• by Ray Schultz , September 4, 2025

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by four Gannett employees who claimed they were discriminated against because they were non-minorities, but allowed the case of a fifth plaintiff to go forward. 

The claims by plaintiffs Steven Bradley, Stephen Crane, Noah Hiles and Barbara Augsdorfe were denied but Logan Barry's will continue. Also not allowed by the court was class action status.

U.S. District Judge Rossie D.Alston, Jr. wrote that “each of the Named Plaintiffs’ claims of discrimination, with the exception of Plaintiff Barry, will be dismissed for failure to state a claim and that the class allegations will be stricken from the Second Amended Complaint.” 

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2023, is of special import given the battle by the Trump administration against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. In April, in apparent reaction to Trump's executive order on DEI, Gannett announced it will no longer publish statistics on the makeup of its different newsrooms. 

The plaintiffs in this case had initially attempted to tie Gannett's alleged discriminatory policy against White employees  to the company's Inclusion Report, which did report the demographic statistics pertaining to newsrooms. 

Originally, the plaintiffs cited the company’s 2020 Inclusion Report as proof of the existence of discriminatory policy against White employees. 

But Judge Alston was not impressed by that claim. 

“Plaintiffs include no details regarding the ‘Policy,’ thus the Court is left with significant questions regarding: (i) who developed and disseminated the Policy; (ii) what the specific contours of the Policy are; (iii) whether the Policy was written or simply verbal; (iv) how managers or editors in various newsrooms across the country were informed of the Policy; (v) who was charged with implementing the Policy; and (vi) how Plaintiffs know of the Policy. 

The judge concluded that “Plaintiffs' bare allegations that there was a Policy without sufficient factual details are vague, conclusory, and speculative.”

Alston was equally skeptical of some of the individual claims, like that of Bradley, a former sportswriter and editor who worked at the upstate New York Democrat & Chronicle for 21 years. 

Bradley alleged that “the Democrat and Chronicle's executive editor commented that he decided to terminate Mr. Bradley's employment rather than another worker, Mark Liu, because Mr. Liu was Asian and Mr. Bradley was White.”

Later, Bradley claimed, he lost out on another job that was given to a candidate who, “irrespective of her qualifications, satisfied the quotas Gannett was seeking to achieve.” 

Bradley lost an earlier decision in the case. And, as that ruling said, “that Plaintiff Bradley subjectively viewed himself as more qualified is not enough to push his claims of discrimination across the line from possible to plausible. 

As for his rejection for another job, the court said that “Bradley fails to identify any of the decisionmakers with respect to his failure-to-hire claim and fails to assert that the decisionmakers knew of and were implementing the policy.”

None of the other plaintiffs had the lengthy tenure of Bradley. 

As for Barry, the court notes that Barry has “plausibly alleged a failure to promote claim sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss.”

The case is on file with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria division.