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2 Seeking Justice in a Climate of Irony The Hiring Initiative’s Uneasy Prelude, 1968–76 During his career in journalism and academia, Norman Isaacs grew accustomed to playing the odd man out in professional controversies. A thoughtful, idealistic editor with a crusader’s distaste for ambiguity, Isaacs always began from the premise that the editor’s covenant required him to serve as a moral compass for his community. Dismayed by the widespread ethical failings of journalism, Isaacs tried unsuccessfully as ASNE president in 1969–70 to interest the organization in starting an ethics enforcement procedure . At the end of his term, Isaacs left the Louisville Courier-Journal and joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he took up the cause of the National Press Council, a noble though ill-fated attempt to hold news media accountable for their conduct.1 In this way, Isaacs frequently cast himself as a nagging conscience that many of his fellow editors preferred to ignore. Given his habit of going against the grain, it seems fitting that Isaacs also inaugurated the ASNE’s campaign for newsroom integration. After months of work through the ASNE’s first Minority Employment Committee, Isaacs stood before the 1972 convention to report that nonwhites accounted for just three-quarters of 1 percent of the professional employees in daily newspaper newsrooms. “It supports the assertion that we have, indeed, been racist in our employment practices throughout our years in the calling,” Isaacs told his fellow editors.2 For the most part, Isaacs’s audience greeted the news with indifference, his enthusiasm for a remedy failed to catch on, and this initial effort to promote newsroom integration sputtered to a halt. With little to show for its labor and the number of nonwhites working in daily newsrooms virtually static, the Minority EmployMellinger_Chasing text.indd 46 10/24/12 4:28 PM ment Committee disbanded two years later. “It is the committee’s feeling that after three years of repeated checking [on the number of nonwhite journalists], it has served its purpose for the time being,” Isaacs reported in 1974.3 The work of Isaacs’s Minority Employment Committee was the ASNE’s first significant response to the rebuke delivered in 1968 by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, more commonly known as the Kerner Commission. The presidential commission, which investigated the causes of the urban uprisings from 1964 through 1967, devoted a chapter of its report to exploring the news media’s role in perpetuating the “black-white schism” in American society that had precipitated violence in the cities.4 In both tone and message, chapter 15 was a scathing and unprecedented indictment of the news media’s failure “to analyze and report adequately on racial problems in the United States and . . . to meet the Negro’s legitimate expectations in journalism.” The report continued, By and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and sources of potential solutions. The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world. The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro ’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed. Slights and indignities are part of the Negro’s daily life, and many of them come from what he now calls “the white press”—a press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America. This may be understandable , but it is not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of our society.5 Chapter 15’s most significant contributions were not only its emphasis on the need for more inclusive news coverage but also its insistence on integrated hiring in journalism. The Kerner Commission did not mince words on this point, framing newsroom integration as a democratic mandate and insisting that nonwhites be among newsroom decision-makers who shaped news content. The scarcity of Negroes in responsible news jobs intensifies the difficulties of communicating the reality of the contemporary American city to white newspaper and television audiences. The special viewpoint of the Negro who has lived through these problems and bears their marks upon him is . . . notably absent from what is, on the whole, a white press. But full integration of Negroes into the journalistic profession is imperative in its own right. It is unacceptable that the press, itself the special beneficiary of fundamental seeking justice in a climate of irony...

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