Reporting What They Are, Being What They Report : A PLACE IN THE NEWS From the Women’s Pages to the Front Page <i> by Kay Mills (Dodd, Mead: $17.95; 355 pp.) </i>

Kay Mills, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, has written a helpful and wonderfully subversive little book.

Under the guise of tracing the historic and continuing struggle of women in American newsrooms, she has exposed some very sore places for the press and for women. In a literal but superficial sense, her book is about the current state of women’s aspirations for power and responsibility in daily newspapers. But what she describes is also true for racial and ethnic minorities as well as for women. And it mirrors the state of affairs throughout contemporary society, in law, politics, academics, and medicine, for example, as women and minorities seek their rightful place in arenas that must relate to a world that is increasingly diverse, but until now has been dominated by white men and, more important, by white male values.

“A Place in the News” is written as a series of 19 relatively short, discrete chapters, each nibbling on a different slice of the pie. Some of the pieces are interesting although expected: a short history of women reporters over the last 100 years, and a recounting of the relatively recent transformation of women’s pages with the implications for female journalists and female issues. Some are necessary reporting: the drama of the efforts of Washington-based women in the media to have equal access to the mostly male newsmakers in the nation’s capital, and stories of the background and consequences of various lawsuits brought by women in news organizations. Some are provocative: the canonization of Al Neuharth, the Gannett organization and USA Today for their role in advancing the careers of women in journalism and for proving that women can do the job and will do it differently; and the next-to-last chapter in which she thoughtfully raises questions about whether all of this struggle is worth the price.

Mills’ data is her own experience, quotes and anecdotes from her 150 interviews with journalists from around the country, almost exclusively women, and some re-reporting of recent academic and professional studies. As a result, the book reads more like a collection of magazine articles than a coherent argument or world view. In addition, it is about newspapers and not television, thus leaving out a whole world of women journalists who are desperately seeking legitimacy and respect. And she dutifully devotes a few pages to being particularly harsh on her own newspaper, as if otherwise we wouldn’t believe the other stuff. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the issues are important and the book is easy to read, which might mean that it will actually be read. It should be read because there is something there for everyone.

For people concerned about the role of the press in American affairs, this book strips away the veneer of the myth of objectivity behind which journalists too often hide in making excuses for why they do not do better than they do in telling us what is really going on. Mills argues, with anecdotal support as well as testimony, that women bring special qualities such as better capacities for listening and compassion, that they have some special resources as reporters, such as being less threatening, and that they see the world differently and thus ask different questions, understand issues in a different way, and hear different nuances in a quotation or a news event.

The implications of this idea are very significant. If women do bring special competences and insights to the definitions and forms of news, then we can explain some of the conventions that bother us the most. For example, the “horse race” coverage of elections is not the inevitable result of the way news must be done, but only the inevitable result of the way news will be done if it continues to be dominated by the values embodied by men. Mills helps us understand why sports metaphors dominate the news pages. We gain some insight about why conventional images of leadership involve lonely men out in front of society rather than nurturing women engaging the relevant communities in facing up to hard problems. In short, we begin to be aware that what ought to distinguish a good reporter and a good news organization from inferior ones is not that they try to neuter themselves by eradicating their special perspective, but that they acknowledge it, use it, and provide room for other, even radically challenging, points of view.

American journalism has wrapped itself in a flag of objectivity, which Mills helps unravel. Objectivity is a surrogate for a set of values that tend to preserve those in power and open the way only to like-minded successors.

A woman, then, must face a painful choice. She can try to advance by absorbing the dominant (read male) values of the news business; that is, by being one of the boys. Or she can take the much riskier road of trying to change the values of the institutions so that even if the fundamental culture of the news organization is not transformed, at least greater diversity will be tolerated. It is a choice women politicians and women attorneys face all the time. Everything they do sends signals and has consequences. Some decisions seem trivial, however consequential. What will they wear? Will they indulge in locker room humor? But others are obviously fraught with personal meaning.

When I as a modern father leave my faculty meeting halfway through in order to pick up my child at day care, I get points for my sensitivity and my values. My female colleague, who left the same meetings at the same time as I did, was sure that her attention to her children was taken as evidence that she was not seriously enough committed to her career. We love to have working mothers work for us if the fact that they are mothers in no way affects their work. That is why news organizations publish glowing feature stories about employer-provided day care but are reluctant to provide it for their own employees.

This leaves women with both the painful choice of which path to take to succeed, and the disturbing question of what happens if they do, which Mills raises near the end of the book. What are the costs to women of their pursuing their professional aspirations in a world that is not always hospitable to the uniqueness that they bring? To what extent do they risk personal happiness, geographical and family stability, parental connections, and heart attacks, never mind a decent and healthy sex life?

Mills provides few answers and few prescriptions. She tells an engaging story of one journalistic couple who seem to be succeeding at an arrangement with their newspaper to share a full-time job between them. She argues that women’s attitudes and news organizations’ attitudes must both change, moving closer together, so that women do not place unreasonable expectations on themselves to be super-everythings, and corporations understand that they cannot and should not twist working women into old male molds. She urges that news organizations provide training in managing diversity (my phrase, not hers) not only for women (and minorities) trying to assume responsibility in a white male institution, but for white males themselves who must begin to understand that the world that spit them up to the top is not the same as the one over which they now preside.

These seem like good ideas, but I fear that we have a long way to go before newsroom values really do change. My own experience, especially in teaching men and women from a wide range of cultures who are coming from or entering careers in public affairs (including journalism), suggests that issues of diversity and change are very much present but difficult to address. Mills is more optimistic about the future than I, but I am a white male with a greater stake than she in the current distribution of power, so our difference is not so hard to understand.

“A Place in the News” provides an important contribution to our awareness of the contemporary condition, not only by reporting on the state of women in American newspapers, but by reminding us, as Ellen Goodman says in Mills’ book, that news organizations not only report “what’s happening in the larger society, (but) reflect what’s happening” as well. Reporters are what they report, and report what they are, and that is why we get just the kind of newspapers that we deserve.