Minority journalists, particularly black reporters, have endured considerable turmoil over the past several weeks.

Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old black reporter for the New York Times, recently resigned from his position after editors discovered he had fabricated, manipulated and plagiarized numerous articles throughout his four-year career at the paper.

Until a mug shot ran with articles that exposed Blair’s shady career, most New York Times readers did not know the face behind Jayson Blair’s byline was black.

Back in 1981, most readers of the Washington Post did not know the face behind 26-year-old Janet Cooke’s byline was black, either. Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize for a story about an 8-year-old heroine addict “Jimmy.”

Not long after the story won the award, Cooke’s story was exposed as a hoax after her editors discovered little Jimmy did not exist. The Washington Post was left with no choice but to fire Cooke and return the prize.

In the aftermath of the Cooke scandal in the early 1980s, black journalists said they were subjected to increased scrutiny and doubts from their peers.

“Those were incredibly tough and traumatic times for many of us to cope with not just the shock, sadness and sense of betrayal sparked by the incident itself, but also the air of racial mistrust and paranoia that rapidly spread in the workplace like a disease in its immediate aftermath,” said Neil Henry, a black professor of journalism at the University of California who was a staff writer at the Washington Post from 1977 to 1992.

At the time of the Cooke scandal, some journalists speculated that affirmative action allowed an unqualified, unethical reporter to slip through the doors of the newsroom.

The same question hangs stagnantly in the air today as a result of the Jayson Blair scandal.

Blair and Cooke’s unethical behavior has nothing to do with affirmative action, their race or efforts to increase diversity in the newsroom. Several white reporters have been involved in scandals in recent years in which they blatantly “faked” the news, but these cases did not spark as much publicity as Blair’s.

Blair and Cooke were both, as reports indicate, emotionally troubled individuals who could not withstand the pressures of the intense corporate climates of the New York Times and the Washington Post. So they chose to lie.

Their actions not only struck a severe blow to journalism, but to all of the numerous highly talented, hardworking black journalists who may now feel the need to defend their news-gathering skills on the basis of their race.

Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from Blair and Cooke is that the truth always comes out. And sometimes, it hurts the most honest people.

Editorial Board: Nicole Paseka, Amy Schierbrock, Alicia Ebaugh, Ayrel Clark, Lucas Grundmeier