Media Reaction: Portrayal of diversity in the media
The article refers to ‘Minority Journalists Push Media to Maintain Diversity Commitment’ as written by Michelle D. Anderson (2008), it was related to a media advisory released, the National Association of Black Journalists had an urgent message for the newspaper industry, quoted “Diversity should not be treated like a passing fad and it should continue to be a top priority”. Showing diversity landscape of the US, upon exposure to such American Black print journalists, warned that it would hold the industry accountable if managers did not consider diversity in recruiting and hiring practices. To the extent that stereotyping issues can be evident as for instance, Anderson point out shocking number of layoffs and buyout packages, leaving many concerned journalists questioning whether diversity will become the “sacrificial lamb” as newsroom managers and recruiters focus on the economy’s impact on newsrooms. For instance, Tribune Company hosts the highly competitive program, which is two-year diversity initiative designed to help beginning journalists launch careers in Tribune newsrooms, including the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun. Fostered better understanding of diversity and multiculturalism since, there has been audience aggregation, an attempt on the part of news executives to identify which audiences to target and the products that will be suited to each target group based on specific set of criteria,” says Lloyd, who was the founding executive director of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, housed at Vanderbilt University, the institute ran a now-defunct program responsible for training dozens of second-career journalists of color (2008, p. 16). Anderson also noted that, “advertisers often focus on women because they make key buying decisions in their families, people of color and immigrants have often been ignored as key target audiences”. The concrete understanding is related to the state of diversity wherein the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) released its annual Newsroom Employment Census, revealing that newsroom staffs decreased by 4.4 percent and that the number of minority journalists in the industry went up just barely from 13.4 percent to 13.5 percent. According to a 2008 survey, the Los Angeles Times newsroom consisted of 19.1 percent minorities – 8.7 percent Asian American; 3.1 percent Black; 7.1 percent Hispanic and 0.2 percent American Indian (Anderson 2008, p. 16). Furthermore, ASNE began conducting the annual survey in 1978 in an effort to measure the industry’s success in recruiting and retaining journalists of color so that the percent of minorities in newsrooms would be representative of the general population and the communities that newspapers cover. ASNE’s decision to conduct the survey came on the 10th anniversary of the well-known federal Kerner Commission declaration, which stated that the poor coverage of inner-city communities facing riots and upheaval at the time was because of a shortage of minority journalists in newsrooms across the nation. The situation is ideally something many journalists of color had been saying for some time. Thus, agreeing that there is ample need of journalists from all backgrounds to ensure that US media has been fulfilling an effective yet credible public service role and to accurately reflect what’s going on among individual lives of the people. There leads to policies in the US as it aims to integrate media people and ethnic minorities within the media assumption, as print media is also essential for the creation of multi-culture based schemes which integrate journalists to be aware of increasingly diverse US society. There has been issues in order to achieve newsroom diversity within the media with policies to increase the diversity in the print media. The development for media diversity can account to problems of integration of ethnic minorities as being obvious, along with diversity known pressures for example, the finding of political solutions for the situation has been rising. The situation on media markets is favouring ‘mainstream’ content, reflecting diversity only insufficiently as addressing of positive possibility of diverse public sphere, which have active part in the realisation of US democracy and its social relationships to other cultures. In addition, aspect of the diversity discourse as focus on media commitment such as certain attempts to bring closure to the political contestation in the name of empirical objectivity or expert knowledge. With increasing inclination to develop empirical indicators to measure media diversity, the scholarly and policy discourse on media diversity has arguably shifted to more instrumental considerations and practices that link with the general trends of technocratisation and instrumental rationality in public policy as there alludes to objectivity and neutrality that seem to transcend the dilemmas inherent in terms such as quality or social responsibility in assessing media performance.
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Anderson, M.D. (2008). Minority Journalists Push Media to Maintain Diversity Commitment. Diverse Issues in Higher Education. Volume: 25. Issue: 12, July 24, 2008, p. 16+. Cox, Matthews & Associates, Inc. by ProQuest LLC
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