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By Bobbi Bowman
Only two score years ago, a little more than a generation, a presidential commission handed up a stinging indictment of the nation's news media. Large sections of two great American cities, Detroit and Newark, N.J., had been ravaged by rioters. There were 69 people dead, thousands injured, and millions of dollars' worth of homes and businesses reduced to rubble. National Guardsmen armed with bayonets on rifles patrolled the streets-and the news media had contributed mightily to the carnage. Where did we fall short? Everywhere. The commission credited us with trying to be fair and balanced, but said too many among us "failed to portray accurately the scale and character of the violence," exaggerating the mood and events; too many "failed to report adequately on the consequences of civil disorders and on the underlying problems of race relations"; too many had "not communicated to the majority of their audience-which is white-a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness" in the communities where rioting broke out. Forty years later, there is even more resonance to that message from the U.S. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission after the Illinois governor-Otto Kerner Jr.-who headed it. Where do we go from here? Demographic trends are turning the tables. It is very clear that the United States will become a majority-minority nation in our lifetime. Will blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans trust a predominantly white press to cover their communities? To what degree will today's youths choose to cover and distribute their own news? You probably have heard of Facebook, MySpace and blogs. Pioneering journalists Jay Harris, Robert Maynard and others took the commission's report and spent a decade lobbying the American Society of Newspaper Editors to set a goal to uphold the industry's highest standards of fairness and accuracy. ASNE finally did so, pledging that by the year 2000 the percentage of minorities working in newsrooms across the United States would be the same as in the general U.S. population, and that those diverse staffs would cover communities of color better than all-white staffs. But by 1998, ASNE acknowledged that the 2000 goal of parity was woefully out of reach, and moved the target date back a quarter-century, to 2025. Currently, minorities comprise one-third of the U.S. population, but less than one-seventh of full-time journalists at newspapers are journalists of color; the proportion in broadcasting is about one of every five. Daily newspaper circulation has plummeted from a high of 63 million paid subscribers in 1984 to a little more than 52 million in 2006. It is no accident that the daily circulation for daily U.S. newspapers started declining in the 1980s-about the same time the current increase in minorities in the U.S. population became noticeable. Demographic changes are a significant factor in daily newspapers' decline. In 1980 non-Hispanic whites comprised 80 percent of the U.S. population. In 2000, that figure was down to 69 percent. Today it's 66 percent. Meanwhile, non-Hispanic white children account for 55 percent of all youngsters 5 years old and younger. The millennial generation-our children and nieces and nephews-will be the first that, as a majority-minority generation, can independently and inexpensively cover and distribute news that is important to them. They are already doing it. Sarah Stuteville is the lead reporter and one of the founders of the Common Language Project, a nonprofit, multimedia online magazine devoted to humane reporting of stories not typically covered by mainstream media sources. Two years ago Sarah was a panelist at the convention of the Online News Association, the organization of journalists who work with digital media. Sarah told the audience that she created the Common Language Project after she and her friends talked of their dislike for foreign news coverage because it concentrated on covering politics and officials. They thought foreign news should cover people. Armed with a bachelor of arts degree with honors in media studies and a minor in political science from Hunter College, she packed up her laptop and headed for Africa. That's the future. If young minority journalists don't like how their local newspapers or TV stations cover their communities, they can report and write their own news. That's a new take on the notion of "mobile journalists." Working independently, they will be the pioneering publishers and editors of the future. What has the established media learned from the Kerner Commission report after 40 years? Not that much, it seems, and it's killing us. Bobbi Bowman, a long-time newspaper reporter and editor, is diversity director for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
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