When the Associated Press chose a new “Race and Ethnicity Editor” in 2010, it picked an African-American woman, Sonia Ross, for the post, and bragged that Ross would “produce coverage that captures the changing facets of race and ethnicity in the United States and its effects on the experiences of people of various races.”

That was then.  This is now:

Longtime Associated Press journalist Sonya Ross has sued the AP for race, sex and age discrimination and retaliation, alleging that she has worked under a “hostile and abusive” environment in the news service’s Washington bureau.

According to the suit, Ross was the first African American woman to permanently cover the president for AP, but her career stalled several years later under one supervisor, identified in the suit as Employee A, and others at the organization.

Ross claims that the AP created “a climate of hostility towards African American employees” and Employee A marginalized Ross. It also mentions that an AP executive warned the company’s then-CEO that the discrimination could eventually impact the AP’s bottom line.

Coincidentally, her predecessor in the post, Jesse Washington, was also African-American.  David Paulin wrote a thoughtful analysis of the very concept of a “Race and Ethnicity” editor at the time of Washington’s appointment in 2008:

In the good old days of American journalism, reporting beats had pretty mundane names: police, city government, national politics, etc. But in the post-modern journalism world, beats like "race and ethnicity" have become popular. And in a sense, they often feed the perception – the false perception – that America's race relations are in the dire state that's usually portrayed in the mainstream media's stories.

I have no knowledge of the details of the lawsuit or the underlying facts of Ross’s experiences at the AP.  But from my knowledge of journalism, a “hostile and abusive” work atmosphere is pretty much the experience of staffers of all races.

I gather that when “race and ethnicity” was defined as a beat, Caucasian was not considered a race that was part of the beat, nor was Italian-American an ethnicity that merited coverage.  Was there racial discrimination involved in choosing the race and ethnicity editor?

As Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, always asks: “Why are Democrat-controlled institutions such cesspools of racism?”