Misrepresentation in the News

Andrew Kovar
ak840511@ohio.edu

The primary job of a news outlet is to report the news fairly and accurately. One of the major components of doing so is accurately reflecting that areas population in the newsroom. Making the newsroom more representative of the population makes their broadcast or reporting on a certain topic more relatable to the audience making them more likely to trust the news. This is something that has been declining over recent years as according to this poll has fallen to less than 25 percent in 2013. One way to regain the public's trust is to represent the community ethnically in the newsroom something that has gotten lost over the past few years.

Who is Reporting

With minorities increasing on a yearly basis, the newsroom should accurately represent that uptrend within its own walls. Unfortunately, the newsroom is headed in the opposite direction as minority employment has fallen to 12.37 percent from a 2006 high of 13.73 percent. As newsrooms follow the up-trends of what is happening in the rest of America, they seemed to miss out on the major factor of diversity and representation in the news place.

With the right mixture of diversity in the newsroom, this will offer the right amount of perspectives to the stories at hand. Diversity in the newsroom doesn't only include just journalists, but those higher up employees too who have just as much say in what content they must publish for the public. According to a study from The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) 86 percent of television news directors and 91.3 percent of radio news directors are Caucasian.

Image from http://www.dvdizzy.com/images/a/anchorman-01.jpg

Guests on News Shows

Anti-diversity in the media doesn't stop with those who report or monitor the news. The guests in which a news outlet brings also shape how the news can be spun. According to a 2008 report by MediaMatters.org, guests on cable news in prime time is drastically misrepresentative of the audience in which watches these programs. In total, 67 percent of the guests brought on these programs are men and of that male percentage 84 percent are white.

This over represents a fading population of America as only 32 percent of the country is Caucasian males while 57 percent of the news broadcast is focused on this group. It was the only group that at least meets the right percentage of news coverage for the percentage of the population. Even Caucasian women are misrepresented by nearly seven percent.

Solution

As the population in America continues to increase in diversity, the newsroom must change with it in order to still be able to relate to the audience. If there is no change in their ways, there might be a further drop off in the viewing audience as according to Paul Cheung, President of the Asian American Journalists Association, more than 50 percent of the country will be non-Caucasian by 2050.

Change needs to start at the top as the largest difference in diversity comes from positions such as news director. A change at those positions would provide a different perspective to what the public views as news. It might also increase trust in news as they see that those reporting the news are more representative to what they see in the community.