What Does Diversity Mean?


Journalism.org - Diversity in the Newsroom
Overview

This is a summary of the third of more than 16 sessions around the country sponsored by the committee of Concerned Journalists examining the principles journalists share. This one, held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on February 2, 1998, focused on the question of what diversity should mean in the newsroom. None of the forums is designed as definitive discussion but together form are an act of inquiry which will be combined with other research, a survey work, in-depth interviews, content analysis, a video series and ultimately a monograph. The Committee is underwritten by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

At earlier forums, we heard that journalism needed to broaden itself--to allow more open discourse in newsrooms, to look in new places for recruiting, to listen more to audiences in ways beyond the scope of traditional product marketing. This would help journalism both regain audiences and fulfill the core principles journalists identify, such as fairness, accuracy, open mindedness, and an allegiance to citizens first. In Ann Arbor, we gathered to explore whether traditional notions of diversity were adequate to this task.

We heard that diversity was necessary, first, because truth more likely emerges from hearing diverse opinions. Without a diverse discussion in newsrooms, journalists often lack the context to ask the right questions and risk becoming disconnected from large segments of the community.

But 20 years into the debate, practice seems more complicated than theory. Too often diversity is reduced to numbers. The newsroom climate must change as well. It is essential to recognize that the goal is not physical diversity, but intellectual.

Concentrating on physical traits may reduce diversity to something merely skin deep. Have we elevated the significance of race and gender in shaping people's outlooks and reduced such factors as class, education, religion, family, geography, political affiliation and more? Race and gender are "crude proxies for ideas" argued African American banker Peter Bell.

Even more significantly, focusing diversity too heavily around measurable characteristics runs the same risk as creating journalism around demographics, polls and quantified market research techniques: it atomizes communities into random and mutually exclusive sets of opinions motives and agendas that misses how people live and depend on each other. "You can determine revenue on the basis of demographics," said John Hockenberry, "but you can't determine content."

What then can journalists do? Hiring people on the basis of their beliefs seems impractical, probably illegal, and ultimately it leads to the same problem: a newsroom can never be fully representative.

Today, moreover, the whole question is often overrun by commercial concerns. News organizations targeting themselves to serve only part of the community, cutting their news budgets or moving toward infotainment undermine the deeper principles behind diversity. Some of those companies are even meeting their diversity targets, but losing sight of the purpose of journalism: to give all people information to be sovereign. The papers involved in the Detroit newspaper strike, several noted, were meeting diversity goals but had bitterly a divided the community. The commitment to diversity must be deeper than numerical goals, without abandoning them.

No one suggested we abandon targets for creating physical diversity in newsrooms. It may be the only door into creating the more open conversations. But we need to be much more honest with ourselves about its limits, recognizing that physical diversity was a method, not a goal.

At bottom, diversity cannot be a proxy for good journalism. Must one have a Pentecostal in the newsroom to cover Pentecostals? It helps. But it is no substitute for the training and humility that teaches journalists to admit their ignorance and know when to ask questions. To be a journalist, said Vanessa Williams of the Washington Post, "you've got to give folks the benefit of the doubt; not be so certain as you go charging into a situation, a location, somebody's life."