Newsrooms
Make Strides Toward Diversity, But Need to Do More, Panel Says
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Panelist Dorothy Gilliam
(Newsline photo by Lisa D. Tossey)
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By
Lisa D. Tossey
Maryland
Newsline
Monday,
April 19, 2004
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Newsrooms have become more diverse
workplaces in the past 50 years, but media companies still need to hire more
minority reporters and produce stories that better reflect the communities they
cover, according to a panel of journalists who spoke at the University of
Maryland.
The dialogue was part of a daylong seminar on Friday that examined the Supreme
Court’s historic Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and its impact 50 years
after the high court found racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional.
Panelist Dorothy Gilliam, who was one of the first African-American journalists
to break into white-dominated newsrooms, recalled that there were just two other black
reporters at The Washington Post when she began working there in 1961. “It was a
very, very different place to be,” she said.
But Gilliam noted that although more minorities are reporting for major
newspapers today, the majority of staffers are still white.
“It’s not a perfect situation,” said Thomas Kunkel, moderator of the panel and
dean of the university’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. “We’re nowhere
near representing the population at large.”
A 2002 census on newsroom diversity from the American Society of Newspaper
Editors found that 60 percent of daily newspapers had minority staffers, but on
average, minorities comprised only about 12.5 percent of newsroom staffs.
The latest U.S. Census figures from 2000 show that about 25 percent of the U.S.
population is non-white.
Gilliam pointed out that before the 1954 Brown decision mainstream press simply
failed to cover black communities and there were “almost no people of color”
working at major papers. Instead, black communities relied on their own
publications to get news, she said.
“The black press was a national press in many ways,” said panelist Reese
Cleghorn, former dean of the College of Journalism. “There was hunger all over
the South … for straight information.”
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Panelist Alice Bonner
(Newsline photo by Lisa D. Tossey)
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Panelist Alice Bonner, an assistant professor at the college and a former
reporter and editor at The Washington Post and USA Today, said that although
today’s papers produce more diverse coverage, there is still a lack of depth in
coverage on social issues affecting poorer communities.
We’ve “separated race out of it, but we still have some serious issues” covering
poverty, she said, pointing out that such issues need to be addressed in a
“holistic and integrated way.”
Haynes Johnson, a professor and Knight Chair at the College of Journalism,
agreed. “The complexity and structure of this society … that’s the real story,”
he said, stressing that reporters need backgrounds that allow them to be able to
explain multicultural topics in proper context.
“You have to know some things,” Kunkel agreed, explaining that journalism
schools now have to fulfill a diversity standard—demonstrating they strive to
prepare students to cover multicultural topics--in order to be accredited. It is
the “single most difficult standard to meet,” he said.
All agreed that although significant steps have been made in newsroom diversity
and media coverage of minorities, there is still plenty of
room for improvement.
“Fifty years seems like a long time, but it’s just a flicker,” Johnson said.
“It’s hard to realize how much has changed and how little has changed.”
Banner
photo courtesy Joseph Douglas Collection, Kansas Collection, Spencer Research
Library, University of Kansas Libraries Copyright ©
2004 University
of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism
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