N E WS R O O M S
A MEDIA RECKONING
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Former USA Today opinion editor says media companies need to return to ‘older values’
24 I N S I G H T July 8–14, 2022
es, and school choice, and he’s open with his disdain of former President Donald Trump. DelGuzzi hasn’t responded to a request from Insight for comment.
Impossible to Be Both ‘Local’ and ‘Ideological’
“People who think journalism is about the facts and being honest with our readers need to stand up.” DAVID MASTIO, former deputy editorial page editor, USA Today
Mastio said Gannett reporters became increasingly liberal because the company hired young reporters to replace more experienced and expensive journalists. These reporters, fresh out of college, come from an “overwhelmingly liberal environment.” “And they just want to bring what feels comfortable to them into the newspaper,” he said. He described Gannett’s evolvement as “one small step at a time.” The problem he saw was that the company’s leadership “didn’t have the spine to demand these young reporters adapt to USA Today’s values. So they changed USA Today to make it more like its reporters.” According to Mastio, Gannett’s business model is local and community reporting, owning more than 200 newspapers nationwide. “And by going far to the left, they’re cutting out half or more of the people in that neighborhood and city who won’t want to read them,” he said. “It’s a contradiction in their business plan. They either want to be local, or they want to be ideological. You can’t be both and succeed.”
Silent No More The headquarters of USA Today in McLean, Va., on June 17.
Mastio hadn’t spoken out until now, except for a Twitter post on March 11, when
CLOCKWISE FROM L: COURTESY OF DAVID MASTIO, WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES, MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
airfax county, va.— Former USA Today Deputy Editorial Page Editor David Mastio spoke out recently about his demotion in August 2021 over his Twitter post that only women can get pregnant. “The top leaders of Gannett and USA Today need to take control of their newsrooms and return to the older values, or they’re going to pay the price,” Mastio told Insight. Earlier in June, the newspaper chain with more than 200 dailies decided to cut back most of its editorial pages. According to a Washington Post report, reader surveys of Gannett, USA Today’s parent company, showed that the opinion pages “had lost relevance” in the age of the internet. In the same article, Kristen DelGuzzi, opinion editor at USA Today and Mastio’s former boss, told The Post that the opinion pages hadn’t evolved along with the industry. Mastio said he found DelGuzzi’s comment to be “a lie and untrue,” the final trigger for him to speak up months after leaving the newspaper in March. “I saw it as an insult to all of the people who had tried to evolve and adapt to the internet,” he said. “I saw it as an insult to all the conservative editorial pages that had been shut down, all the conservative columnists that had been laid off, all of the people that made opinion pages good at Gannett, before corporate cost-cutting made our opinion pages irrelevant.” Mastio identifies as a conservative based on his views on abortion, tax-
By Terri Wu
