RACE MATTERS - Newsroom Diversity

"What stagnant diversity means for America’s newsrooms" PBS NewsHour 12/15/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  As racial concerns continue to rise to the surface across America, is the media doing enough to tell the stories of people of color?  Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault speaks to Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute about the industry’s struggle with diversity.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT (NewsHour):  Race nowadays is all over the news media, not at least coverage of protests in places like Ferguson, Baltimore and New York.

But the media are also taking hits from critics, especially those who complain of a lack of fairness or consistency, again, when it comes to issues involving race.

Richard Prince is a journalist focusing on race and diversity in his thrice-weekly online column “Journalism.”  It runs on the Web site of the Maynard Institute, the sponsoring organization started in the wake of the mid-’60s riots and aimed at trying to correct the lack of stories relating to race and diversity.

We met Prince at the Newseum, a Washington, D.C.-based institution that’s home to examples of media committed to fairness and balance in their coverage of race and diversity.

Richard Prince, thank you for joining us.

RICHARD PRINCE, The Maynard Institute:  So glad to be here.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT:  Your column carries a lot of articles about journalists who are themselves complaining about fairness in media.  What’s your take on the criticisms of media and their issues?

RICHARD PRINCE:  I don’t think there is any more criticism of the media than there has ever been.  It’s just that we get to hear it now and see it instantaneously.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT:  Well, you’re a little younger than I am, but I remember the presidential commission that reported on the riots in the mid-’60s.  And it blamed the media for not having enough people or any people at all in the neighborhoods where people were simmering over few — lack of jobs, poor education, no opportunities.

And it said that you have got to get more African-Americans or people from those neighborhoods in the media.

What happened?

RICHARD PRINCE:  Well, since that time, there was a great push, as you say, after the Kerner Commission report of 1968.

All through the ’70s, diversity was a great buzzword.  And then in the ’80s, you started getting a backlash to affirmative action and that kind of thing.  Then you had the recession, which meant that newsrooms had to sort of tighten up and not hire as many people, start laying people off, and the Internet, which made things worse, because it took away a lot of the revenue base of newspapers particularly.

And so diversity sort of went off the table.  And so now we are sort of in a stagnant situation, where the — I think of newspapers, for example, and online outlets.  We have 13 percent of the newsrooms now are people of color, whereas the population has a third people of color.

So there’s a big gap there.