Journalist's sins not an issue of race***It is upon this slim reed that Cohen and others have perched claims that diversity has hurt The New York Times. The charge is otherwise unsupported.
Which is not surprising in the least. Race is its own planet. The pull it exerts warps perspective and distorts truth. So that a celebrity accused of killing his wife becomes tabloid fodder but a black celebrity accused of killing his white wife becomes the fulcrum of a national debate on race. Not domestic violence, mind you, but race.
Similarly, some people would have us believe the Jayson Blair story is less about the need to reexamine newsroom safeguards than about the color of one man's skin. Less about the decline in workplace ethics than about newsrooms forced to hired unqualified blacks.
And if you don't think the weight of that is felt by every black woman and man in the newsroom, you're kidding yourself. Just Wednesday, the managing editor of The Times, who is black, had to defend himself against charges he had mentored Blair. Mentored.
I've frequently said that to be a black professional is to be always on probation, every day expected to prove that you belong. People always ask me what I mean. This is what I mean. This, exactly.
In recent years, white writers Dennis Love of The Sacramento Bee, David Cragin and Eric Drudis of The San Jose Mercury News, Stephen Glass of The New Republic and Mike Barnicle of The Boston Globe have all been charged with plagiarism or fabrication. Yet to my knowledge, neither Cohen, nor Sullivan nor anybody else wrote stories linking them to journalism's history of discrimination. Nobody asked whether that history has forced editors to hire unqualified white men.
Maybe they'll write that essay next time it happens.
No, I won't hold my breath.***