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 3: Newspaper Industry Efforts on Race Issues
“Since the Kerner Commission, the number of minority journalists has inched up with all the speed of a one-legged tortoise climbing a hill in a hailstorm.”
– Chuck Stone, founding president
National Association of Black Journalists
National Association of Black Journalists
After the Kerner Commission released its report on race relations in America, assailing the media – particularly newspapers – for their failure to inform and educate the society, some progress did take place in terms of increasing nonwhite staffing and coverage of minority communities. But it has been painfully slow. As Timothy Crouse observed in The Boys on the Bus, “Journalism is probably the slowest-moving, most tradition-bound profession in America. It refuses to budge until it is shoved into the future by some irresistible external force.”1
The events of the 1960s leading up the formation of the Kerner Commission were just such an irresistible external force, and in many quarters the press did take some long, hard and critical looks at itself. Then as now, there were two kinds of concern among newspaper industry leaders in the wake of the 1967 riots. Many took the Kerner criticisms to heart, understanding that the press had failed its responsibility to society. Others sought to employ more minority reporters and to expand coverage of nonwhite communities for reasons more associated with the journalistic “game” than its philosophical underpinnings; the press had been beaten by events in the 1960s and had not had the tools to compete in the black community. Many black journalists got their journalistic starts on the day violence hit the black communities in their towns. The Kerner Commission found less than 1 percent of newspaper newsrooms were nonwhite in the ’60s;2 black journalists in the ’90s recall suddenly being drafted from non-news jobs when the papers they worked for couldn’t find anyone else to send into black areas.
Subsequent improvements in the nonwhite staffing patterns of newspaper newsrooms have been relatively sparse. Still, there is some good news to report. Many more persons of color are working as gatekeepers in the American press in 1991 than in 1968. The overall consciousness of newsrooms and boardrooms has been raised, particularly in the last five years, and those who control newspapers are much more aware of the diversity of audiences in their circulation areas than their 1960s counterparts.
Still, however irresistible the external force that hit newspapers and the nation in the 1960s, the industry’s reaction to the Kerner Commission report was not exactly a lightning implementation of its recommendations. In the 10 years that followed the violence of 1967, some more nonwhite faces appeared in American newsrooms, but overall, it was business as usual. There was little radical change in newspapers’ exercise of their franchise to inform, discuss, educate, criticize and represent society. By some measures, the Kerner charge to the industry to employ more persons of color so that newsroom staffs would be more representative of the social reality should have been the easiest to implement. Relatively speaking, hiring minority staffers is the easiest and cheapest thing publishers can do, much easier than more substantive changes in newspaper content and performance; through aggressive training and recruitment of minorities, newsrooms everywhere could soon have approached the complexions of their communities. In so doing, newspapers would have fulfilled their mandate to be more representative of all constituent groups of the society. But the 1960s’ external forces weren’t that irresistible; it didn’t happen.
Newspaper owners, publishers and editors – who had the power to implement change, both to the industry and to society – forgot or ignored the moral arguments of the Kerner and Hutchins commissions. The industry conveniently overlooked the fact that newsroom diversity is both a moral issue – providing voice to all people in democratic society – and an economic one. Analyzing press performance in 1990, Ted Pease commented that the worst fears of the Hutchins Commission may have come true. In the 1960s, the commission saw dangers of the mass media failing to fulfill their duties, thus betraying their public trust; in the 1990s, Pease concluded, newspapers themselves may be at risk because they have moved so slowly in implementing real change. He wrote:
Now, more than two decades after Kerner and four after Hutchins, what’s at risk is nothing less than survival of newspapers as a mass medium with a real and substantive role in the democratic marketplace of ideas. Ultimately, a major communications medium that fails growing segments of a society betrays that society’s democratic identity, and is left behind as irrelevant.3
The newspaper industry did make stabs at correction. Noting in 1978 that the percentage of nonwhite staffers in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms was just 4 percent, the American Society of Newspaper Editors undertook to hasten progress on the hiring front. On the 10th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report, ASNE committed itself to a goal of achieving “parity” by the year 2000; that is, the editors said, by the turn of the century, the demographics of individual newspaper newsrooms should reflect those of the nation, or of the communities in which the newspaper circulates.4
“Progress” Since Kerner
The greatest efforts and loudest criticism coincided with Kerner’s 20th anniversary and since, but progress even in this simplest of remedial steps has been painfully slow. “[S]ince the Kerner Commission,” wrote Chuck Stone, founding president of the National Association of Black Journalists, in 1988, “the number of minority journalists has inched up with all the speed of a one-legged tortoise climbing a hill in a hailstorm.”5
How slow is slow? ASNE figures placed the percentage of minorities in the newsroom at less than 1 percent in 1972.6 John W.C. Johnstone, Edward J. Slawski and William W. Bowman, in their benchmark 1971 sociological study of The News People, set the proportion of nonwhite journalists in both print and broadcast at 5 percent.7 Edward J. Trayes, in a study of daily newspapers in the country’s 20 largest metropolitan markets in 1968, found that 108 of 4,095 newsroom employees – 2.6 percent – were black and only one of 532 news executives was black.8 Considering the possibility that the ratio of minorities would be even lower when smaller newspapers were considered, Trayes followed up a year later with a survey of 196 papers of less than 10,000 circulation, finding 83 of 3,691 reporters (2.2 percent) were African America; only eight of 1,467 desk editors (0.5 percent) and five of 1,219 newsroom managers (0.4 percent) were black.9 In their replication of the Johnstone study, David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit reported in 1982-83 that 3.9 percent of journalists in their national sample were black and 1.1 percent were Asian American.10
In 1991, minorities make up approximately 24 percent of the total U.S. population, with that proportion projected to hit 28 percent in 2000 and 32 percent in 2010;11 in most major metropolitan areas, where the largest and greatest of American newspapers are published, so-called ethnic and racial “minorities” already are the numerical majority. At the same time, journalists of color comprised only 8.72 percent of the newsroom staffs of all U.S. general-circulation daily newspapers at the end of 1990, and 51 percent of the country’s 1,545 dailies still employed only whites in the newsroom.12 Although the 0.96 percent gain in newsroom employment of minority journalists in 1990 was the largest increase in 13 years, representing a 218 percent increase in nonwhite daily newspaper staffers since 1978, many in the industry find scarce reason to applaud.
