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Views > February 21, 2008

Missing: Minorities in Media

By Laura S. Washington

At a time when we are on the cusp of electing our first black president, the press corps dissecting the race remains overwhelmingly white.

America was burning. The riots unleashed by the April 4, 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were terrorizing cities across the nation.

Chicago was no exception. Warner Saunders got a desperate call from WLS-TV, the local ABC affiliate. They needed blacks on the air, and they needed them now. So Saunders, who was a community activist and executive director of Chicago’s Better Boys Foundation, signed up as co-host of a hastily arranged television special, “For Blacks Only.”

The special, which aired in 1968, snared such high ratings that the station gave it a regular slot and kept it going for 10 years. Saunders eventually became a full-time reporter. Today he’s the top news anchor at Chicago’s NBC station.

Saunders’ foray into TV news came weeks after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Kerner Commission report declared, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

The report, also known as “The Riot Report,” released 40 years ago this month, was a response to the urban riots of the late ’60s. Blacks, outraged over poverty and racism, took to the streets and shook up America’s powers that be.

The commission produced an exhaustive look at media coverage of communities of color and responded with a key recommendation: If the United States hoped to cool down the searing anger in its inner cities across the nation, it must do a better job of covering African Americans.

The report’s authors slammed the media, writing, “the journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training and promoting Negroes.”

Four decades later, there has been undeniable progress. Our cities are no longer burning. Yet in many ways, we are running on ice.

Following ‘68, news organizations scrambled to find black faces and connections. For a while, they were actually plucking talented African Americans off the streets.

In 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) set a goal to have journalists reach parity with their proportion of the population within 25 years.

We are still waiting on the ASNE vow.

In 2007, the percent of blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans working in America’s daily newsrooms stood at 13.62 percent, a slight decline over the previous year, according to ASNE’s annual newsroom census. Those groups represent 33 percent of the nation’s population.

The numbers are not much better on the broadcast side. Local TV news shows boast about the rainbow of faces featured on the 10 o’clock news. But the real power lies with the news managers and producers who pick the stories and steer the coverage. That’s the “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage that passes for real reporting. Crime victims, welfare mothers and child abusers are the stars of those shows. The public housing resident with the rag on her head, the gang-banger slouching out his signs. It’s a sensational and only small slice of African-American life today.

The decision-makers don’t know any better. Most of them don’t live in those communities and they probably don’t know too many of the people who do.

Meanwhile, journalists of color are leaving the media—voluntarily and otherwise—in droves. Some have collided with the glass ceiling. Others are being pushed out by the massive changes in the media’s economy.

Ironically, at a time when the nation is on the cusp of electing its first black president, the press corps assigned to dissect the presidential race remains overwhelmingly white.

Every few years we get a “moment” when America wakes up to our long-festering racial divide—the ’60s riots, the rebellion in South Central L.A., the Tawana Brawley debacle, the O.J. Simpson saga, Hurricane Katrina.

With each moment comes new promises to bring more people of color into the media discourse.

Last year, PBS host and correspondent Gwen Ifill was suddenly getting more airtime as an analyst on the major networks, like at her alma mater, NBC News. It should be because of her experience covering politics, her deep intellect and plainspoken charm. It’s more likely because she took on Don “Nappy Head” Imus in the New York Times.

The Barack Obama Hope Machine promises us a new kind of racial moment in America. Let’s hope it’s an opportunity for lasting progress on the media diversity front as well.

Laura S. Washington, an In These Times senior editor, teaches journalism at DePaul University and is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

