Media

NY Mag Accused of Cropping Black People Out of Pro-Trump Party

CUT OUT

“This is insane,” tweeted CJ Pearson, the Black Republican who hosted the event.

An image posted by CJ Pearson to X shows how an image was cropped for the cover of New York Magazine.
CJ Pearson/X

New York Magazine was accused by attendees of a pro-Trump inauguration party of misleading readers by claiming the people there were almost entirely white.

Republican Youth Advisory Council co-chair CJ Pearson—a Black conservative who hosted the “Power 30 Awards,” one of a number of parties profiled in New York‘s latest cover story—pointed out that the magazine appeared to crop Black attendees out of the image that ran on the magazine’s cover page. They appear unobstructed in the lead image of the story in print and online.

“This is insane. I hosted this event and [New York] intentionally left me out of their story because it would have undermined their narrative that MAGA is some racist cult,” Pearson posted. He noted that rapper Waka Flocka Flame and boxer Gervonta Davis were in attendance. (The story noted that Flame performed.)

The story in question, which ran under the headline “The Cruel Kids’ Table,” is an inside account of socializing among a reportedly youthful, urban MAGA set throughout Washington, D.C. The story broadly describes the young cohort, noting that “almost everyone is white,” and quotes an attendee from a different party who noted everyone they saw at an inaugural ball was white.

Rob Smith, a conservative consultant who was at the event, tweeted a direct challenge to the image of Pearson’s Power 30 awards, writing he “saw MANY other Conservative media influencers who are Black, Latino, Asian, etc.”

Radio host Megyn Kelly also attacked the story’s premise, dismissing the photo outrage as an aside. “This pic, cropped as it is or with all shown, reveals a levity, a joy (the real kind not Kamala’s fake thing), a grab-life-by-the-reigns optimism,” she wrote on X. “It shows beautiful winners, basking, and the Left cannot STAND IT.”

A spokesperson for Vox Media, New York Magazine‘s parent company told The Daily Beast: “The magazine’s most recent cover story explores the new class of conservatives taking Washington by storm, through the lens of inauguration weekend. The cover was cropped to the center of a picture that was published in full online, and we believe both the cover and story provide an accurate impression of the weekend.”