When it comes to fulfilling their 1978 pledge to integrate people of color into their staffs, however, most newspaper editors are moving slower than a Gutenberg press. The American Society of Newspaper Editors' goal was to achieve minority employment at daily newspapers "equivalent to the percentage of minority persons within the national population" by the year 2000. Racial minorities now constitute 11.6 percent of news staffs but 27.3 percent of the country's population. At the rate newspapers are going (ASNE last year extended its deadline by 25 years), they won't reach their goal until late in the next century.
Slightly more diversity can be found in TV news staffs, and far less in magazines. But few top news executives in any medium -- real decision makers -- are people of color. This lack of diversity has consequences in terms of content. To take a relatively trivial example, when the decision was made at Time magazine to darken a cover picture of O.J. Simpson, only the lone nonwhite person in the room objected.
A more important consequence is the narrow, distorting lens through which racial minorities are frequently portrayed in mainstream news. Studies commissioned by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have found that only about 1 percent of the 12,000 stories aired yearly on the three network TV evening newscasts focus on Latinos or Latino issues -- and roughly 80 percent of these stories "portray Latinos negatively," often on subjects like crime, drugs and "illegal" immigrants.
Kirk Johnson's classic study (Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1987) of 30 days worth of coverage of Boston's two largely black neighborhoods found that mainstream media focused overwhelmingly on lights-and-sirens stories involving some "pathology" -- to borrow a term journalists love to apply to reports about black and Latino communities -- such as violent crime or drugs, and "85 percent reinforced negative stereotypes of blacks."
By contrast, Johnson also found that coverage of the same two neighborhoods by four black-owned news outlets during the same period was more multifaceted, and thus ultimately more accurate. These outlets certainly covered crime, but they also covered local business, school successes and community cleanup campaigns – "57 percent of the stories suggested a community thirsty for educational advancement and entrepreneurial achievement, and eager to remedy poor living conditions made worse by bureaucratic neglect."
Each individual "pathology" story in mainstream news may not be false, but if that's basically the only kind of story presented, the total picture becomes a lie.
The flip side of media's overrepresentation of minorities as criminals and druggies is their underrepresentation as experts and analysts. FAIR's studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s documented not only the incredible whiteness of being an expert in national media (92 percent of Nightline's U.S. guests were white; 90 percent of the PBS NewsHour's were white; 26 of 27 repeat commentators on National Public Radio during a four-month study were white) but a tendency to ghettoize minority experts into discussions of "black" or "brown" issues…often those "pathologies" again.