Job Satisfaction of Minority Journalists at U.S. Daily Newspapers
By Edward C. Pease (©1991)
Doctoral Dissertation
E.W Scripps School of Journalism
Ohio University • Athens, Ohio
CHAPTER 1: Introduction
“My own life experiences do not provide a complete and unabridged perspective on what is important to others in this world. That is why I must ‘people’ my newspaper with folks who know something more about many things than I.”
–David Lawrence Jr., Publisher
The Miami Herald (1991)
The Miami Herald (1991)
In the summer of 1988, Ohio University’s journalism school launched a new training program for minority journalists. With the help of funding from the newspaper industry, the Midwest Newspaper Workshop for Minorities enrolled eight students in its inaugural year for an intensive 10 weeks of instruction. At the end, the goal was for all eight to land reporting and copy editing jobs at daily newspapers, a small contribution to increase newsroom diversity.
Gung-ho, the workshop staff began referring informally to the program as “journalism boot camp.” It seemed appropriate – 10 weeks is not much time to teach someone everything he or she needs to know to launch a new career. The work was long, hard basic training; instead of crew-cuts, these Marines got press passes.
Enamored of the “boot camp” label, the program director – who was white – was set to order 100 “Journalism Boot Camp” t-shirts when a colleague – who was black – suggested he reconsider.
Why? he asked.
Some of the workshop participants, she said, were uncomfortable with “journalism boot camp.”
Why? he asked.
In some parts of the country, she told him, the term “boot” means “nigger,” “coon.” They didn’t think you knew, she said, trying to reassure him.
If there ever was a graphic illustration for why American newspapers – which are white – need people who are not white in the newsroom, that was it. As well-meaning and dedicated to the cause of racial and ethnic diversity as that workshop director was, good intentions don’t always translate. Had he been a newsroom gatekeeper, as so many white men are, he would have unblinkingly let the term “boot camp” into the paper and then be stung and hurt by criticism of his insensitivity.1
That has been the pattern of the American press. Generally reflective of the mainstream power structure, those who run newspapers rarely see and almost never know people who aren’t like themselves – overwhelmingly white and male. And even if they are well-intentioned, those white male reporters and editors don’t – cannot – have enough perspective to avoid insensitivity to people whose lives and experiences and values differ from theirs.
In the 1940s, novelist Langston Hughes created Jesse B. Semple, a black man called “Simple” by his friends, whose front-porch commentary on life in Harlem included insights on life, racism and newspapers. “The only time colored folks is front page news,” Simple observed, “is when there’s been a lynching or a boycott or a whole bunch of us have been butchered or is arrested.”2
That’s not true in specifics in the 1990s, but it remains the case in spirit in much of the American press. Many in the newspaper business, both white and nonwhite, are saying what many of their readers or former readers already – like “Simple” – have concluded: When they are not ignored altogether, people of color in America are portrayed negatively or paternalistically in the press. As the Kerner Commission commented in 1968, it’s as if people who aren’t white “do not read newspapers or watch television, give birth, marry, die or go to PTA meetings.”3
More than two decades later, press portrayals of people of color – who will be the numerical majority in this country before children born today retire – contain the same pathological perspective. “The offering pattern has African Americans disproportionately included in negative coverage – as prostitutes, drug dealers, welfare recipients, second-story men, unwed mothers,” Newsday’s managing editor Les Payne said. “It’s a strange place, this black world the media project.”4
Marilyn Gist, a press scholar from Seattle, says negative press images of people of color stem largely from ignorance. However well-intentioned reporters and editors may be, their views of the world are anchored in their own experiences, which are largely white. “For much of its history, this country was mono-cultural and, with the exception and frequent exclusion of African Americans, it was racially homogeneous,” she wrote. “It is rarely necessary to think of one’s culture, values and perspectives when they rarely contrast with those that may be different.” As a result, she says, those who are gatekeepers in the predominantly white press naturally view events in the context of their own “perceptual biases and cultural anchors.”5
Those perspectives, however, no longer reflect social reality in America, if they ever truly did. Media gatekeepers cannot see from the breadth of perspectives that now increasingly exist in the communities their newspapers cover. And this lack of understanding causes newspaper reporters and editors – like the well-intentioned minority workshop director – unknowingly to cause offense. During their investigations in 1967, Kerner Commission investigators interviewed a black man who told them,
The average black person couldn’t give less of a damn about what the media say. The intelligent black person is resentful at what he considers to be a totally false portrayal of what goes on in the ghetto. Most black people see newspapers as mouthpieces of the “power structure.”6
In the 1980s, newspapers began to become increasingly aware that this was no way to run a business. The objections to such a myopic press were and are both moral and practical. “Moral in the sense that what is proposed in the hiring, advancement and retention of minorities and women is simply a matter of being fair,” said David Lawrence Jr., publisher of the Miami Herald and 1991-92 president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “Practical in the sense that it is absolutely crucial to the future of our business.”7
Lawrence – a white man – pointed out the logic of improving newsroom diversity: “My own life experiences do not provide a complete and unabridged perspective on what is important to others in this world,” he said. “That is why I must ‘people’ my newspaper with folks who know something more about many things than I.”8
If the American press is to cover adequately, fairly, completely, fully the people of America, it must have the help and full participation of all the people of America. White males, however well-intentioned they may be, have no corner on wisdom. A Latino editor from Texas told researchers in a 1988 survey of minority upper-echelon newspaper executives that newsroom diversity can help newspapers stop blundering around in the dark. “You don’t drive a car, don’t read a book with one eye covered,” she said. “Without a newsroom that reflects your community, you’re covering that community with partial vision.”9
The arguments – both philosophical and economic – for increasing the ethnic and racial diversity of newspaper newsrooms have been in place for generations. But relatively little impact has yet been felt on the final product, the service provided by newspapers to their communities and to the marketplace of ideas in American society. Consumers, after all, are concerned with the quality of the products they purchase, not with the philosophies, intentions or hiring policies of the manufacturer. The ultimate test of whether newspapers can survive in a pluralistic society will be whether the news product is satisfying to the new breed of American consumer, who are more likely in the future to be Latino, African America, Asian American than Anglo. The consumers will care about what comes out of the news “bottle” they buy – how it tastes, how it quenches their thirst, how it serves their needs – and not about the policies and procedures governing those who brew the product and bottle it.
