How many minority journalists will a wary mainstream media embrace? What's this year's color du jour? If your group advances, must mine fall behind?
Such questions seemed validated by a survey released Wednesday by the Unity consortium that showed that 90 percent of the journalists working in the nation's Washington news bureaus are white -- in an America whose citizenry is fewer than 70 percent white. Minority journalists make up less than 12 percent of bureau reporters, while minorities represent more than 30 percent of the U.S. population.
Clearly, too few minority journalists are covering the nation's most news-producing city. So the ethnicities of the small percentage who have these coveted positions seem important.
Which hardly fosters Unity.
"I wasn't a big fan of the first two Unity conventions," admitted NABJ President Herbert Lowe, a reporter at Newsday in New York. "The [traditional] NABJ convention means so much to me -- it's like a family reunion." Seeing so many strangers from unfamiliar groups at "his" convention felt odd.
But working closely with the presidents of the other minority journalist associations this year helped Lowe realize that "we're all definitely going through the same things."
At Unity, minority journalists' voices and power "are multiplied -- you don't get Kerry and Bush and Powell to just NABJ," Lowe continued. Visiting politicos "probably didn't know there were this many journalists of color -- they don't see that many at press conferences or on their campaign planes," he continued. "So they're not getting asked questions that matter to our constituents, our communities."
No wonder many attendees feel how I did back in Detroit -- surprisingly moved. Pablo Bello, a writer for the Spanish-language newspaper El Informador Hispano in Fort Worth, came to Unity looking for a job.
He found inspiration.
"The speakers are very passionate," said Bello, 36, who was a reporter in his native Mexico City 14 years ago when he decided to "give myself one year to learn English and get a journalism job." When he couldn't achieve his goal, Bello decided to work on his English and reporting skills "rather than go back home defeated."
So he feels motivated by photos shown to him by NAHJ's president of the overwhelmingly white White House press corps. He feels "very emotional" when Unity speakers, "some of them immigrants like me, really tell us to go for it."
Unity helped him realize that as minority journalists, "we have strengths, we have qualifications, we have numbers," Bello said.
"We just need a chance to show the mainstream media that we can succeed."
I appreciate Bello's feelings. Yet in the more than two decades since the sight of hundreds of minority journalists moved me to tears, thousands of them have succeeded -- some brilliantly.
Enough have done well that editors and news directors shouldn't have to be reminded -- year after year at conventions such as this one -- why it's so important for the journalists who report the news to be as varied as the population they cover. At some point, it seems, diversity shouldn't be a goal.
It should be a reality.
