Rh972116@ohio.edu
For years traditional media was ran predominantly by straight white men. This created a natural bias as there will be many issues that associated with having such a small universe group coming up with news together. The first issue with this is that the news will thus only cover stories related to those groups similar to the ones making it and a large portion of the audience will not apply to the stories. Another main issue is that there will not be the diversity in my opinion among the news and thus the way the news is written as well as how information gets covered will stay stagnant.
I think it's news outlet's jobs to get as well formed of a diverse staff as possible. This can protect the news outlet in many different ways. One way is that the news outlets now can feel more comfortable that is covering stories that make up all the demographics. If your team has African American writers than they would be more likely to want to write on those topics. If you have as many areas of diverse staff as possible then more demographics would be covered as a result.
It is also important to realize that people of different races, genders, sexualities have different backgrounds as well as different experiences. When working as a unit it has been proven that working with different opinions is better for getting things done. This type of research can be cited here. In the example where all the newsroom is straight white men it would be easy for those involved to all agree with each other without having any push back or differing of opinions because they are all so similar. It is also important to be completely diverse rather than just one or two opposing people so that they do not feel like their opinion is getting shunned by a majority.
Another important reason for news outlets to have a diverse staff is so that they can avoid offending a group. If my entire staff is all straight individuals and we run a story about LGBTQ people and get things wrong, we now have to deal with the consequences of that. If I were to have a member of that community on my staff, they may have been able to step in and say that work is offensive to their group.
An example of this is when popular clothing store H&M posted a picture of an African American child wearing a sweatshirt that said coolest monkey in the jungle. This was upsetting to a lot of African Americans given that this has been used as a racial slur against them. If H&M had more African Americans on their staff perhaps one of them could have stepped in and said that it wasn't okay.
 |
| https://www.afnor.org/en/news/journalism-trust-initiative-afnor-supports-rsf-and-its-partners/ |
Most importantly is that people need to trust their sources in journalism. The public is less likely to trust media if they do not represent them. Without trust in media democracy fails. So in our ever evolving society it is important to become diverse.
No comments:
Post a Comment