At least three times recently, young black people have attacked news reporters, photographers or cameramen covering events in predominantly black communities. Black politicians--including Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson--lash out at the media for an alleged double standard. Polls show black mayors think papers do a lousy job of covering the black community, and many black media professionals agree.

So what has happened since the days of the Civil Rights struggle, when the media and the black community were "de facto allies against Jim Crow?" In the July/August The American Enterprise, National Public Radio reporter and UC Berkeley journalism professor William J. Drummond presents a number of interesting explanations for the "complete about-face of prevailing sentiment" toward the media.

Black politicians, he writes, "no longer enjoy the shield of moral leadership once accorded them by the civil rights movement. They must take their lumps from the press like other politicians, and they find this an unwelcome surprise."

At the same time, though, Drummond suggests, there is a tendency for the media to ignore black politicians on issues other than those directly related to their race. All of which is complicated by the fact that minority journalists assert their rights as professionals to cover \o7 any \f7 issue they choose. As a result, the reporters who presumably have the greatest insight into and empathy for the black community don't want to be pigeonholed into covering it--not that the number of black journalists is even remotely representative of the population.

So, where does that leave us?

About where we were after the race riots of the mid-to-late '60s, when President Johnson's Kerner Commission warned that the media "have not communicated to whites a feeling for the difficulties and frustrations of being a Negro in the United States."

If Drummond's excellent analysis has a weakness, it's in his inability to reconcile two conflicting matters. On the one hand, he cites the growing demand that the white-dominated media stop focusing so intently on the misleading stereotypes of "black pathology": drug addiction, crime and the like. On the other hand, he and others complain about the unwillingness of the media to shed light on the problems faced by black America. Hence the frustrating observation: "There is black pathology, but it is given more attention than white pathology, and it is less understood."