By Mark Trahant
I live in a small town in Idaho where some gather at the cafe for a cup of coffee. A group of us sit together while we engage in that high form of discourse called gossip.
We tell stories about the people we know and the things they do. Some of these stories have the instant recognition of truth because the story sounds about right. We know deep down that the anecdote adds up.
Our national gossip is the same. We tell stories again and again because they sound about right. There are two stories going around right now: The first is that liberals are ruining journalism; and the second counters that it's Corporate America bringing about our destruction.
Both of these narratives, when we listen to the story as a single thread, seem to make sense because they fit with our notions about journalists and media companies.
But for either narrative to be true we must believe there was a time when journalism was near perfect and that news was reported "objectively."
Let's take the "blame the liberals" narrative. A part of that story is finding a group to blame for journalism's decline: Diversity efforts. In Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias," and William McGowen's "Coloring the News," example after example show how the news media gets the story wrong because of a media "diversity agenda."
"The press' diversity crusade has performed its greatest disservice to the country's broader civic culture by oversimplifying complicated issues and by undermining the spirit of public cooperation and trust without which no multiethnic and multiracial society can survive," writes McGowen. "Instead of making public discourse intellectually more sophisticated, the diversity ethos has helped to dumb it down. Instead of nurturing a sense of common citizenship, the emphasis on diversity has celebrated cultural separatism and supported a race-conscious approach to public life."
McGowen and Goldberg both support these beliefs with compelling anecdotes of failure: A reporter, editor, producer, publisher or the company itself is caught going too far pushing the cause of diversity and therefore a bias.
But the media critics do the very thing they accuse journalists of doing. They oversimplify and only tell part of the story. They chronicle excess -- and, yes, mistakes -- without acknowledging that there also are news organizations that are clearly better because they understand all of their community.
The irony of this narrative is that critics find fault with news organizations for giving into "the diversity ethos" against empirical evidence that the industry has lost its passion to better reflect all of America.
Last year, for example, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reported that the number of minority journalists working at daily newspapers dropped for the first time in 23 years. Many of us expect that number to decline again this April when the editors meet in Washington.
The portrayal of minority groups is not improving that much either. A recent study by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies found that "diversity" is usually limited to three subjects: sports, crime and social welfare issues. Think about what that means: One story, say the return of Michael Jordan to the NBA, can statistically alter the content of what's reported about African Americans by a news organization. This is too much, too fast?
News coverage still has a long way to go before it fairly portrays all of America's distinct communities. Forget race or ethnicity for a minute: Imagine how a news organization would fare if it only routinely covered sports, crime and entertainment from a city's major suburb? Folks who live in that suburb would find another way to get information -- which is exactly why ethnic media is growing at unprecedented speed. Dozens of newspapers have sprung up printing the news in Korean, Chinese or Spanish across the nation.
This is the reason this narrative thread matters. One way or another all segments of society will find a way to get their news. But how much will we know about each other? Will our discourse be the same, at least on occasion? Or, will we just give up and go our own way?
For me, the answers are found over coffee at the local cafe. I laugh when I think about a story told only a day or two ago. Damn, it was juicy. It sounded so right. Then the details started coming out, messing up everything. It's all so complicated. Too bad. I liked the first story better -- even if it wasn't true.
Mark N. Trahant is chairman of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. He lives in Fort Hall, Idaho.
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