My colleague Ruben Navarrette has now

written a terrific column denouncing the

appalling display of partisanship at the UNITY minority journalists

conference, which he attended last week. Ruben says it’s true: the

journalists there fawned embarrassingly all over Kerry, and treated Bush

rudely. Writes Ruben:

It was disrespectful – and distasteful. It was also dumb. Things like this help set back the larger cause of bringing racial and ethnic diversity to journalism. Those who want to keep things the way they are – those who don’t bat an eye at statistics showing that people of color make up just 10 percent of the Washington press corps and just 12.5 percent of the reporters, editors and supervisors in America’s newspapers – will now cite this episode as a justification for not hiring and promoting more minorities. After all, they’ll say, not enough of these people are professionals. And too many are minorities first, journalists second. All week at the conference, I heard minority journalists complain that they’re tired of writing about Black History Month and Cinco de Mayo – that they want to cover the serious stories. Fair enough. But first, they have to get serious about their profession and all that it demands of them.