COMMENT
Unfinished Business

As the Jayson Blair debate makes clear, we still need diversity programs

Jayson Blair’s flameout at The New York Times was the result of many things, not the least of which was Blair’s inability to do his job honestly, whether because he was out of his depth or sick or both. By all accounts, Blair is brash and aggressive, a talented writer with a seemingly endless energy to pursue both stories and career connections. As such, he fit nicely into the star system of the former Times editor, Howell Raines.

Blair is also black, and that played a role, too. The Times’s commitment to diversifying its newsroom is well established (The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins, Jr. called it a “nearly gothic hang-up”), and Raines admitted as much when he told his staff that, “as a white man from Alabama,” he gave Blair “one chance too many,” at least in part because he is black.

Yet in the polarized debate over diversity that has erupted in Blair’s wake, the issue of race has often been confined to two extremes. One extreme holds that race had nothing to do with the Blair affair, and to even bring it up is to somehow imply that Blair plagiarized and fabricated because he is black (why wasn’t race mentioned, this argument goes, when Stephen Glass, The New Republic’s serial fabricator, was exposed in 1998?). The other extreme holds that race had everything to do with it, and that Blair is exhibit A in the case against all deliberate attempts to diversify the workplace.

Both arguments assume a color-blind society that does not exist. The former because it willfully ignores how Blair’s race surely complicated his boss’s attitude toward him; the latter because it inevitably leads to the shallow conclusion that with the snap of our fingers we can be free of the weight of a long racial history. Neither argument helps us move beyond the status quo, which is unacceptable. U.S. newsrooms are 12.5 percent minority (against a national population that is 31 percent minority), according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ 2003 survey. Less than 10 percent of newsroom “supervisors” — the managerial class — are members of minority groups. Meanwhile, for complex reasons, the pool of young people of color choosing to enter journalism is actually shrinking, as Wanda S. Lloyd, who directs the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute, pointed out in cjr last year. All this as the communities we cover grow steadily more diverse.

So in addition to the social argument for affirmative action, there is now, for the media especially, an economic argument for it.

Last month, the Supreme Court affirmed the use of race in college admissions, and we in the media must remain similarly committed to diversity and to the kinds of programs that brought Jayson Blair to the Times. Such programs crack open worlds that might otherwise remain closed to so many people. Once inside, they can thrive and enrich the news report.

What gets lost in the polarized post-Blair debate is a candid discussion of the challenge of managing diversity within the newsroom. As David K. Shipler writes in his 1997 book A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America: “Although affirmative action brings people into the same room, it does not teach them how to deal with one another once they are there. Every workplace is a warren of unseen walls and barriers.” All young reporters need nurturing. But young minority reporters often face a range of issues and emotions their white counterparts do not: the pressure, real or imagined, of white assumptions about their ability to do the job; pressure to try to represent an entire race or ethnicity. “When you have more in common, on the surface, with a rap star than you do with a newspaperman who’s got thirty years in the profession,” writes Joshunda Sanders, a twenty-five-year-old black reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, “there is a level of discomfort that is hard to describe.”

Whether it is true, as some have argued, that in the post-Jayson Blair world all minority hires will be scrutinized and questioned more than ever, the fact that so many seem to believe it only makes managing diversity all the more challenging.

The other side of this balancing act is that it is a form of racism not to scrutinize and question, not to hold reporters hired through diversity programs to rigorous standards. Macarena Hernandez, the young reporter who briefly served with Blair on a diversity internship at the Times, and who later busted him when he plagiarized her story in the San Antonio Express-News, put it this way in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times: “If The New York Times was sincerely committed to diversity, Blair’s editors would have chopped off his fingers at the first sign of trouble instead of helping him polish his claws.” Hernandez, by the way, reports that she received serious and thorough mentoring during her stint at the Times.

Someday, we hope, the idea of a diversity program will be seen as a quaint and unnecessary vestige because we will have become the color-blind society of Martin Luther King’s famous dream. We’re not there yet. Diversity programs are a way to move in that direction, and thus are worth the complicated trip.

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