Mt. Ida, AR: Why does’t anyone ever listen? A company by law has to hire so many blacks or they are out of business. That is the law. It doesn’t matter if they have the education or the ability to do the job or not. A business has to have a quota of the blacks or loose funding or their business. And they yell discrimination. So. The NYT’s hired someone who was not worthy of the position. It happens all the time….

Seth Mnookin: This is pig headed and ignorant. Companies do not need to hire “so many blacks” by law or “loose (sic) funding in their business.” The Times doesn’t get funding from the government, first off. And the Times’s laudable goal of diversifying its staff has nothing to do with the law and everything to with a belief that I agree wholeheartedly with — that news gathering organizations have a responsibility to present as many viewpoints as possible, and one of the ways to do that is to have an inclusive newsroom.

— Wednesday, May 21 Online Chat on MSNBC

We’ve got nothing but respect for our former colleague, Seth Mnookin, now at Newsweek. But when even Mr. Mnookin, one of the nation’s top reporters on the press beat, is leaving the wrong impression about the government subsidies going to the New York Times and the racial strings that are attached — well, it’s time to set the record straight.

The Times does get subsidies from the government — and it’s not small change, either. The most obvious place that money is changing hands is a real estate deal for a new headquarters tower that the Times is building on Eighth Avenue between 40 th and 41 st Streets. A New York Times article on July 25, 2002, reported, “The city granted The Times $26.1 million in tax breaks.” This while the Times has been fighting against tax breaks for ordinary citizens — and indeed, the paper’s editorials have been supporting Mayor Bloomberg’s tax increases. The same July 25, 2002, Times article quotes a lawyer opposing the land and tax break deal as saying that the subsidies are “at least $70 million” and raising the question of whether they “constitute a waste of taxpayer funds.”

It’s not only the city government that’s involved with the Times development project. The key player in seizing the land for the new headquarters was the Empire State Development Corporation, a state government agency. Governor Pataki appointed the agency’s chairman, Charles Gargano, an important political ally of Mr. Pataki. And the New York Times Company has disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission the 11-page “nondiscrimination and affirmative action construction contract provisions” that are part of the real estate deal between the New York Times, the city, the state, and the Times’s partner in the real estate deal, Forest City Ratner.

By the terms of the contract, the Times is “required to use its ‘Best Efforts’ to achieve” an overall participation goal for minority or women-owned business enterprises “of 18% of the total dollar value of the contract.” As for the actual construction workers, the Times “is required to use its ‘Best Efforts’ to achieve the overall goal of 20% minority and female workforce.”

That’s just for the “core and shell” of the building. There are other goals for the “leasehold improvements,” the build-out and finish work for tenants of the new Times Tower. If the lease is for 500,000 square feet or more, then the Times “is required to use its best efforts to achieve” 7.5% participation by minority or women-owned businesses of the total dollar value of the contract. For spaces of between 100,000 and 500,000 square feet, the goal is 5%. For this work, too, there are workforce goals as well as dollar goals: 15% “minority and female workforce participation in the work performed” for the leasehold improvements on spaces of 500,000 feet or more, 10% on the spaces between 100,000 and 500,000 square feet.

If these goals aren’t met, the Times and Forest City Ratner could be forced to pay the state the money that would have gone to the minority contractors and workers. That’s millions of dollars.

The 11 pages of documentation include forms for monthly reporting to the state by the Times on such details as “all worker hours” and “minority worker hours” and instructing the Times to “classify any new male employee by ethnic background.”

We’re not in the camp that believes that the Times’s diversity policies are to blame for Mr. Blair’s fabrications. After all, at other papers, white reporters have been caught in their own scandals. Nor do we belittle — indeed we agree with — the idea that having a racially diverse staff is good for a major newspaper. These columns support the idea that companies have a responsibility to take affirmative action to make sure their hiring and scouting programs do not exclude or overlook qualified candidates of minority backgrounds.

The case is a lot weaker for the kinds of quotas that are being demanded by Mr. Pataki and agreed to by a newspaper in return for a state subsidy paid for by hard-pressed taxpayers. Then the substantive arguments tend to degenerate into an arbitrary racial spoils system. Mr. Blair was not in the building trades. And we do not make light of the racism with which the building trades have been riddled in New York. But we’ve been trying since last Thursday to get the state’s Economic Development Corporation to explain to us why the targets were set at 18%, 20%, 5% and 7.5% and not, say, 60%, or 2%.

We’ve yet to get an answer on that point or on the matter of exactly what state law requires such specific targets. Or why, as a matter of policy, such numerical goals are better than simply strictly enforcing the anti-discrimination laws. If Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the Times shareholders want to run their company in accord with these kinds of numerical quotas, that’s their business. But if Mr. Pataki means to tell them they have to — and to dole out government subsidies in exchange — well, that strikes us as a matter of more than passing public interest.