By Mark Trahant
Some see stars and hear poetry. Others see the same heavens and think about a scientific puzzle. We live in a world where so many of us see the same things – and then think differently.
News, and our perceptions of news, is like that too. Just last week a new study about how TV news and newspapers deal with issues of race and ethnicity found that, even at some of the best U.S. news operations, journalists’ attitudes regarding race and their coverage of racial and ethnic diversity show "sharp divides between Whites and minority journalists in reporting fully and completely on a nation whose demographics, culture and complexion are changing radically."
When, Why Not and How Fast?
Some see progress and hear poetry. Others look at the same data and ask, "when, why not and how fast?"
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"People of color (and you could take off the ‘of color’ to understand its importance) watch the weather, conduct business or do all the things that constitutes life. That’s what news organizations ought to try to reflect..." |
The Poynter Institute’s News & Race study finds that when there is strong agreement in the newsroom across racial and ethnic lines on the importance of diversity, coverage of traditionally under-covered groups is not only broader, but it is more substantive and more fair.
But perhaps stunning, at least to me, is that even in our best news organizations much of the progress related to content "diversity" is limited to a few subjects – sports, crime, and social welfare issues.
Minorities = Sports & Crime
First let’s look at television. "Overall minorities were most often featured as central characters in sports and crime," the study says. "Fifty-one percent of all minority related stories dealt with sports and entertainment."
Think of that: One story, say the return of Michael Jordan to the NBA, can statistically alter the content of news organizations when it comes to diversity.
Crime, of course, is a lengthy subject -- worth exploration on another day. But let’s look at the totality of coverage here.
Minorities as Everyday Folk
I’ll start with some good news.
The study says KRON-TV of San Francisco regularly uses minority subjects in "features, stories about everyday folk." This seems to me the model of what we ought to work toward. People of color (and you could take off the ‘of color’ to understand its importance) watch the weather, conduct business or do all the things that constitutes life. That’s what news organizations ought to try to reflect – not just making sure that numbers are at parity. A strictly numbers approach is too easy simply because sports, crime and social welfare can fill any gap in coverage.
The same could be said for newspapers (although the study says crime is far less used to fill that gap). Some 40% of stories from newspapers in the study were sports or entertainment, 12% were social welfare and 11% crime stories. But the study also said 12% of the coverage was features – again "regular folk."
Turn the Dial a Bit
So much of the content of news could be improved just by turning the dial a bit. What if we had just a little more news about "regular folk" and made sure that we captured more of all America’s population on stories like the weather, business or even a lifestyle such as food.
When I was editor of a community newspaper many years ago the best telephone calls I got from readers wasn’t the material on the front page; it was the news clippings bound for the ‘Fridge. This was the stuff of great journalism: feature stories about a school outing, a community group working on a project, or any story that put people’s names in the paper. It is these stories that we need to make sure include the same richness as the growing demographic diversity of this country.
We all need to see ourselves on the weather report. Even better we need to see ourselves in the stars.
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