Diversity: Content

Defining Diversity

While a typical dictionary definition of diversity emphasizes distinct characteristics or traits without specifying racial or ethnic attributes, diversity for many has come to represent inclusion of different races and ethnicities, especially in the context of news coverage and newsroom employment.

In recognition of the central role that diversity plays in achieving quality journalism, this entry defines diversity as the inclusion of as well as accurate and fair reporting about groups that historically have been excluded, stereotyped, or devalued because they were born with certain enduring and discernable attributes that differ from the dominant [Page 435]racial group. Diversity in news coverage (restricted to daily news reporting in this entry) requires that the definition of newsworthy be expanded to include issues, events, communities, and people who historically have been excluded from the news. It also means including sources, both experts and ordinary people, and experiences that represent people of color as well as angles that directly affect communities of color when reporting mainstream stories.

Diversity in News Coverage: From Exclusion to Inclusion

More than 15 years after the publication of the Kerner report, journalism scholars Clint Wilson and Felix Gutierrez (1985) asserted that historically mainstream media's news coverage of racial and ethnic groups involves five stages: (1) exclusionary, (2) threatening issue, (3) confrontation, (4) stereotypical selection, and (5) integrated coverage. In later editions of their book, the fifth stage was renamed “multiracial coverage.” These five stages can also be thought of as two dimensions of news coverage with the exclusionary stage symbolizing a failure to include people of color in the news while the other four stages represent how news coverage includes and frames people of color.

A pre-Kerner picture of exclusion first emerged from a content analysis of three decades of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Chicago Tribune. Indeed, during the early 1950s at the dawn of the civil rights movement, the only newspaper out of four studied whose coverage of the black community accounted for as much as 1 percent of the entire available news space was the Atlanta Constitution. By the 1960s, news coverage of blacks had increased, though it still accounted for no more than 4 percent of the total news whole.

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