“I Hired Them. They Reported Me for Missing a DEI Meeting” – Oliver Malcolm

October 17, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Oliver Malcolm spent two decades inside the biggest publishing houses in the world—Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette—working across sales, editorial, and as a managing director. He knows how the machinery works. But what he describes is an industry that has quietly become a monoculture, where a book’s fate often depends less on its commercial potential and more on whether the people inside the building approve of its politics. His own experience crystallizes the problem: he was reported to his boss for missing a DEI meeting during the pandemic, not because anyone knew why he was absent, but because he had published Douglas Murray and Piers Morgan. The fact that he had also published Siya Kolisi, the first black captain of South Africa’s rugby team, did not matter. Kolisi was not the right kind of person.

The mechanics of soft cancellation

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What you'll learn

1 (00:01) **"I Was Reported for Missing a DEI Meeting"** - Oliver Malcolm introduces the core problem of internal censorship in publishing
2 (00:26) **The Real Side of Publishing** - Malcolm describes what happened when Francis Foster's book was effectively killed after he left the publisher
3 (04:27) **The Monoculture Problem** - Why publishing has become a single-ideology industry
4 (08:04) **Why It Got Worse** - The causes behind publishing's ideological narrowing
5 (12:03) **The Power Dynamic** - Why senior people cave to junior staff instead of pushing back
6 (16:09) **The Antagonism Before Reading** - How books are judged without being read
7 (21:40) **Soft Cancellation Mechanisms** - How books are killed without explicit orders

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Show Notes

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