Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Diversity
Norman Isaacs’ idealistic quest
In 1972, Isaacs — an ASNE past president — and his
Minority Employment Committee took the first stab at diversifying U.S.
newspaper newsrooms
By Alice Bonner
Harsh words and defensive postures were not uncommon among editors in
the early years of the newsroom desegregation movement, and few knew better
than Norman Isaacs, chair of the first ASNE Minority Employment Committee
in 1972.
Isaacs, a venerated former Louisville newspaper executive and Pulitzer
Prize winner, was past president of ASNE and on Columbia University’s journalism
faculty when he accepted the diversity assignment in 1971. Still, he got
little respect for his efforts.
“Denunciations for meddling and trouble-making; personal slurs; some
patent evasions,” were among the responses Isaacs and other committee members
got when they queried editors in the first national survey of non-white
journalists in daily newsrooms. Committee members deserved “a Bronze Star
for combat duty,” Isaacs said when he presented the report to the 1972
ASNE convention in Washington.
Many editors were “looking for instant minority professionals,” he warned.
“My own conclusion is that they’re in for about seven lean years.” There
were few non-white journalism candidates in the pipeline, Isaacs said,
partly because he and other news executives had been too cautious in hiring
minority staffers in earlier years.
None of the ASNE members who had criticized Isaacs’ committee anonymously
would agree to speak on his convention panel, so Isaacs had invited Bob
Maynard, a rising star on the national desk of The Washington Post to discuss
the report. One of Maynard’s Post colleagues, Richard Cohen, covered the
discussion for the ASNE Bulletin, noting that it had the poorest attendance
of the convention.
Maynard had just been named co-director of Columbia University’s Summer
Program for Minorities in Journalism along with New York Times correspondent
Earl Caldwell. (The program was later renamed the Maynard Institute for
Journalism Education following his death in 1993.)
In 1972 Maynard told the ASNE members they must desegregate newsrooms.
“In a society wracked by the problems of race, white voices dominate and
white hands control the final outcome of the product.” This coverage, he
said, “is not just unfair to blacks and other minorities, it is unfair
to whites as well because they are not getting their money’s worth when
they pay for the paper.”
A year later, Isaacs was still hammering away at the need for press
desegregation, but there was little good news in his April 1973 committee
report: Editors’ recruitment activities had “diminished considerably,”
he found. “It probably was too much to expect the sense of urgency to be
maintained over the long period required for greater reform of existing
inequities.” Isaacs emphasized the positive: there had been “no strong
forward thrusts” in minority hiring, he said, but there also was “little
slippage.”
Journalists’ attention had been diverted to other problems, including
the war in Vietnam, and the “crush of inflation,” Isaacs noted. He cited
it as “common knowledge that the ‘Second Reconstruction’ in the United
States has fallen victim to weariness and general disaffection. What is
missing, generally, is the sense of urgency expressed in the 1969-72 period.
Editors today report no minority pressures being voiced, and they are taking
their time in recruitment. ... Like other massive social problems, however,
the issue of minority employment will not fade from sight.”
Another press worry at the time was the spreading “credibility gap,”
a matter of serious concern throughout the early 1970s. Polls indicated
that public confidence in the press had slipped considerably since 1966.
Isaacs saw a strong link between the values of credibility and desegregation,
noting that hiring and promoting minority journalists was integral to maintaining
readers’ trust.
“Our two-year study ... indicates that a gap exists between the announced
intentions of publishers and editors and the decisions made at middle-management
levels. If newspapers are to successfully mirror their communities, they
need better blends of information, more roots spreading out into the total
audience and more balanced appraisals of the subsurface problems of citizens
and their dissatisfactions. This kind of thoughtful, informed analysis
cannot come from staff members and editors recruited from one general strata
of society.” (Emphasis added.)
Weariness had settled over the newsroom desegregation movement by the
time ASNE met in 1974. Some editors seemed ready to concede defeat, at
least for the moment. Many expressed frustration that desegregating their
staffs was proving harder than they had anticipated.
Editors complained about “raiding” of their minority staffers by competitors.
“We’ve been pirated by the metropolitans and the government,” one editor
complained. Said another irate respondent, “We keep trying even though
we are robbed blind by the fat-cat slobs who are too uppity to do their
own training but just take a bead on the ones we’ve gathered in and trained,
and use their pocketbooks to seduce ’em. We can’t blame the kids, but my
respect for the lazy big shots is really low.”
Hiring and retaining minority staffers was difficult because of hiring
freezes racial discrimination in local housing markets, lack of staff turnover
and an easing of pressure from minority communities (even while pressure
to hire more women was increasing), some editors said.
One editor complained about a black woman he had hired as an editorial
assistant who “left two months later to accept a public relations job at
a much higher salary than she was qualified to receive.” He cited another
example of a black reporter who was hired but never showed up, who “had
taken a job on a large Eastern paper.” The editor said he found demand
for minority staffers on large metropolitan papers and in television was
so great that the chances of keeping a “good black staffer on a medium-sized
daily are slim.”
Although the non-white presence had barely changed, pressure to hire
minority staffers was dropping in 1974, Isaacs said. His committee had
faced “difficult duty” through three years of tough fact-finding on press
desegregation, and had gone as far as it could go.
“It is the committee’s feeling that after three years of repeated checking,
it has served its purpose for the time being, Isaacs said. “The membership
knows the score by this time. The committee, therefore, recommends to the
board of directors that the function be suspended and consideration given
to a reactivation at a later time.”
With that the ASNE Minority Employment Committee shut down for four
years, next appearing at the 1978 convention with Dick Smyser as chairman,
to mark the 10th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report and to embrace
the Year 2000 Plan.
