News-Record.com

Thursday we published a story on the front page about Greensboro firefighters doing work at the fire chief's houses. It didn't take long on the Debatables blog for some commenters to see racial politics behind it.

Alas, a mention of race is nowhere to be found in Thursday's article or Friday's. But that hasn't stopped some readers from imagining it. (That, and for blaming us for writing about the story in the first place.) I don't know if there is a racial angle to the things happening at the fire department, but I know that we haven't reported on one. The chief, by the way, is white, for whatever that fact is worth.

At the same time, Skeet Club Savage, a frequent commenter on this blog and several others, started an interesting comment thread on my Sunday newspaper column post.

He (I'm assuming Skeet Club is male) and I spar in a long back-and-forth about our coverage of the police department issues. It is worth reading. If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you probably know that some people think this newspaper made the upheaval in the PD a racial issue. I've resisted that characterization because I think it's imprecise, if not inaccurate.

Every year, ASNE surveys its members on the race and gender of newsroom employees and publishes the results. The results haven't made us proud recently, either in total numbers of journalists or increased diversity of newsrooms.

Alan Mutter calls it "a confounding statistical mélange of apples, bananas and bowling bowls." Gotta love that image.

I would go even further. It's a waste of time and a false indicator of the industry's health. And it is yet another morale downer.

National numbers don't mean anything. The numbers that are important are local. How many journalists are in the newsroom of your hometown paper? How many of them are women? Men? African American? Asian? Hispanic? American Indian? (Those are the categories on the survey. I know because I took it.) As it happens, the N&R has a higher percentage of minority journalists (15%) than the national average (13.5%). Makes it sound as if we're ahead of the curve....except that we're less than halfway to mirroring the percentage of minorities in Guilford County, our core market area.

Does it help me as an editor to know the national numbers? No. Its original goal may have been worthy, but we need to try something else.

While I'm here, some questions not asked on the employment census: How many newsroom staffers are digitally proficient? How many are paid what they deserve? How many would it kill you if they left the paper? How many would you hire if you had it to do over? How many would work elsewhere if they had the chance?

Now that is a census that would tell you something.

A caller wanted to know why we didn't identify the race of the voters we quoted in our presidential primary stories.

Specifically, he wanted to know whether all of the people we quoted supporting Obama were African Americans. (I'm being kind: He said that he knew they were because they "sounded" like it.)

Racial profiling?

By including that piece of information, it would suggest that the individual's race is specifically relevant to how they voted. It may be. It may be because an African American wants a black man to win in the same way that a woman votes for Hillary because of her gender. It may also mean that the voter agrees with Obama's policies because they have seen the world through similar eyes.

I think the discussion overly simplifies a complex decision, and, in some case, tries to affirm our own beliefs about people. Many emotional, intellectual and political factors enter into picking a candidate.

Singling race out seems unfair, unless the voter specifically said he voted for Obama because of his race. An African American may vote for Obama because they support his policies. Put another way, imagine this sentence: "John Doe, who is white, said he voted for Obama because he agreed with him on the gas tax moratorium." What does race have to do with his vote? Nothing.

Granted, we want it both ways. We look at the demographics of voter registration and exit polling. Our first paragraph on the Obama victory story today certainly examined the results through a racial lens: Sen. Barack Obama's sweeping victory over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the North Carolina primary reaffirmed his strength among the affluent and African American voters and set up the final rounds in the bruising contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That tells me more about who voted for Obama and how he won, but not why.