ABSTRACT
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the first generation of African-American reporters to integrate newsrooms and get those reporting jobs as real journalists. It was no accident that newsroom integration paralleled the national push for integration. Editors were very aware of the contradiction of condemning racism, especially in the South, and not dealing with it closer to home, on their staffs. Newsroom integration was mostly in the North. The South was a different story. Newsrooms really did begin to change for the better. The percentage of minorities in the newsroom is 18 percent, with nonwhite managers making up 11 percent. Tension between the races in the newsroom began in the 1970s as more nonwhites were hired, posing a threat—or perceived threat—to white males. Traditional newsroom rivalry turned into antagonism—sometimes madness—in the 1980s, helped along by Reagan administration anti-civil rights policies and politics that extended even to journalists.
