out of email and other communications platforms. 

In a final, grand, and perhaps self-immolating gesture, Kriegman personally emailed Thomson Reuters’s top executives, complaining about the company’s bias and hostility toward his criticism of Black Lives Matter. “And then they went ahead and fired me,” Kriegman told me. “I was expecting it. It didn’t come as a great surprise that they ended up firing me.” The final email from Melissa Budde hit with a thud: “The manner in which you’ve conducted yourself in recent weeks does not align with our expectations for you as a leader within Thomson Reuters,” she wrote. It was over. Six years as a data scientist, dozens of high-profile projects—all set ablaze out of a deep frustration about the falsehoods Kriegman felt were ruining the newsroom.

Kriegman tells Rufo, “I’m extremely disturbed by what’s happening in our country. It’s absolutely clear that in our major news organizations, people are not discussing these issues openly. They can’t afford to. They’ll be fired.” 

“I feel proud of what I did, but I don’t feel satisfied that I had a big impact within the company,” Kriegman says. “I don’t think that it changed anything.”

The interview ends with a discussion of how critical race theory is working its way into every part of our lives. 

Kriegman shares a story about a book his son’s elementary school classroom is reading called “Race Cars,” in which “a committee of white race cars conspires to make sure no black cars win the big race.”

“It’s absolutely poisonous to the country,” he concludes.

 

A previous version of this article was published on The Western Journal.
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