The AAJA is one of four major minority journalists' groups that promotes so-called diversity in the newsroom. Last week, the influential quartet of Asian-American, black, Hispanic and Native American associations sponsored a national media confab in Seattle. Presidential hopefuls Al Gore, George W. Bush, Bill Bradley and John McCain came, saw and pandered to the rainbow crowd. Lavish funding for Unity '99 flowed in from corporations and philanthropic foundations. But the fatal flaw of Unity '99 was its unspoken mandate of strict political conformity.
Unity demands unanimity.
If you don't accept the left-leaning agenda of advocacy journalism, you're enabling racism. If you don't support the pursuit of racial hiring goals as a primary journalistic goal, you're selling out. This pressure to bow and scrape before the false god of skin-deep diversity was overwhelming at two typical workshops I attended. The moderator, reporter Gary Fields of USA Today, gained national attention in 1996 with an extensive series on the purported epidemic of racist church-burnings in the South. Yet, no one at Unity '99 questioned Fields' authority.