Diversity

Promoting diversity among those who work in the news media with the goal of fostering more inclusive coverage is a notion rooted in the civil turmoil of the 1960s, when mainstream media outlets were criticized for failing to cover African American neighborhoods adequately. The Kerner Commission, investigating urban violence in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere, argued in 1968 that local newspapers and television stations were overlooking and underserving impoverished and frustrated citizens in their own communities. Decades later, the intrinsic value of diverse newsrooms and inclusive coverage is a media given, but the concept has taken on new urgency. Industry leaders say that it represents both good business sense and good journalism for the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of print and broadcast journalists to reflect the makeup of the communities they cover. Although a mountain of scholarship has long pointed to lags in the inclusiveness of media coverage of women and under-represented racial and ethnic groups, professional organizations of newsroom executives and working journalists express a commitment to multicultural diversity—if not always gender parity—through initiatives, awards, and well-publicized tallies of the industry's employment figures. A host of associations of women journalists and journalists of color profess a dedication to closing the inclusiveness gap.

Since the 1970s, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) and the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) have separately monitored newsroom progress in employing journalists who are Hispanic, African American, Asian American, or Native American. RTNDA has tracked employment of women from the inception of these efforts, and its auxiliary foundation's Newsroom Diversity Project promotes recruiting and training aimed at bringing more women and people of color into, especially, broadcast news management. ASNE's diversity goals are focused on hiring, [Page 67]promoting, and retaining newspaper journalists of color; it has tallied employment figures for women journalists only since 2000. It urges that newsrooms become as diverse as the nation's population by 2025—a significant extension of the target date of 2000 that it initially set in 1978.