The depth charge this time is a 13,000-word article in The New Republic written by 24-year-old Ruth Shalit, a talented if habitually careless writer. Shalit, who is white, paints a grim picture of a newspaper that hires and promotes candidates solely on the basis of race, waters down its coverage of minority leaders and harbors deeply resentful white reporters. If the paper wasn’t aflame before the piece appeared (the disputes over race were actually much hotter in the 1980s), it is now, at least temporarily.
That might not be so bad for the Post (NEWSWEEK’s sister publication) and for every other institution wrestling with these issues. As Geneva Overholser, the Post’s ombudsman, wrote in an internal report: “Much of the power of the article derives from its airing of sentiments that are deeply felt but usually narrowly circulated. This carries great wounding power, especially when anonymous . . . Still, the struggles and questions and views it brings to light are representative of the U.S. in 1995 and certainly are present at the Post.”
Unfortunately, Shalit weakens her argument with sloppiness: one city contractor is described as having “served time” when he wasn’t even indicted; well-regarded black reporters at the Post are unfairly smeared; more than a dozen unambiguous facts about the Post are simply wrong. (For instance, a reporting slot she claims was reserved for minorities was recently filled by a white.) And it would have helped had Shalit acknowledged that without the era of “diversity” she, as a woman, would probably not be writing for The New Republic. (The weekly has done even worse on race than gender. Post publisher Donald Graham suggested a new motto for the magazine: “Looking for a qualified black since 1914.”)
Beyond that, Shalit missed some critical context. Journalists are bellyachers by nature, so an aura of turmoil can be conjured any time, anywhere in the news business. The sensitivity-training sessions she deliciously skewers (executives wear placards reading LAUGH AT ME) are partly an overreaction to the traditional absence of any management training in newspapers. Most important, there are sound journalistic reasons for a newspaper to recruit and promote blacks to cover a mostly black city, and editors deserve some credit when they hug this third rail. It would be a helluva lot easier not to try.
Shalit’s assumption that such recruitment automatically lowers hiring and promotion standards is fallacious because it defines “qualifications” much too narrowly. After all, being black can be a legitimate, if partial, job qualification as long as those hired end up performing. Shalit doesn’t establish that black journalists at the Post don’t perform well, and to make her case, she must. The assumption that talented whites aren’t being hired also suffers from the fact that in the nine years since establishing the goal of increasing minority hiring, the Post has hired more than two and a half times as many whites as blacks.
But Shalit is right that the Post has not fully articulated the trade-offs implicit in its preferential-hiring program. Some qualified whites, in all areas of employment, have suffered for coming of age during this painful passage. And Shalit aptly describes a “new editorial culture” that seeks “racially balanced news coverage, carefully edited to respect the increasingly brittle sensibilities of relevant groups. The result has been to compromise the paper’s traditional role as a gadfly in Washington, D.C. and the nation as a whole.”
Instead of acknowledging the element of truth in this point by admitting, for instance, that the paper’s coverage of Mayor Marion Barry has been intermittently soft over the years, the Post is digging in. The combination of Shalit’s flawed attack and the paper’s overreaction (“Big lie propaganda,” executive editor Leonard Downie called it) has obscured deeper questions that the article might have raised: Must sensitivity make a paper less hard-hitting? How important is it for a newspaper to have good relations with the local power structure, black or white? How much responsibility do newspapers have for building community?
These are hot topics now in the media, where a movement called “public journalism” envisions a new role for newspapers in helping communities improve themselves. Downie is the biggest critic of that approach. He worries that newspapers will become like the Los Angeles Times in the movie “Chinatown”–manipulating levers of power instead of staying independent. Ironically, Shalit agrees here, but goes much further, concluding that “a newspaper’s indifference to the subjects of its coverage is a sign of a newspaper’s integrity.”
After all the ego bruising, this is what’s ultimately so wrong about the New Republic article. Instead of trying to bridge some of these issues–to describe how to make a paper that is both tough and committed to improving the community, a newsroom that is both diverse in its staff and aggressive in its coverage–Ruth Shalit sets them up as mutually exclusive. This reflects a hopelessness that is worse than sad: it’s unnecessary.
