Within the Veil Black Journalists, White Media [Paperback]

Winner of the National Press Club Prize for Media Criticism.
Companion website: http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/authors/veil.html
Thirty years ago, the Kerner Commission Report made national headlines by exposing the consistently biased coverage afforded African Americans in the mainstream media. While the report acted as a much ballyhooed wake-up call, the problems it identified have stubbornly persisted, despite the infusion of black and other racial minority journalists into the newsroom.
InWithin the Veil,Pamela Newkirk unmasks the ways in which race continues to influence reportage, both overtly and covertly. Newkirk charts a series of race-related conflicts at news organizations across the country, illustrating how African American journalists have influenced and been denied influence to the content, presentation, and very nature of news.
Through anecdotes culled from interviews with over 100 broadcast and print journalists, Newkirk exposes the trials and triumphs of African American journalists as they struggle in pursuit of more equitable coverage of racial minorities. She illuminates the agonizing dilemmas they face when writing stories critical of blacks, stories which force them to choose between journalistic integrity, their own advancement, and the almost certain enmity of the black community.
Within the Veilis a gripping front-line report on the continuing battle to integrate America's newsrooms and news coverage.

In many ways, today's news business suffers from a terrible case of isolationism, not just racial but socioeconomic. If every news editor in America read Within the Veil, it could transform dynamics within the newsroom and what appears on the screen and printed page. And for everyone elsethe informed citizens of America who wonder how the media worksthis book, with its gripping behind-the-scenes newsroom dramas, is a damn good read. In her eloquent take on media Eurocentrism, Pamela Newkirk observes that anti-lӍ