The Elements of Journalism, Revised and Updated by Bill Kovach & Tom Rosenstiel

Author:Bill Kovach & Tom Rosenstiel [Kovach, Bill & Rosenstiel, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

DIVERSITY AND JOURNALISTIC INDEPENDENCE

What does diversity in a newsroom mean? What role does personal background play in the choices someone makes about what is news and what is not, whom to interview, what voices to seek out, how to frame stories? It is one thing to say it matters. It is another to allow those forces to come into play—to create a newsroom where people’s backgrounds and their differences inform the news. A default culture begins to harden in a newsroom when everyone is supposed to think the same way—not when their differences are encouraged to broaden how the news is created.

In what was clearly an acknowledgment that personal identity and experience influence journalistic decision-making, the news industry began to formally embrace the idea of diversity in the latter part of the twentieth century. The most public move in this direction came in 1978 when the American Society of Newspaper Editors formally stated that the number of people of color working at American newspapers should reflect the percentage in the general population.

More than forty years later, that effort can only be described as a failure. According to the best academic research, the American Journalist Project, headed by David H. Weaver, Lars Willnat, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, in 1971 just 3.9 percent of people working in newsrooms across media were Black. By 2013 that number had barely budged, at 4.1 percent.25

Beneath those numbers was a more complex story—hiring programs, mentorship programs, culture clashes, and talented people of color leaving newsrooms in frustration. There was also progress made and then regression. But as newsrooms shrank because of economic disruption, and the media landscape fragmented into more partisan outlets, the problem of newsrooms lacking class, race, ethnic, and cultural diversity only worsened.

And as efforts to make newsrooms more diverse along racial and ethnic lines failed, the question of political or ideological diversity—another dimension of our human culture—was largely ignored. This failure, in turn, is now connected to another profound challenge facing news and democracy—the breach of trust between journalists and the roughly half of the American population who consider themselves conservative.

American newsrooms do not just lean toward an older, white, and male default culture. Over the last two generations, they also have become increasingly liberal—largely because conservative voices have departed. The same researchers who found no progress on racial diversity, Wilhoit, Willnat, and Weaver, found a retreat when it came to political identity. Over the last two generations, conservatives began to leave local newsrooms. In 1971, fully 26 percent of US journalists identified themselves as Republicans, 36 percent as Democrats, and 33 percent as independents. By 2013, only 7 percent of those working in newsrooms identified themselves as Republican, a drop of almost fourfold. The number of self-described Democrats had fallen slightly, to 28 percent. Independents had swelled to 50 percent. Asked differently, 39 percent in 2013 described themselves as “leaning left,” 44 percent as “middle of the road,” and only 13 percent as “leaning right.”26

The reasons why newsrooms became narrower

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