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| Photo courtesy of Embracing Diversity |
How does a journalist appropriately and effectively cover diversity? Is it changing a long stereotyped portrayal of the black community? Presenting minorities with accuracy about their own communities? Is it avoiding biases in tragedy based news coverage? Is it using proper word choice? Maybe respecting the way a specific community wants to be addressed?
It's all of it.
Covering Diversity
For minority communities, coverage is everything. Whether it be the African-American community or the LGBTQ+ community, appropriate portrayal and the dismissal of damaging stereotypes is crucial in critical and judgmental society.
After Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was killed by a white police officer last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, a photo of the teen surfaced online of him throwing up gang signs. Following this, the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown went viral, questioning mainstream media's portrayal of the African-American community. The hashtag highlighted the issue of racial stereotypes that news coverage reinforces through their selective use of photos that depict victims in a certain light.
Journalists should be wary of their responsibility to properly cover race, an effort that should be progressed over time.
"Because of changes begun by the civil rights movement and continued by the changing attitudes of younger people, race [isn't] as simple as it used to be," says Austin Long-Scott, a former national reporter for The Washington Post. "What's the commonality between upper class blacks and black folks being corralled by the prison system?"
A possible solution to this issue is to start with diversity in the newsrooms. With a diverse staff comes a diverse set of experiences and perspectives that can bring missing elements to stories covering class, religion, gender, race, and sexual orientation.
According to the American Society of News Editors 2014 Newsroom Census Figures, in 2013, only 13 percent of journalists in newspapers were people of color. In that same year 37 percent of the United States population were minorities according to the U.S. Census Bureau. These statistics have stayed consistent over the past decade, showing a plateau in the progression of minorities in newsrooms.
The Power of Journalists
As journalists, it is our responsibility and held power to inform. We have the change to influence the public and feed society the words we choose. With this power, we have the chance to correct the way media and news is viewed at this current time, correcting the profiling and stereotyping of many minority groups.
"It's east to take the power of our words for granted, until you started seeing and feeling the harm of those words," says Waliya Lari, a Radio Television Digital News Association writer. "This is most evident in the words we as news media, and we as a nation, use to describe the people accused of terrorism."
This type of profiling is most commonly used when a terrorism suspect has a difficult to pronounce name or is anything but a white man, with these conflicts, it is our responsibility to report events such as domestic attacks responsibly and unbiased. Context is everything when attempting to minimize harm, so with the portrayal of certain ethnic groups and beliefs, it is important to avoid the portrayal of an entire group following the terroristic beliefs of a certain few.
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