All but two asked not to be identified in this story or wanted to speak off the record for fear of retaliation from their current and former bosses. In interviews with VICE News, corroborated by emails and recordings of meetings, they detailed how the company laid off many of its most vocal internal critics in the midst of a major reckoning over race.Corus, a publicly traded company with a staff of roughly 3,500, has not revealed how many employees it laid off on July 23. So far VICE News has identified 22 people who were laid off, eight of whom had signed an open letter calling out systemic racism within Corus; more than 150 current and former employees signed it in all. (Disclosure: two of my friends and former colleagues at VICE, Tamara Khandaker and Rachel Browne, were among those laid off.)Does your workplace have an issue with systemic racism? You can contact reporter Manisha Krishnan by email at manisha.krishnan@vice.com or on Twitter @manishakrishnan.
Former and current workers said the company has been made aware of systemic issues relating to race for years and has failed to take action.“Global is aware they have a racism problem; they’re not stupid,” said one current employee, who participated in several conversations about race with managers. “It was always us being like, ‘This is a continuous problem. How many times do we have to meet you guys to let you know that the culture here has to change?’”“Global is aware they have a racism problem; they’re not stupid.”
Although managers acknowledged that the story should never have run, Global News later unpublished the story with a note stating it would republish it “after it meets our editorial standards.” Eventually, the note was updated to include a link to a new article about anti-Black racism in Canada.In a subsequent call on June 3, the group of employees questioned why the story had been pulled down without a fulsome apology or explanation.“There wasn’t a lot of value for us to continue to show people a mistake that our organization made,” Boston said during the meeting.The managers also tasked the lifestyle journalists with finding Black voices to include in an improved version of the story, rather than assigning that task to Campbell, the (white) author of the original piece.“I didn’t get a sense that there were people jumping in to really effectively help Morganne put the story better,” Smith said on the call. “I think she’s feeling quite abandoned, unsupported.” He repeatedly said he didn’t want the fallout from the article to result in an “us and them” dynamic between managers and staff.“We’re only going to be successful if you feel that we're moving the ball forward and to start constantly with ‘the company this’ and ‘management that,’ I have a real hard time with that,” Smith said.“There wasn’t a lot of value for us to continue to show people a mistake that our organization made.”
One Global News employee questioned how the company could claim to be emphasizing objectivity while leaving problematic shock jocks on air to float conspiratorial ideas about Islam and the children detained by ICE.“It’s almost laughable that the company said they’re committed to fact-based journalism, when they made very little attempt to improve talk radio. There are hosts and on air contributors across the Corus network that regularly go off on all sorts of nonsense,” one employee said, noting that some of the longstanding radio hosts are paid six-figure salaries.Corus told VICE News its talk radio content “is designed to be an outlet for free speech and opinion, with a wide range of perspectives.”“It’s almost laughable that the company said they’re committed to fact-based journalism, when they made very little attempt to improve talk radio.”
The producer said she had several conversations with Buffitt about feeling like she was being overworked compared to other team members. When it came time for her to interview for a position that would keep her in the newsroom—one very similar to her role at the time—she said she was told Buffitt had hired a white woman “because she had more thorough answers than you.”“I felt I was seen as an internal troublemaker.”
“If you walk into a room and there’s only white people, you have a race issue.”