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  • Reader Comments

    With all due respect to your considerable experience and expertise, madam, the problem, as this white writer has observed, is much deeper than “the numbers.” Calling for the number of persons of color working as prominent journalists to be proportionate with the census data on our melting pot’s ethnic stew insults, as we former and present mainstream journalists know, the intellectual threshold that should be journalism’s requisite credential. As a glance at the blacks holding prominent seats in mainstream journalism’s ranks reveals, there aren’t many Angela Davises among them and too many of the black males have iced their souls rather than lit the fire of burning spears that once marked a generation of young black men’s and women’s understanding of how the system was working to keep them from fully perceiving its pernicious racism. It would appear that the larger problem is how young, black writers are recognized as talented. I would guess that few journalism professors have observed a reminder of Bobby Seale or Huey Newton in their classrooms. During my brief but hugely enlightening experience with The Black Panthers of Oakland not long after the year that our cities were afire, I came to realize that fiery rage was not considered respectable and would not long be sanctioned by academia or the brokers of our information industries. Even forty years ago, when I would have called you “sister,” it was obvious that CBS and PBS weren’t going to hire Angela. We are lucky to have you; but Gwen Ifill taking on Imus is not that big a deal. When last did she update us on Mumia or Pelletier? It’s content, not politeness, that arouses movement. Stokely was brilliant, not well-educated. Token blacks mark our times. Token radical blacks are unheard of. In the mainstream, we swim the same or are swept aside. It’s a conforming race

    Posted by Bud Wizer on Feb 21, 2008 at 10:23 AM

    Why stop with only proportionate representation by race? There seems to be a distinct shortage in the media of Swedish decent. Does anyone care?

    Calls for quotas, group representation and diversity will do little for equality in the treatment of individuals. If we abide by percentages of population which minority athletes do we cut? Such continued fragmentation as affirmative action offers no long term aid in eliminating bad feelings toward each other.

    Posted by whattheheck on Feb 21, 2008 at 12:30 PM

    Surely you don’t mean to compare African-Americans, a group of Americans whose ancestors emigrated from Africa, to Swedish-Americans, a group of Americans whose ancestors emigrated from Sweden.To be consistent, you need to compare countries to countries and continents to continents (apples to apples and oranges to oranges).  Either way, I’m sure you’ll find proportionately more Swedish-Americans than, say, Moroccan-Americans employed in the media.  In other words, if Swedish-Americans represent x percent of the population and Moroccan-Americans represent y percent of the population, then you can be reasonably certain that Swedish-Americans and Moroccan-Americans represent w and z percent, respectively, of the population of people employed in the media, where w>>x and z<<y.  I don’t mean to needlessly confuse you with irrelevant appeals to logic.  Judging from the general vacuity of your comments, your confusion appears to be obvious regardless of any input I or anyone else might provide.  The author asserts that proportionately more European-Americans are employed by the media than are African-Americans.  Although you apparently agree with the statement, your final response is, nevertheless, “Who cares?” Well, of course, most of the rest of us do care. You can’t begin to rectify disparities of inequality until you actually see the people who experience the inequality.  To paraphrase your final, fatuous, unsubstantiated assertion, “calls for quotas, group representation and diversity will do a lot for inequality in the treatment of individuals.”

    Posted by Major Major on Feb 23, 2008 at 12:02 AM

    MajorMajor,

    Yes, you are right and I apologize. My comparison was more like one apple from the bushel to an entire basket. 

    Also, instead of Swedes — who are known for intelligence, compassion and a willingness to accept any and all regardless of ability, talent or other characteristics to help the their country maintain its socialist benefits — I should have compared Africans in general to Europeans in general.

    On the other hand, if as you assert, the fragmentation quotas benefit people, perhaps we should go a bit further and compare only those from each group who have large (or small) ears, or can sing, or have specific sexual preferences, or irritating voice qualities — we can go on...and on… and…

    I still say unity is better than diversity if individuals are important. Grouping only encourages an us/them attitude.

    Let’s compromise — we can subdivide until we get down to individuals — and both be happy :-)

    Posted by whattheheck on Feb 23, 2008 at 8:35 AM

    There’s a reason for instituting a policy of proportional minority representation among the members of the media, aside from eliciting the usual racist complaints from conservatives concerning politically correct displays of aberrant behavior.  If we can see members of minority groups who are intelligent, compassionate, talented and professionally capable (like journalists, newscasters, film directors--in short, us), then we become less likely to relegate them to the margins of social irrelevance (drug dealers, addicts, gangbangers, unwed mothers, welfare recipients--in short, them).  In fact, the boundary between us and them begins to erode to the extent that many of us may feel motivated to question its existence in the first place.  Who benefits from the disproportionate allocation of whites among us?  Who suffers from the disproportionate allocation of blacks among them?

    Posted by Major Major on Feb 23, 2008 at 2:38 PM

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