Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 78
Dr. Soon-Shiong said the Times will hire more Black
journalists over the next 36 months, ensure pay equity and
address “unconscious bias” in its news coverage. As part
of these efforts, the editorial board will publish a story
documenting the paper’s history of racist coverage. 18
What’s frustrating is that it has taken Black death and
suffering for these news organizations to commit to
the kind of changes that should have happened many
yesterdays ago. It has, after all, been more than 50 years
since the Kerner Commission released its historic report.
Since then, Black, Latinx, Asian American and Indigenous
journalists have created their own associations and have
held annual conventions and conferences over the past
half century that many executives from these powerful
white-controlled media institutions have attended. These
conversations about the need to integrate our nation’s
newsrooms and produce journalism that serves the Black
community’s information needs have been going on for
decades. But racial disparities in presence and power
remain.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Janine Jackson calls
out these persistent inequities:
The Kerner report didn’t call for ‘diversity.’
It called for US journalism to de-center
its white male view. Media ‘report and
write from the standpoint of a white man’s
world.’ Coverage ‘reflects the biases, the
paternalism, the indifference of white
America.’ And, the report said, this isn’t
just lamentable; it is ‘not excusable in an
institution that has the mission to inform
and educate the whole of our society.’
For Kerner, the meaningful representation
of Black people in editorial roles was not a
sop, or a nice thing to do, but a core value.
Inclusion was crucial as a means toward an
end — which was media that would ‘meet
the Negro’s legitimate expectations in
journalism.’’19
What’s clear is that big media companies remain
committed to upholding and protecting their own whiteracial hierarchies. This is reflected in the poor treatment
of Black journalists in newsrooms and in how Black
communities are altogether excluded from newsgathering
processes.
In a New York Times column, journalist Soledad O’Brien
writes about the current newsroom uprisings and the
racism that journalists of color face. She said that when
she joined CNN as an anchor in 2003, it was “a great
opportunity to work with journalists at a network known
for its saturation coverage of news events.”
But she was troubled to see that news reports rarely
included people of color “unless they were about crime
or tragedy or poverty.” O’Brien, who has since left the
network, saw that “deeper reporting on our community
was often limited to Black and Hispanic history months —
a ‘special report’ that often felt more marginalizing than
special.”21
O’Brien lays out why so many journalists of color have felt
compelled to speak out:
To be clear, this is not just about how
reporters of color are treated when they talk
about race in the newsroom. The thin ranks
of people of color in American newsrooms
have often meant us-and-them reporting,
where everyone from architecture critics
to real estate writers, from entertainment
reporters to sports anchors, talk about the
world as if the people listening or reading
their work are exclusively white.
There are simply not enough of us in the
newsroom to object effectively — not
in TV, print or online, certainly not in
management. So our only option is to mimic
the protester’s strategy: Talk directly to the
public and just talk loud.22
As Jackson notes, the newsroom uprisings are another
reminder that the industry has never fully committed to
enacting the kinds of changes the Kerner Commission and
Black journalists have called for — and that “the demand is
not for more ‘diversity,’ but for less white supremacy.”20
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