The consumer focus groups are still out on decisions about the final newspaper product, and this study does not address that ultimate question of product positioning in the news multicultural American marketplace. What this study does, however, is assess progress of efforts to provide the kind of perspective in the newsroom that will head off unintentional but damaging errors of content and emphasis that limit newspapers’ ability to fulfill their responsibilities in the American marketplace of ideas.
More people of color work for American newspapers in 1991 than ever before, though those proportions still don’t come close to reflecting the American demographic mix. Despite efforts to increase the diversity of newsroom decision-makers, only one of the 50 largest newspapers in America employs a newsroom workforce that reflects the demographics of the community it covers. It probably is not just a fortuitous coincidence that that newspaper, whose newsroom is more than 31 percent nonwhite, is David Lawrence’s paper, the Miami Herald.10
This study consists of a survey of a representative sample of 1,328 newspaper journalists on issues affecting their job satisfaction and the role of race in personnel and coverage decisions at American newspapers. Called “The Newsroom Barometer Project,” the study asked journalists to describe how race plays in newspapers of the 1990s, to evaluate the newsroom climate on issues of race and ethnicity, and to discuss the environment for minority journalists in the workplace.
The study surveyed both white and minority journalists about their perceptions on a broad range of professional and race-related issues to see how their expectations and conclusions differ. With all the newspaper industry emphasis on putting more people of color in the newsroom, what impact are those new journalists having on the way newspapers do their business? What response do those new multi-ethnic news professionals elicit from the old-timers, who are predominantly white? What is the reaction in the newsroom when the new cultural perspectives of these new employees come up against the traditional cultural anchors of not just their older co-workers, but the newspaper institution itself?
Is the newspaper industry’s commitment to diversity strong enough to force a restructuring of its entrenched institutional and sociological biases to permit a real change in the way newspapers cover America. Or, as a white male metro editor for a Midwestern metro daily suggested in the study, is minority hiring in newspapers just “lip service from our white male management?” He wrote: “I’m concerned that my management will lose interest after convincing themselves that they’ve won the war by enunciating a policy, then move on to a new fad.”
Responses of the 1,328 newsroom professionals working at dozens of newspapers all over the country indicate that deep disagreements divide the newsroom. It is not surprising that the simple act of hiring minorities for newsroom positions has done little to change ingrained attitudes and traditions of decades. The industry’s workforce is less homogeneous in the 1990s than ever, but that necessary first step so far has done relatively little overall to change the ingredients in the daily product bottled by newspapers for public consumption.
There is evidence of great frustration among both white and nonwhite journalists as the industry undertakes these changes, and such growing pains are not surprising. Some of these growing pains, however, are potentially destructive and dangerous. Many white journalists are deeply resentful of the “special perks” they say minority co-workers receive; many nonwhite journalists say racism and double standards in the newsroom are widespread. There is no indication that these tensions will drive minority journalists from the industry, undoing the recruiting and hiring efforts of the past decade, but storms threaten the workplace climate – as this newsroom barometer shows.
The hope is that this study, uncovering much that is new and confirming much that is suspected about American newspaper newsroom, can be used by newspaper industry leaders to effect change in the newsroom climate, even as they change the makeup of the newsroom workforce.
If newspapers are to survive with anything left to sell in the American marketplace of ideas in the next century, communication and common cause are not just needed, but essential. The American society is becoming more vibrant and varied, soon to be the most truly multicultural society on the planet. To avoid becoming stale and irrelevant to that society, newspapers must become multicultural, too, in both workforce and content. As too many newspapers have learned in the 1980s, to do otherwise is to go gentle into that good night.
• • •
NOTES
Pease Chapter 1 – Introduction
1. Ted Pease, “So what’s wrong with ‘journalism boot camp’?” ASNE Bulletin, April 1989, p. 3.
2. Langston Hughes, Simple Speaks His Mind. (London: V. Gollancz, 1951); See also David Shaw, “Negative News and Little Else,” The Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1990, p. 1.
3. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), p. 10.
4. Les Payne, “Desegregation in the City Room: 20 Years After Kerner,” Kerner Plus 20. (Washington, D.C.: National Association of Black Journalists, 1988), pp. 11-12.
5. Marilyn E. Gist, “Minorities in Media Imagery: A Social Cognitive Perspective of Journalistic Bias,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (3): 52-63, Summer 1990.
6. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, op. cit., p. 126.
7. David Lawrence Jr., “Broken Ladders, Revolving Doors: The need for pluralism in the newsroom,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (3): 18-23, Summer 1990, p. 19.
8. Ibid.
9. Ted Pease and Guido H. Stempel III, “Surviving to the Top: Views of Minority Newspaper Executives,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (3): 64-79, Summer 1990, p. 78.
10. American Society of Newspaper Editors, “Annual Newsroom Employment Survey,” April 1991; see also, Dennis Cauchon, “Minorities gain in newsrooms,” USA Today, April 12, 1991, p. 6B.
• Chapter 2.
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