Jeff Vaughn Sues Over Racial Quotas

CBS Broadcasting and its guardian Paramount International are going through a discrimination lawsuit from former anchor Jeff Vaughn, who accuses his ex-employers of implementing insurance policies that favor the hiring of people from sure teams and firing older, white, heterosexual males.

Vaughn, in a lawsuit filed on Monday in California federal courtroom, says he was changed in 2022 by a youthful, minority information anchor. He factors to a CBS aim to make sure that half of all writers be nonwhite by 2023 and an initiative requiring half of all castmembers on their actuality exhibits be minorities.

The grievance seeks a courtroom order blocking CBS’s allegedly discriminatory hiring insurance policies and for the corporate to supply Vaughn, who seeks at the very least $5 million, his job again.

“CBS determined that there have been too many white males at CBS, and it acted accordingly,” the grievance states. “It wanted to resolve its ‘white drawback’ by firing profitable white males.”

The submitting of the lawsuit follows an identical grievance from Brian Beneker, a script coordinator for SEAL Crew who alleges that he was repeatedly denied a workers author job after the implementation of an “unlawful coverage of race and intercourse balancing” that promoted the hiring of “much less certified candidates who had been members of extra most well-liked teams,” specifically those that establish as minorities, LGBTQ or ladies.

Like Beneker, Vaughn is represented by America First Authorized Basis, a conservative group based by Stephen Miller, a White Home coverage adviser underneath the Trump administration. The group has been submitting complaints with the Equal Employment Alternative Fee in opposition to main firms, together with Morgan Stanley, Starbucks and McDonald’s, over company variety and hiring practices that allegedly run afoul of civil rights legal guidelines.

CBS and Paramount didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.

Based on the grievance, Vaughn, who labored at CBS for seven years, discovered in 2022 that his contract wouldn’t be renewed for the next yr. He says he wasn’t supplied a direct purpose for the choice however was informed “it’s not in regards to the rankings.”

The explanation, Vaughn alleges, is that CBS applied a coverage to extend variety amongst its ranks. He says the hassle “went into excessive gear” when Wendy McMahon, who’s named within the grievance, was promoted in 2021 to president of CBS Information and Stations. Below her management, the lawsuit says the corporate “prioritized variety, fairness, and inclusion initiatives, employed and promoted a number of ladies and/or individuals of shade to serve in key roles.”

Vaughn, then 57, says he was changed as a result of he didn’t “meet these standards.” He takes subject with the community not transferring ahead along with his story concepts for a twentieth anniversary 9/11 particular.

“His African American colleague hosted the present, and reporters from minority teams hosted all of the featured tales,” states the grievance, which notes that Vaughn was excluded from different occasions he usually coated in favor of colleagues who’re ladies or racial minorities. “Not one in all them had personally been current at floor zero reporting in the course of the occasions of 9/11.”

When CBS held auditions for Vaughn’s substitute, the lawsuit claims that every one the candidates had been all “youthful, racial minorities.” In 2023, Vaughn was terminated, with a Black male assuming his place, based on the lawsuit.

Within the wake of the Supreme Court docket’s choice flattening affirmative motion, the lawsuit additional calls into query the legality of variety, fairness and inclusion applications that explicitly account for race, which have been on legally tenuous floor. Final yr, 13 Republican attorneys common wrote letters to Fortune 100 firms warning them that a number of of their efforts to spice up variety are discriminatory. In response, a gaggle of Democrat attorneys common urged them to “double-down on diversity-focused applications.”

In College students for Honest Admissions v. Harvard, the group that sued claimed a violation of the 14th Modification’s Equal Safety Clause, which protects in opposition to discrimination by the federal government. Though the ruling is just not instantly relevant to firms, that are ruled by a separate set of federal and state antidiscrimination legal guidelines that don’t permit employers to contemplate race in hiring choices, America First Authorized Basis, the agency representing Vaughn and Beneker, has leveraged the choice in lawsuits that would sign opening authorized salvos in opposition to efforts to spice up variety and inclusion in Hollywood.