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Is The Washington Press Corps Too White, Or Too ... ?

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post is worried (and he claims others are worried) that too many members of the Washington press corps look like him. He probably doesn?t mean that they?re not Hollywood-handsome, or even that too many of them are Jewish (which I assume he is, and if he hasn?t checked to see how many Jews there are, how can he be sure that?s not what he calls a ?cause for concern??). He means that not enough of them are black.

Eight days before Barack Obama is sworn in, the relative paucity of black journalists at the White House is striking. A mostly white press corps at 1600 Pennsylvania would be cause for concern no matter what the color of the Oval Office occupant. But the advent of the Obama administration seems to underscore that racial progress has been uneven in a business that chronicles that very subject.

While there are some exceptions, most major news outlets that regularly chronicle the White House do not have a minority reporter on this, Washington?s most visible beat.

So, ?racial progress? requires more black White House reporters? Why? In fact, since there is a finite pool of talented blacks (as of every racial group) and since it is inescapably true that every single black who decides to become a reporter thereby decides not to become something else, in Kurtz?s view it must be true that ?racial progress? in White House reporting must mean racial regress, or stasis, in some other field.

If you regard the above point as silly, or trivial (I don?t), you need look no further than this column by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe to find Kurtz?s krap sliced, diced, and skewered. ?Barack Obama will face a sobering array of problems when he takes office as the nation's 44th president,? Jacoby writes, ?but the color of the reporters who will be covering him is not one of them.?

?Why should it matter to anyone but a racist whether a White House reporter is black or white?? he continues.

Well, says Michael Fletcher, a colleague of Kurtz?s, ?you would want to have black journalists there to bring a different racial sensibility.? By the same token, more evangelical journalists would presumably bring a different religious sensibility to the White House, more journalists from the Deep South would bring a different regional sensibility, and more Republican journalists would bring a different political sensibility. Do you know of any news organizations that are fretting over the ?relative paucity? of evangelicals, Southerners, or Republicans on their payrolls? Me neither.

There is no shortage of people like Kurtz who believe their profession (and, of course, the greater good that it serves) suffers from its paucity of ?people of color.? Yet, oddly, there is a massive shortage of resignations by such people to make room for the minorities they miss.

Here?s a closing thought experiment: if some of those Kurtzian ?people of no color? who lament the woeful lack of ?racial progress? in their field were fired so that they could be replaced by a ?person of color,? would they praise their former bosses for the justice of their dismissal ... or develop a new appreciation for the principle that no one should be burdened or benefited because of his race?

Full post as published by Discriminations on January 14, 2009 (boomark / email).