Diversity in the Media: Why it Matters

Posted July 26

By Dori J. Maynard

Dori J. Maynard

At a recent panel on journalism and society at the University of Arizona, a member of the audience asked whether Latino journalists could fairly cover the Hispanic community. On the flip side, we have to ask whether an all-white newsroom can fairly cover communities of color.

There is validity in both of these questions. Good journalists should be able to tackle any assignment, whether it is covering their own community or covering a community with which they have had little or no personal contact.

That’s the ideal.

The truth is, we all have blind spots and it helps to have colleagues, copy editors and city editors with diverse backgrounds and different points of view, who can help reporters understand the diverse communities they write about.

Some newsrooms operate with a diversity model of “us and them”: White men feel as if they are pressured to accept African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, gays and women as colleagues, while journalists in those groups feel as if they must work overtime helping white co-workers understand the world outside of the four walls of the mostly vanilla newsroom. Journalists, hired not only for their skills but also for their diverse views, become worn down by countless attempts to explain the story to a white editor.

This is the wrong scenario and the wrong approach. A newsroom divided cannot help a country divided understand itself. If we are to fulfill our obligation to accurately, fairly and completely cover all segments of our communities, we as an industry must learn to talk across the fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography, sometimes putting aside our need to agree and striving simply to understand.

My late father, Robert C. Maynard, the former editor and publisher of the Oakland Tribune, used to say that a newspaper should be a tool for community understanding, a place where you see not only your life, but also the life of your neighbor, accurately and fairly represented. I’m sure if he were alive today he would add broadcast, radio and Internet to that description.

These days, with blue state and red state residents seeming to turn to very different sources of media, that idea may seem like a pipe dream.

Yet it is just that media fragmentation that makes it even more urgent to work toward understanding. As changing demographics collide with the ever-growing number of news sources, there is the danger that “mainstream” media may become a niche media in the not so distant future if we do not more accurately portray the daily lives of all of citizens in all of our coverage.

That is where learning how to talk across the fault lines comes into play.

It is not always easy. Though we live in an increasingly diverse world, we also live largely segregated lives. As a result, many of us do not walk into the workplace with the tools to talk cross-culturally. To start, news organizations would do well to encourage conversations across the fault lines with the goal of understanding each other’s viewpoints. At the same time, we must recognize that our fault lines shape the way we think about ourselves, each other and events around us.

Consequently, two people with different fault line perspectives can look at the exact same event and see two very different stories. In today’s newsrooms, oftentimes one person’s perception wins out, leaving scores of readers and viewers out of the picture.

It is only through honest dialogue throughout the process of reporting and editing that we will learn how to include all perspectives and, by extension, many more viewers and readers.

By adopting this approach and having these conversations, we are making it clear that diversity means everyone.

White men no longer have the luxury of sitting it out with the excuse that diversity does not apply to them. Journalists of color no longer have the luxury of walking away because “they (white men) just don’t get it.” It’s time for all of us to do the hard work and to work together.

A successful future for the news industry means true diversity in newsrooms – not “us and them,” but journalists from all walks of life disagreeing and agreeing together. It means newsrooms where everyone is respected, appreciated and acknowledged – where everyone is needed and where everyone can cover every story.