AUSTIN, Texas — A 25-year effort to diversify newsrooms and news content has fallen short because of a lack of strategic planning on the part of news media management and failure in the classroom, according to a new report released Friday (March 14).
"Diversity Disconnects: From Classroom to Newsroom" a two-year study funded by the Ford Foundation, contends a major reason for the news media’s failure is because its efforts and energies have been directed solely toward newsroom integration, putting the burden of diversifying news coverage on minority journalists.
"For too long, we have focused on body count and not on expanded knowledge," said Dr. Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte, a professor of journalism at The University of Texas at Austin who headed the project. "It is hard for a diverse newsroom to emerge within traditional newsroom culture. News media management still expects reporters to think by consensus.
"This unchanging intellectual culture in newsrooms discourages real diversity and fails to prepare minority journalists for mainstream press or mainstream journalists to do minority coverage," said de Uriarte, a former journalist with The Los Angeles Times.
Twenty-five years ago this spring, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) called for racial parity in newsroom employment by the year 2000. The plan became the single most forceful effort to change the makeup of both broadcast and print newsrooms.
Today, however, the goal is further from realization than when ASNE began. For the past quarter century, minority participation in newsrooms averaged an increase of only one-half of 1 percent per year. According to the study, more than half (59 percent) of executives of color in the media industry believe that at least sometimes they must exercise self-censorship when expressing opinions or ideas: 35 percent say they do this often.
The findings of "Diversity Disconnects" suggest a misstep occurred when ASNE’s goals focused only on racial diversification in employment. The report argues that intellectual diversity must go hand-in-hand with racial and ethnic diversity throughout the newsroom. Only then can the news media truly achieve diversity, the report says.
The study provides a candid look at the effort to diversify the news media, beginning with the failure of journalism education and continuing as African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and American Indians depart from newsrooms in numbers that match their recruitment.
The report suggests alternative ways to achieve diversity in content and stop the revolving door of minority employment.
"The educational system neglects to lay a foundation for newsrooms to build on," de Uriarte said.
"We clearly can’t get to diversity i the newsrooms from the classrooms, because the pipeline to an integrated news media in content or personnel just isn’t there," she said.
Journalism education has lagged behind in stimulating intellectual diversity, especially regarding curriculum, according to the study. Only 44 percent of journalism education programs require ethics courses. And, while diverse curriculum exists, it rarely is a required course.
Among its findings, the reports recommends non-minority journalists self-educate to meet diversity content goals, that journalism education provide or require students to demonstrate substantial basic knowledge of the histories and experiences of minority populations and calls for more stringent accountability procedures in the accreditation process to ensure that it is not circumvented by the "old-boy" network.
The findings of the study are based on 25 years of documented materials including diversity reports from ASNE, census reports from ASNE and the Radio-Television News Directors Association, accreditation data about colleges and universities, 300 journalism course syllabi, and interviews with more than 600 reporters, editors and news directors nationwide.
Dr. Cristina Bodinger-de Uriarte, a professor and associate chair of the Sociology Department at California State University, Los Angeles, designed the research survey and directed interviews of more than 500 reporters, editors and news directors. Dr. José Luis Benavides, professor of journalism at California State University, Northridge, played a key research role both in interviewing editor and news director survey respondents and working with documentation.
The report was released at a National Press Club "Newsmakers" event coordinated with the Hispanic Link Journalism Foundation in Washington, D.C. It will be on-line in late April.
Contact: Erin Geisler
512-475-8071
Date: March 14, 2003