“The commission recommends an extensive effort by the media to fully explain, by whatever means necessary, to all people how media operate.”

No, that’s not something new on the heels of the turmoil going on in the media today, what with the big, mainstream newspapers and TV talking heads accused of Bush bashing, and the Bush administration paying off journalists to write good things about its programs.

That recommendation was by the Washington State Commission on the Causes and Preventions of Civil Disorder in a report released about this time back in 1969.

The study was based on media activity in the preceding year, which was the year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and we just caught hell.

We weren’t doing enough to bring blacks into the business. We were inclined to play up violence rather than the less interesting, non-violent doings of the ghetto. We don’t put enough emphasis on ghetto problems and should assign reporters specifically to that. We write lousy headlines on stories that might otherwise be fair and impartial.

The last I agree with. Reporters don’t write headlines and it is the curse of the reporter to occasionally find his efforts distorted by a headline that reverses the meaning of what he wrote. As for bringing blacks into the business, it would be silly to pull some black off the street and title him reporter just so the paper or station can have a visible black on the premises. Whether he is black or white, he has to WANT to be in the business and earn his way.

Not all that many do. The newspaper business isn’t known for its fat salaries. TV pays better.

Bill Will of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, which serves most of the weeklies in the state, says every newspaper organization has a diversity program and the number of minority employees has improved over the last 20 years. “But a talented minority candidate is attractive to a lot of other industries, “ he said, “not necessarily just the newspaper business. That’s the 800-pound elephant on our backs.”

Actually, minorities are gaining. In 1978, the Newspaper Association of America started an annual national survey of daily newspapers, checking minority hirings in newsrooms of professionals, i.e., reporters, editors, photographers, news artists, and came up with 3.95 percent.

In the latest survey, for 2003, with 927 of 1,4l7 dailies responding, the total of minorities, which includes blacks, Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans, had climbed to 12.95 percent… The percentage of blacks alone in the national population was 13.1. That was the year Hispanics surpassed blacks for the first time as the leading minority with 13.4 percent.

Here in Washington state, blacks make up only 3.2 percent of our nearly 6 million population. But the newspapers are diversity conscious. Examples: The Seattle Times’ newsroom is 22.2 percent black, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 14.4, the Tacoma News Tribune, 14.3, and the Spokane Spokesman-Review, 6.0. Ken Bunting, executive editor of the P-I, is black and so is the new publisher of the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Rufus Friday.

As for the other complaints by the Commission on too much violence and not enough in the news about non-violent doings in the ghetto, what constitutes news? Webster says news is a recent event and an event is a noteworthy happening. Many papers have black reporters on the black beat because they are more likely to be trusted by their peers as being without prejudice.

The majority of Washington’s blacks live in Pugetopolis and there is no dearth of stories in the newspapers there about them, particularly since they have been elected to high office and are represented in the top drawer professions and social strata. Incidents of racism or civil unrest are few and far between, the only really sore spot being the antipathy between blacks and the police.

Maybe, as more and more blacks join the police force, things will get better.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.).