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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 9/26/2005 8:12:59 AM
Title: NYer's Goldberg responds to WP's Nakamura
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I am writing in response to David Nakamura’s bizarre but inadvertently self-revealing "open letter" to me, posted on Friday.

Mr. Nakamura is apparently upset because I told the Washingtonian’s Harry Jaffe that my career at The Washington Post came to an end when an editor there informed me that I would not be hired to fill a permanent reporting slot on the city desk, on which I had been working for a year. The editor said: “We would like to hire you, but we have to hire a Hispanic for that slot.”

I did not complain to Mr. Jaffe about this editor’s comment. Nor did I assert, as Mr. Nakamura implies, that my career was “doomed by diversity.” My sin, in Mr. Nakamura’s eyes, it seems, was to answer truthfully a question from Mr. Jaffe about my time at the Post.

I was, of course, unhappy about this long-ago turn of events -- it was upsetting to me to have my time at the Post brought to a premature close; it was upsetting to lose a job because of the color of my skin; and it was especially upsetting because I was pretty-much broke at the time, and needed the paycheck. But even as this episode unfolded, I sort-of understood the decision, particularly because it seemed journalistically sound for the Post to seek to raise the number of Spanish-speaking reporters covering the city.

Mr. Nakamura knows none of this, because he neglected to call me before posting his “open letter.” Had he called, he also would have known that these events occurred in 1989, not 1986. (Mr. Nakamura also wrote that he had "no way of knowing exactly who was hired back in 1986 after your internship." It seems to me that he could have reported out this question with a minimum of legwork, given his place of employment.)

On the larger points, I don’t know if I would have been able to help Mr. Nakamura. He shows no evidence of understanding that it is possible to support a policy (such as diversity hiring) and still acknowledge its moral complexity.

As for Mr. Nakamura’s wild extrapolations, they are self-evidently foolish, and his final, demagogic comment is beneath contempt.

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