My local newspaper (and former employer) learned a fresh lesson this week: The diversity police never rest.

God help any newspaper that allows its commitment to diversity lapse for even a moment. Do that, and the ever-vigilant diversity VoPos will spring into action, wagging their fingers in disapproval and shouting “J’accuse.” It won’t matter how many previous good-faith efforts a paper has made to portray the cultural variety and vigor of its community. One slip, and it’s into the dock.

Naturally, it’s always the innocuous story that trips up a newspaper. In the News & Observer’s case, it was a simple piece on back-to-school fashion (which you can see here). What you won’t see in the online edition, however, are all the photos which accompanied the story. Each of them showed — you might want to sit down for this — a teenage white girl.

I’ll confess that during the six or so seconds I invested in that story, I didn’t even notice that horrifying absence of diversity. But the all-pale model lineup sparked a flurry of letters to the editors decrying the uniformity of skin hue. (If you want a taste of the outrage, go here and here.) In response to those expressions of unhappiness, let me rise to the defense of the N&O.

I can assure you that N&O executives fret about diversity every day. Everyone who works for the paper has to, at some point, attend a two-day diversity re-education camp, during which all the old attitudes are purged from their minds and new, progressive attitudes are downloaded. Even the toughest nuts are eventually cracked: During my stint at diversity camp, a middle-aged black co-worker related how he was considering relocating to another home because Mexicans had started moving into his neighborhood and he was tired of listening to the “cha cha music” all night. It took a while before he finally got his mind right. But I swear, I think he was only minutes away from electroshock.

At one point, the N&O even formed a diversity committee to parse every story after publication. It became a de facto court of inquiry which issued reports that smelled of reprimands to unlucky writers who’d fallen short of the fuzzy, imprecise standards. I became the object of one of those reports after I wrote a story about that 1946-64 bulge in the population known as the baby boom. Apparently I’d failed to make it sufficiently clear that lots of babies of many skin tones had been born in that period. My response — that pointing out the fact that the baby boom included all races and ethnicities was sort of like requiring the weather report to note that people of all cultures got wet in last night’s thunderstorm — didn’t endear me to my overseers. (Yeah, I’ve always had a problem with authority.)

In short, the N&O’s use of a monochromatic bunch of models to illustrate a fashion story isn’t cause for alarm. Trust me, some poor staffer who had a momentary lapse of judgment is having a very bad week.

I’m sure a refresher course at the re-education camp is in the works.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.