The Hockey News thinks being tall is diverse

Another day, another screw-up in the world of hockey when it comes to diversity. This time, it was The Hockey News.

While the tweet was quickly deleted, nothing ever disappears on Twitter or the internet. And certainly having Zdeno Chara on the cover of your “Diversity Issue” is bad enough. Proclaiming it jokingly and celebrating it just adds even more cherries to this particular shit-dessert. There is something truly hockey about the obliviousness of it all, though. The absolute minimal effort would be labeling something “The Diversity Issue” simply because of one interview with Anson Carter and a story about Black History Month, and then slapping a white guy on the cover. But this is hockey, where the minimum amount of effort to diversity is usually a bridge too far to begin with.

The Hockey News later apologized.

Which leads to some questions in itself. It would be hard to believe whatever peon in charge of THN’s social media simply decided it was the Diversity Issue on his/her own. Did they see the interview with Carter and decide it was? Because if one interview with one guy on one subject makes you think it’s now a “Diversity Issue,” well then there are myriad problems with that.

But again, that’s unlikely. Whether going rogue or simply missing their guess by a couple miles, no social media person is going to decide that. So this message came from somewhere. Was it originally the “Diversity Issue” and they only decided it wasn’t when they saw the reaction? Did they think that one interview with Carter was enough?

As THN points out, nowhere on the cover is it labeled “The Diversity Issue” either, so apparently all the editors knew that it wasn’t. Or somehow a picture of the cover without that label made it to their Twitter. How did this idea get to the social team in the first place?

Needless to say, The Hockey News has some cleaning up to do in their operation. Perhaps this is just a good warmup to joining the .