The media ideal of diversity?

Newsrooms have been known to display a concern over racial diversity.

And that seems reasonable to a point. It's probable that blacks have been victims of past discrimination at newspapers, so an attempt to balance that ledger by encouraging the hiring of qualified blacks makes sense.

That attempt should probably stay limited in scope and duration, however, since its perpetuation simply creates a new pattern of racial discrimination. Plus blacks might want jobs that pay better than print journalism. Drawing blacks into a economically disadvantaged career almost seems like a dirty trick.

In contrast, newsrooms care little for ideological diversity. And that makes sense to a point. Today's newsrooms are dominated by the political center-left, but that breakdown probably owes hardly any debt to a past pattern or job discrimination against political conservatives.

Where newsrooms advocate diversity for its own sake rather than as part of a reasonable (and not overtly discriminatory) affirmative action initiative, the argument for diversity runs into a problem via its failure to consider political ideology.

If blacks brought exactly the same ideology to the newsroom as any other group, what would justify attempting to achieve black representation in the newsroom other than the affirmative action rationale already mentioned?

Justification would prove difficult.

I suspect that for many newsrooms, the ultimate motivation is brand stewardship. It's OK to stock the newsroom with blacks because the brand benefits along the lines of a charitable donation. That perception will more than make up for the fact that blacks overwhelmingly tend to vote Democratic. The brand benefits.

Making an effort to hire conservatives, on the other hand, has corresponding upside for the brand. Making a public effort to hire conservatives serves as an implicit admission that conservatives are underrepresented in the newsroom. Newspapers don't care to broadcast such an implied bias. The print ideal in the U.S., after all, is "objective" journalism. An overt attempt to hire conservatives might also create the impression that the newspaper has adopted a rightward tilt to its reporting, for that matter.

Though newspapers prefer to see themselves as relatively objective centrists, they do manifest a behavioral concession that could pass for an attempt to hire conservatives: They buy op-eds from conservative columnists. In this case also, the motivation appears to have the bottom line in view. Newspapers want to sell to the general public, not just one party or the other (though that wasn't always the case). A few conservative op-eds sprinkled on the op-ed page adds a veneer of balance regardless of the positions of the home-grown editorial staff (my local paper, The St. Petersburg Times, serves as a case in point).

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