The Irony of an Non-Diverse Newsroom

Spencer Charlton - sc506816@ohio.edu

America, a nation founded by immigrants and a nation whose identity is like a quilt, woven together by many different culturally diverse threads. It is something this great nation prides itself on, but also something it takes for granted. The United States has, since its inception, been a country founded on the principles of the rights to the freedoms of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition. It is due in no small part to these basic rights that so many people from around the globe are attracted to a life in this country. Making the United States a beautifully eclectic mix of religion, culture and of course ideas.

However, this diversity is not being reflected in the newsrooms and various other journalistic institutions of this day and age. It is funny that a multitude of media outlets, the same outlets that are the voice of the people while simultaneously being the people's watchdog of the government, have become so one-sided, so plain, so un-catering to diversity not only in the way their stories are written or portrayed but in the way their own staff appear and operate.

                                                      The diversity of Fox News anchors   


There is a startling trend that has begun to occur in which newsroom leaders and their staff oftentimes do not "reflect the communities they serve". What this means is too often newsroom staffs from the beat reporters all the way up to the senior editors are publishing stories and producing content for a market and thus a community that it doesn't fully understand and is unable to relate to. Often times stories are told through a lens or with a source that makes it hard for a community to feel something from the story, to connect with it at all. And with this lack of connection, a breeding ground of confusion and mistrust begins to spawn.

Therein lies one of the biggest problems. News publications are not reflecting their own diverse communities. Take this study, conducted in 2017, by the Asian American Journalists' Association's Voices program. In the study, this group takes a statistical look at the diversity of some of the nation's biggest journalistic institutions and publications. Familiar names like The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune were all put under the microscope. And this study found staggeringly low numbers of minority representation.

The New York Time's newsroom was dominated by white staff members who made up 78 percent of the staff. The Los Angeles Times had a newsroom staff that year in which 66 percent of staff members were white while only 34 percent were minorities. This was a considerably better representation than seen at The New York Times but in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan area, the LA Times main market, this falls far short of the market's true demographic.

So how do we fix this? And why is diversity in the newsroom even important?

First, we'll take a look at the latter question posed. The answer to that simply put is trust. In recent years there has been a severe dip in the peoples' trust in the press. One of the primary institutions that have historically been seen as the guardian of democracy. But it is becoming more common for people to become disgruntled with the press as they feel their stories and their plight are not being depicted accurately or at all in the media they consume. This has caused hostility between readers and publishers and led to widespread discontent. The discontent that often times stems from the simple fact that there is a severe lack of minority representation in the newsroom.

But how do we fix this or simply begin to make a change? There needs to be a general acceptance from publications that there is a problem with their lack of diversity and thus steps must be taken to publish and tell stories that minorities want to hear. This will help not only with retention rates but will also help with the general trust people will begin to have in the press. This isn't an issue that can be solved overnight, but it is an issue that can be addressed and solved as long as major media publications consciously work to overcome these barriers that too often separate newsrooms and thus destroy trust in the people.