For instance, after the Post was forced to take back a February front-page story on the sniper case, Blair sent along an e-mail with the following subject line: "oooooooppppps." The missive proceeded to chide the Post's reporting and accused the paper of "stretching."
It seems that the Washington Post does not want to be left behind in the fabrication department... and Blair had a lot chutzpah
excerpt from Columbia Journalism Review, December 1993
Accepting the premise that a newsroom lacking in proportional representation of nonwhites cannot provide fair and accurate coverage of America's increasingly multicultural society, [NYTimes Publisher] Sulzberger has called diversity "the single most important issue" his newspaper faces. In 1991 he made a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists in which he referred to it as "our cause." The following year he told the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association, "We can no longer offer our readers a predominantly white, straight. male vision of events and say that we, as journalists, are doing our jobs."
Endorsing the first tentative steps toward diversity taken by the Times's executive editor, Max Frankel, after Frankel took over the newsroom in 1986, Sulzberger has urged his executives to redouble efforts to hire and promote minority editors and reporters. In 1991, Gerald Boyd, the first black manager in the Times's Washington bureau, had been made editor of the Metro section, and in 1993 he became the paper's first black assistant managing editor; as Metro editor, Boyd expanded coverage of the outer boroughs, to which the paper had previously given short shrift. Other celebrated diversity hires have been Bob Herbert, who this spring became the first black columnist, and Margo Jefferson, who became the paper's first black critic, leaping from outside the Times over the heads of several talented white male veterans whose seniority would have given them preference before.
The quest for diversity has had unquestionable benefits. It has led to the hiring of many talented members of minority groups who might have been ignored by the paper in a less enlightened day. While not too long ago the Times was a nearly all-white institution focused on all-white precincts of power, it is now getting closer to the "ideal newspaper" made up of "as many smart people from as many different backgrounds as possible," as one Times reporter put it.
Some acknowledge the value of this effort but see a worrisome downside. A recent Esquire magazine piece by Robert Sam Anson described the feelings of white reporters at the Times who complained of certain stories being reserved for minorities, of editors tailoring stories to suit their political views, and of management so desperate to hire and promote minorities that some have been placed in positions where they were in way over their heads.