In the details, we find the devil of a self-perpetuating dynamic that has doomed coverage of race in America: journalists of color, few in number, and with little in the way of final-say power, have scant influence on the coverage that reaches consumers. Major news organizations have not put a premium on elevating journalists of color into the management pipelines--with the exception of a handful of top editors, reporters and columnists working at the biggest outfits. Within that context, few big news organizations have made it a priority to find, cultivate and promote journalists of any ethnicity who are not from elite universities.

The gradual creep over the past fifty years of "professionalism" into a business that once was viewed as a "trade" has been devastating to popular journalism, as catastrophic, in my opinion, as the quickening economic crisis is proving to be. And the current trend of downsizing at big traditional news organizations has hastened a black brain drain that will have negative impact for years to come. The basic outlines of this dynamic is not new. Back in 2000, New York University journalism professor and Nation Institute Fellow Pamela Newkirk detailed the dilemma of black journalists in mainstream media in her book, Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media.

But now, with this presidential election hinging so powerfully on voters' perceptions of race, class and gender in the US, the absence of newsroom benches that are significantly deep with black talent is shortchanging American consumers at the worst possible time.

Consider a recent online column by Richard Prince, detailing the dearth of journalists of color in the ranks of bigfoot reporters currently covering the presidential campaigns. Prince, who is black, writes his column for the Oakland, California-based Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. He and his white counterpart Jim Romenesko at the Poynter Institute, are required reading for dispirited journalists who have seen their industry's approval ratings sink to the cellar in the past decade. But Prince stands alone in charting the steady shrinking and demoralization of a population of journalists--blacks, Latinos, Asians and women--that was small to begin with. And for those who remain, their influence in shaping the daily narrative of this historic presidential election is minimal.

At the same time, certain verities apply. Newspapers still do a better job at providing in depth analysis of complex topics than do broadcast outlets. Traditional news organizations still have more resources for flooding the zone of a hot breaking story than do upstart websites. And journalists trained and experienced at the fundamentals of reporting are more accurate in covering tough topics like race than the growing numbers of citizen journalists and blogging opinionators. But in a very basic way, the press is no better at covering race-related stories now than they were in the late 1960s, when, as Senator Obama indicated, Jeremiah Wright and his theological and political cohorts first became radicalized.

But our evolving media landscape has done little to bridge the disconnect between what Americans think they know about other ethnic groups and cultures and the realities of people's lives and experiences. The truth is that media in 2008 is not equipped to give citizens the fullness of what Senator Obama was getting at in his speech simply because its infrastructure is not geared that way.

For example, as the cable news programs and op-ed writers chew over Senator Obama's Philadelphia speech, how much attention has been paid to one portion of the talk that endeavored to highlight the pressing urgency of a subtle but crucial point--the intersection of race and class in the US?

"The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through--a part of our union that we have yet to perfect," Obama said. "And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American."

That one sentence--"And if we walk away now, .... we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care...." is, for me, the heart of the speech, the money shot. The stakes of continuing to allow government and corporations to engage in economically inequitable policies are high for more than 90 percent of Americans. Yet from the overwhelming coverage of Sen. Obama's talk that's been produced so far--and of the sickening obsession with the candidate's own racial makeup that defines most coverage--you'd think the biggest challenge we face collectively is to identify, pin down, and execute any candidate who refuses to pretend that racism doesn't exist. (The apocryphal white male, blue-collar voter, wherever he may live, surely felt during the news cycle after the Philadelphia speech, like the most popular guy at the hootenanny.)

Senator Obama broke new ground not because he decided to talk about race but because he forced American media to finally try to cover calmly and with necessary context a topic that it has primarily covered as entertainment for the better part of two decades.

Also, Senator Obama's bravery in challenging the way corporate chicanery diminishes the opportunities of Americans of all ethnicities cannot be over-stated. Yet even the few black "experts" on the leading political talk programs -- including CNN's Roland Martin; Eugene Robinson of NBC, MSNBC, and the Washington Post, and a bevy of academics including Michael Eric Dyson and Melissa Harris Lacewell--do not emphasize the importance of the class aspect of Senator Obama's Philadelphia talk. They have fallen into an unhelpful game of race-as-entertainment that the media leadership class--in its denial and unwillingness to relinquish power--seeks to perpetuate.

Thus, consumers of news, now more savvy than ever before, may indeed recognize the stink of decay emanating from the media. But they do not know its true source. The MSM-haters in the blogosphere focus incorrectly on journalists' supposed liberal biases, missing completely Big Media's biggest sin--its utter bankruptcy on matters of class and race. To those of us black journalists who have worked in major corporate news organizations and have seen first-hand the insidious negative fallout of racial denial in the industry, the campaign of Senator Barack Obama represents the inevitable, unhappy outcome of long-standing negligence on the part of the media leadership class: A viable black presidential candidate places serious matters of race and class squarely on the table and there aren't enough big-league journalists capable of skillfully and fairly carving it up.

The chickens, as Rev. Jeremiah Wright said, quoting Malcolm X, have come home to roost.