WITHIN THE VEIL

The journey and continuing travails of the nation’s black journalists.

Newkirk (Journalism/New York Univ.) begins her account with Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the US, launched in 1827 to protest efforts to deport blacks to Africa. Few mainstream newspapers hired any black reporters until the late 1960s, however, when the Kerner Commission blamed poor press coverage in large part for the urban riots of 1968. But the battle really started once blacks were employed and sought to interpret and explain black life and culture to a larger audience of white editors and readers (whose views had largely been shaped by years of stereotypical distortion). On another front was the war over affirmative action, and there were individual battles such as the Janet Cooke affair. Cooke, a black Washington Post reporter, made up a story about an underaged drug user that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. She later acknowledged that her story was fiction and returned the prize, but there followed years of mistrust and suspicion of the work of all black reporters. Newkirk (a former New York Post writer) maintains that, despite advances, black journalists today face a continuing struggle for acceptance and respect within the profession. Minorities make up 11 percent of all US newsrooms today, a figure that falls far short of the 15 percent goal set by editors in 1978. In addition, the universal journalistic tenet of being fair and balanced to all seems not to apply to controversial figures such as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan or even to Sally Hemmings (the former slave who, according to DNA evidence, gave birth to at least one of Thomas Jefferson’s children).

Newkirk’s account is well-grounded historically and anecdotally, and she manages to be both fair and accurate at a time when those values seem to have lost their luster in the profession.