For weeks now sensible people have been asking, “When is some responsible adult going to stand up to the wokerati?” Well, it appears the folks who make Red Bull may have done so.
The Wall Street Journal reported a few days that the European-owned Red Bull dismissed several of its top U.S. executives over “tensions” about “diversity and inclusion.”
The maker of Red Bull energy drinks has replaced its top U.S. executives amid internal tensions over the closely held company’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Red Bull GmbH, the Austrian company that makes the drink, said Stefan Kozak, its North America chief executive, and Amy Taylor, its North America president and chief marketing officer, have left the company. Red Bull didn’t give a reason for the changes, which were announced in an internal memo Monday.
Ms. Taylor had been working on diversity and inclusion efforts within the company with Mr. Kozak’s support for several years but was met with opposition when she began advocating for Red Bull to be more overt in its support of racial justice in the last month, according to people familiar with the matter.
Typically bland news writing from the Journal, but some European press sources (especially the glorious Daily Mail in the UK) point out that the owner of Red Bull, Austrian businessman Dietrich Mateschitz, is a Trump supporter who has publicly criticized political correctness. Here’s to hoping Mateschitz is sending a message to the company that if quaffing Red Bull doesn’t wake you up enough, go get woken somewhere else.
Speaking of staff problems, the other news out of the Wall Street Journal isn’t very good. A letter to the new publisher signed by 280 Journal reporters and editors complains about . . . you guessed it: the editorial page.
A group of journalists at The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones staffers sent a letter on Tuesday to the paper’s new publisher, Almar Latour, calling for a clearer differentiation between news and opinion content online, citing concerns about the Opinion section’s accuracy and transparency.
The letter, signed by more than 280 reporters, editors and other employees says, “Opinion’s lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence, undermine our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources.”
Of course, the real reason so many Journal news reporters, who are mostly standard liberals, object is that the editorial page is conservative, and has the most readers of any part of the paper. Can anyone imagine New York Times news reporters worrying about the gray lady’s editorial page and writing a similar letter? (Of course, at the Times you really can’t tell the difference between the news pages and the editorial page, so. . .) Given that the Journal‘s editorial pages are about the only editorial pages of any paper in the country that actually helps sell subscriptions and therefore increase profits instead of being a deadweight loss for owners, one hopes the Journal‘s management (and ultimately Rupert Murdoch) will inform each and every signatory that the editorial page is just fine but that they are all free to seek employment elsewhere if they don’t like it.
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