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  • CHASING NEWSROOM DIVERSITY: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action by Gwyneth Mellinger
  • Hellen S. Lee
CHASING NEWSROOM DIVERSITY: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action. By Gwyneth Mellinger. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2013.

Gwyneth Mellinger spares no quarter in her extensive examination of pervasive racism within the field of journalism. Drawing extensively upon an impressive array of materials, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) conference proceedings, ASNE Board meeting minutes, the ASNE Bulletin (later the American Editor), archival materials, and personal interviews; Mellinger weaves the history of decades-long struggles to diversify newsrooms across the United States to include people of color, women, and gays and lesbians. Adding depth and focus to the crucial scholarship about the broader American press by Carolyn Martindale, Roland Wolseley, Pamela Newkirk, and Patrick Washburn, among others, Mellinger turns her attention specifically to the ASNE as the crux of the journalism industry at large.

By tracing ASNE’s overt racism and its neutral-on-its-face policies that denied access to African American editors of the 1950s, to the Civil Rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to the anti—Affirmative Action climate of the 1990s, and to the contemporary moment, Mellinger weaves a story of repeated failures to overcome racial barriers and of embattled efforts of women and gay and lesbian journalists and editors to gain access to and recognition in the industry. While she tracks the racial, gender, and sexual battles largely separately in the beginning, she brings the various threads of resistance to bigotry together in the second half of her book. By laying out each group’s separate goals and how, at times, they work against each other instead of together in their common goal of social justice in the journalistic field, she points out the irony of "minority" journalists and editors pitting against each other when she writes, “A diversity effort that allows one marginalized cohort to insist on the exclusion of another is simply not sustainable as a movement for social justice” (156). [End Page 107]

One of Mellinger’s most valuable moves is that she makes clear that the initial efforts to integrate the field were led by African American editors and later aided by their white counterparts. Even as she is uncompromising in shedding light on the deep-seated racism that African American editors faced in the ASNE, from Louis Martin and John Sengstacke to Albert Fitzpatrick and Jay Harris to Robert and Nancy Hicks Maynard; Mellinger practices the best of journalism—being fair and balanced—by also including influential white ASNE Presidents who joined the struggle beginning in the late 1970s, such as Eugene Patterson, John Quinn, Richard Smyser, and John Siegenthaler

Limiting the scope of the project to the ASNE allows Mellinger to bring into high relief the biases of racialized, gendered, and sexualized power dynamics within journalism, but at other times seems a bit too focused as important details that she includes—such as the large numbers of the attendees at the first UNITY conference—suggest that the diversity project was gaining momentum outside of the cabal of the ASNE leadership. Perhaps she is setting the groundwork to follow up on this well-written, astutely organized, and exhaustively researched book.

Hellen S. Lee
California State University, Sacramento
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