Taboos and Race in the Newsroom   

Are people really talking to each other, in a spirit of goodwill?

The New Republic, not known lately for competence and authority in its reporting but useful in its self-described "post-ideological" perspectives, sallied into the home harbor of the Washington Post in a recent long piece about race in the newsroom. The Post's top management fired back with full broadsides and probably won the engagement.

Within the Post staff, though, minority and white reporters were divided on the piece. Minority reporters and editors – at least at first – seemed to be more divided among themselves than white reporters. Some were incensed at the implications of lower standards applied to them. Others were pleased that the tensions had surfaced prominently and that, as they read it, the Post had been taken to task for not sufficiently retaining minority journalists and not moving them into many top positions.

Much was in the eye of the beholder. But national black leaders in journalism tended to come down resoundingly against The New Republic, largely on grounds that it had assaulted minority journalists by prominently raising doubts about their abilities, in some cases, and suggesting, mostly in unattributed quotes from white Post staffers, that the paper has been soft in coverage of black public officials and other leaders.

"Race in the Newsroom," by Ruth Shalit, appeared in the October 2 issue. It was a layered and textured piece, not easy to summarize here without the distortions that some of its critics have applied to it. It included factual errors on a scale that normally would result in probation or dismisssal of a writer at a good news organization, and in the past the writer has been embarrassed by plagiarism that she acknowledged and said she inadvertently stumbled into (see Bylines, September).

So this piece could be easily blown away by Post executives.

Except. Except that it explored, at length, a subject that is almost an official taboo in newsrooms that are seriously striving for diversity. (This is paradoxical. You can have racial balance despite taboos, but if you have taboos you can't have genuine diversity, independent expression on important professional issues, and a mature core of internal integrity.)

The hot-button questions:

Do newspapers sometimes hire and promote less qualified people because they are minority journalists? Does that, or the perception of it, create disruptive resentment and tension in newsrooms? Is the news being biased because of a fear of being insensiti±e, or of being attacked for being insen- sitive, to the feelings of minority groups (the obverse of newspapers' traditional failures of insensitivity and non-inclusiveness)?

These are awkward and even hurtful questions. Who wants to think he or she was hired because of race or, for that matter, because of being somebody's brother-in-law?

To exorcise taboos, it seems to me we should posit several things:

Yes, affirmative action has resulted in somewhat riskier hiring and promotion, in some cases.

No, race-conscious hiring for corrective purposes is not resulting in low standards. In fact, it is setting higher overall standards by breaking these old shackles: race-based hiring giving white males the advantage, and hiring by buddymanship and closed circuits of "people like us." It also is opening newsrooms to much wider future pools of talent and providing diverse role models.

But further: Yes, if newspapers very quickly achieve the objective of having staffs whose racial percentages reflect the makeup of the country's population, they likely will be hiring less capable people for some time to come.

It's obvious. Minority groups are proportionally far behind the white majority in numbers of college graduates, including numbers of journalism majors. How could those minority young people be, pound for pound, far more capable than young whites going into the business? One would have to be the worst kind of racist, or at least a tunnel-vision racialist, to believe that.

And is coverage being warped (or subdued) to avoid offending minority readers? I think so, in some places (although in many others the papers' content still does not reflect the composition of the communities). The New Republic piece indicted the Post for this. I think the Post was more guilty several years ago. These days, it more often takes gutsy positions in relation to its black readership, but it does sometimes still walk on eggs to avoid being pilloried as white racist.

Certainly it is true that many diversified newsrooms walk on eggs rather than bear down on society's fuzzy-minded indulgence of so many young black men who engage in self-destructive behavior and criminality when they have other choices. But that particular failure also seems to exist in newsrooms that are almost all white.

And there is this, when you look at the larger picture: Half the country's dailies still have no minority reporters or editors.

So do we have large-scale kowtowing to minority readers? Too much of it, but limited in scale. And probably not as much as the kowtowing to the biases of middle-class white readers by many papers, often obliviously.

Here is something else to posit:

Opportunities for minority kids simply have to be improved in a hurry, for the good of the country and of journalism, by getting more of them into universities and into those professional schools that produce 80 percent of daily newspapers' hires and a substantial portion of broadcast news hires.

This country's greatest strength is that it is becoming the planet's first true "world" nation-state: an enormously significant factor in our future role with the earth's billions of diverse people who don't know or talk very well to each other.

It is just a bit hard, right now, to make this transition without tensions and conflict, often at a very personal level among people who work closely together and in most cases like and respect each other. It hurts. But things won't work out until we become more candid and confident and shed the taboos. l