The New Republic weighs in:
The policy Howell Raines and other Times executives were administering when they overlooked these things wasn’t affirmative action; it was the fetishization of diversity, which is a complete perversion of affirmative action. And any fetish–any monomaniacal fixation on a single goal, whether the goal is diversity or proper grammar or having a certain type of Danish at editorial meetings–can be exploited by a pathological rogue looking to game the system … As one anonymous Times reporter says in today’s New York Post, “Howell didn’t listen … to anyone about anything.” Howell Raines was apparently practicing a form of authoritarianism that isolated him from his staff and reinforced his personal fixations. And it came back to haunt him.
Yes, the problem isn’t the policy as such. It’s the quixotic, arbitrary, dictatorial way in which the policy was abused.
The Dish 