Should newsrooms hire conservatives?

Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell thinks so. Excerpt:

Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, "The perception of liberal bias is a problem by itself for the news media. It's not okay to dismiss it. Conservatives who think the press is deliberately trying to help Democrats are wrong. But conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It's inconceivable that that is irrelevant."

[snip]

Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.

Rosenstiel said, "There should be more intellectual diversity among journalists. More conservatives in newsrooms will bring about better journalism. We need to be more vigilant and conscious in looking for bias. Our aims are pure, but our execution sometimes is not. Staff members should feel in their bones that unfairness will never be tolerated."

Newsrooms are obsessed by diversity, so much so that they've expanded the definition of quality to include race and gender, which makes no sense, but those are the logical knots they'll tie themselves into for the sake of ideology. But I have never worked in a newsroom in which ideological diversity mattered to anybody not a conservative -- and as has been proven by study after study (for example), there are very few of those in newsrooms. While I would not want an inquiry into one's political views to be part of a journalist's interview process, there are ways to search out more ideological diversity among journalism hires. For example, newsroom recruiters could spend time among graduates of journalism programs at religious-oriented colleges -- which wouldn't guarantee that your hires would be conservative, but would raise the likelihood. And some campuses have conservative newspapers that do good journalism. Why not recruit among those writers and reporters?

Newsrooms spend lots of time and money going to minority journalism job fairs and suchlike, seeking out ethnic diversity. Why wouldn't they put a similar effort and resources into finding talented journalists among those journalism grads who are more likely to represent a conservative point of view? Unless, of course, they really would rather not have ideological diversity in their newsrooms.

Eric Boehlert over at Media Matters says:

Who's stopping conservatives from being hired in newsrooms? Honestly. If Newsbusters can document how scores of qualified College Republican grads were passed over by local newspapers to poorly paying jobs to cover local zoning commission jobs simply because the applicants were conservative, we'd love to hear about it. Because right now there's nothing stopping young conservatives from joining newsrooms and working their way up from the bottom just like everybody else in media does. They just don't want to do it.

Put another way ... why don't conservatives try to get jobs in newsrooms? Why don't they jump at the chance to become poorly paid reporters in a dying industry?

Fair enough. Let us assume that there simply aren't enough qualified conservatives seeking jobs in newsrooms -- and if there were, they'd be hired. OK, fine. Now, substitute the word "blacks" for "conservatives" and "College Republicans" in those paragraphs, and see how it reads. Do you think the kind of people who make hiring decisions in newsrooms are likely to believe Boehlert's rationale, but would react strongly against the same logic if applied to women or racial minorities?