Vince Damico
vd058216@ohio.edu
Diversity in the newsroom is required and expected for a news source to be fair and appealing for all consumers of the news. Journalism needs to be diverse because the range of issues reported on is so diverse as well.
One might expect to hear that the percentages of minorities in newsrooms would match that of the population at large. This is not, however, the case. We need more diversity in the newsroom, as according to the Pew Research Center, newsroom employees are less diverse than the U.S. workers are overall. Newsroom workers are many times more likely to be non-Hispanic white males than the national average for the U.S. workforce. This graphic from the Pew Research Center indicates the alarming reality of diversity in the newsroom.
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Picture source: Pew Research Center
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How can we as journalists work to remedy this problem, one may ask? It's more complicated than just hiring more diverse people because if becoming more diverse was that easy then it would've happened already. We instead need to focus on how and why these percentages are so high.
According to Pew Social Trends, people mostly associate with those who look like themselves. This idea is a potential reason non-Hispanic white men continue to hire and bring in other non-Hispanic white men because they are comfortable together. Why can't we all be comfortable with everyone else? We are all human beings, no race, ethnicity, creed, color, or anything else should have us classify someone else as less than a person than we are. All people have equal worth and everybody is important.
I was very surprised to see the results of those polls conducted by the Pew Research Center. Considering how journalism as a profession is thought of as being forward, diverse, and inclusive of all people, these statistics were somewhat disturbing.
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) said in their article about diversity in the newsroom, "Despite being in majority-minority cities, the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are both 81 percent white. The Washington Post is 70 percent white. Minorities make up 72 percent of the population of Los Angeles, but only 33 percent of the Los Angeles Times."
Hi Vince,
ReplyDeleteYou wrote a great article explaining in depth about diversity in the newsroom. It is important to have diversity. This can lead to minimizing errors and better decision making. It helps with the final news product, especially with expanding the range of the story. I really liked how you included the graphic of the chart, it gave insight to this problem.