Coloring The News: How Crusading For Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.

• Author: Mnookin, Seth
• Position: Yellow Journalism

COLORING THE NEWS: How Crusading For Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism by William McGowan Encounter Books, $25.95

MORE THAN SIX YEARS AGO, IN the fall of 1995, Ruth Shalit wrote a 13,000-word piece for The New Republic entitled "Race in the Newsroom--The Washington Post in Black and White." The piece, written before the feisty scribe was drummed out of TNR for a laundry list of journalistic sins, set out to document "the growing backlash against affirmative action at the Post itself."

Shalit was tackling one of the thorniest topics in newsrooms in America. Her piece came on the heels of two incendiary memoirs written by black reporters who had left the Post (Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler and Jill Nelson's Volunteer Slavery). Both writers said the paper was a predominantly white enclave into which token blacks were hired but never fully accepted. On the other side of this poisonous divide were the midlevel white journos who were convinced that they would be succeeding faster were it not for the forced diversity represented by the Nathan McCalls of the world. (McCall made an easy target: He had a serious criminal record as part of his vita, having spent three years in a Virginia prison, and admitted in his book to participating in numerous gang rapes of black girls.)

Shalit got an impressive number of things wrong. (Look up Post editor Len Downie's barnburner riposte for the whole list.) But she did get the forest right, even if she was hard-pressed to accurately identify all of its trees. A half-decade ago, the burgeoning economic boom was just reaching the country's ink-stained wretches, and most working journalists still remembered the lean years of the early and mid-1990s, when staff-writer jobs were few and far between. Efforts to diversify the country's newsrooms were often forced and clumsy, and many people, black and white, had legitimate gripes. There was a growing backlash against affirmative action, and it wasn't limited to the Post's newsroom.

It was during this time that William McGowan, a former Washington Monthly editor and current Manhattan Institute fellow, signed on with Simon & Schuster's Free Press to write a book critiquing how a poorly conceived and executed push to diversify newsgathering organizations was robbing American journalism of its objectivity. McGowan aimed to take Shalit's critique one step further, examining not only how diversification was roiling newsrooms but how it was hurting the...