The Lack of Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives in Ethics Codes

Isabella Philippi

ip383316@ohio.edu

 

When analyzing all the different ethics codes for the array of journalistic/communications organizations here in the United States, I was really disappointed that most of these rarely touched on the issues of diversity and inclusion, especially when we're facing so many topics in our current events that have to do with race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Diversity and inclusion has gone further than just Human Resources and has become a vital part of our storytelling, and is certainly something that is on the minds of journalists of color and of minoritized groups when looking at the newsroom culture of the papers that they want to work for. Is it an ethical situation to not demand diversity in the newsroom because certain stories won't have the correct perspective when they're told, or is it a separate issue altogether? 

Would calling for equity within the newsroom, be it print or digital, be deemed 'racist'? Let's take the Los Angeles Times for example; their LA Times Guild's Latino employees formed the Latino Caucus to demand better representation of the Latinx community in LA County (which make up for 50% of the population) within their own newsroom, and were actually inspired by earlier demands in the summer from the LA Times Black Caucus. Are the main journalist organizations calling for racialized mascots in sports a biased opinion that shouldn't have happened? How many people of color and people of marginalized communities were involved in writing these ethical codes? Why shouldn't equal representation in our newsrooms that reflect the communities be a part of our codes that drive us as communicators?

Photo source: Ink Factory

Being a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (as of this summer), the publication of the Cultural Competence Handbook right before our Virtual Convention really caught my attention. If any leaders of communications organizations haven't read it yet, they should; it covers everything from migration to health reporting, and though I think there are the topics of religion and race that definitely need more focus, this handbook is an incredible starting point. In order to have the proper rules to ethically dictate us as communicators, that also needs to include how to check our implicit biases in terms of race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and gender and how we can sometimes unknowingly apply those to our work. What does it say about our newsrooms and stories when the majority of its employees are white cis men? We need a hard-looking at and long overdue update at our ethics codes if we truly want to be as unbiased as we claim.