CNN quietly disbands its Race and Equality team

The news comes as CNN leader Mark Thompson announced that the cable news channel will lay off 100 employees as it restructures its newsgathering operations.

CNN quietly disbanded its Race and Equality team Wednesday, a source said. 

The news comes as CNN chief executive Mark Thompson announced that the cable news channel will lay off 100 employees as it restructures its newsgathering operations. 

The team, which was unveiled in July 2020 by former CNN president Jeff Zucker, had three reporters. The source explained that one reporter was laid off, while the others will be reassigned to different roles in the newsroom.

The team was announced as a “significant, sustained commitment to ensure race coverage is a permanent part of our journalism” in a memo to staff in the wake of the anti-racism protests sparked by the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Numerous companies and organizations pledged to take action after millions took to the streets to protest police violence — through recruitment efforts, donating to civil rights organizations, and examining internal policies — during the so-called “racial reckoning.”

"The recent conversations we've had in our newsrooms have been informative and constructive. We have valued them, we heard you, and we will continue listening,” Zucker wrote in the 2020 memo. “There are structural changes and investments we can and will make to better cover what is happening in our society. We are committed to doing that."

The team produced award-winning work on Black maternal mortality, police brutality, and more.

A CNN spokesperson pushed back against the notion that the team was “disbanded,” explaining that the reporters will now be integrated “fully and completely” across the network’s platforms. Instead of the team existing within an “organizational silo,” the reporters' expertise will be utilized more collaboratively, they said.

“The investment is still 100 percent there,” the spokesperson explained, referring to the race and equality coverage the team was responsible for producing. They noted that CNN is on the ground right now at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference this week.

Ultimately, however, they acknowledged that the Race and Equality team no longer exists. 

“For all intents and purposes, the team is not a team anymore,” the spokesperson said. “They’re assigned to different areas so that [their] perspective and work is brought into all of our types of programming. It’s not a unit in the way it was before, but [Race and Equality] is very much still their focus.”

Read Thompson’s full memo to CNN staff here.