Compared to the anemic growth of minority representation in the newspaper industry – up an average of slightly more than one-third of a percentage point each year since Kerner – the nonwhite population in the United States is booming. “Consider that in the rest of the world the people you and I refer to as ‘minorities’ are, in fact, the majority,” wrote David Lawrence Jr., then chairman of the Task Force on Minorities in the Newspaper Business and now publisher of the Miami Herald, in 1989. “In this country, population trends demonstrate that we are rapidly becoming the most multicultural country in the world.”14 Those population trends show that 87 percent of the population growth in the United States between now and 2010 will be in minority communities; sometime in the middle of the next century, whites no longer will be in the majority.15
The Threat and the Opportunity
The combination of growing U.S. minority populations and steadily declining newspaper penetration and circulation, particularly among those growing minority groups, presents both a threat and an opportunity to the newspaper industry. The opportunity is clear: A combination of population and press in urban centers would seem to add up to greater circulation, but has not. The threat is two-fold: Although nonwhite newspaper readers have been found to be at least as loyal as whites, metropolitan dailies are not attracting or holding minority readers. Many are “voting with their feet,” to borrow a term from political science, dropping subscriptions or not subscribing in the first place or switching to local ethnic press that serve their interests better, threatening the financial well-being of mainstream daily newspapers.
At the same time, these nonsubscribers may be cutting themselves off from the larger society in which they live, disenfranchising themselves from the larger society to form discrete, fragmented subgroups. This leads to the second threat, to an American society founded on a premise of democracy, full citizen participation and the free flow of goods in the informational marketplace of ideas. As U.S. newspaper penetration among certain constituent groups of society slips, those nonreading segments become less well-informed and so less well-equipped or interested in participating in the larger socio-political system. Further, the newspapers themselves run the risk of becoming more elite and increasingly narrow in their content focus as they try to retain what readers they can.
ASNE’s “parity” goal was morally and philosophically unassailable; the industry must increase its newsroom diversity “because it’s right,”16 Lawrence told the Task Force on Minorities in the Newspaper Business in 1989. When President Lyndon B. Johnson formed the Kerner Commission in 1967, he said society, “fired by conscience,”17 must put straight the injustices inflicted on its members. And the newspaper business must ask itself how it can continue to be a true mass medium in a democratic society when its news product is becoming increasingly less important to a segment of the society now approaching 25 percent.
As the Hutchins Commission said almost a half-century ago, media voices reflecting all the diversity of the American cultural mix in the society’s open marketplace of ideas are necessary to a representative democracy; increasing numbers of minorities in the newsroom has been seen as a means of accomplishing that in a task-oriented industry. A key assumption was that, by increasing the number of nonwhite faces in the newsroom, newspaper content, agenda and perspective would change; the issue was not just increased coverage of different segments of society but heightened sensitivity to the cares, hopes, concerns and interests of the members of that society.18
That also was behind the Kerner Commission’s recommendation to the industry to hire more minorities:
If the media are to comprehend and then to project the Negro community, they must have the help of Negroes. If the media are to report with understanding, wisdom and sympathy on the problems of the cities and the problems of the black man – for the two are increasingly intertwined – they must employ, promote and listen to Negro journalists.19
Good Intentions, Poor Execution
Despite good intentions, the performance of the newspaper industry in integrating its newsrooms and, even more important, its managerial ranks has been for the most part as lacking as its rhetoric has been laudable. At the current pace of progress, “It looks like you’re lying,” wrote Andrea Ford, a young, black female copy editor, in 1987. She said,
Newspaper executives and editors need to look long and deeply at their own attitudes and expectations. ... If they are serious about retaining black, Hispanic, Asian and other journalists from groups poorly represented in newsrooms, they need to realize that the current pace at which hiring, retaining and promoting such journalists is occurring contradicts and is counterproductive to the stated goal.20
Many agree. “The newspaper industry ... has not proved itself capable of self-correction,” wrote Les Payne, managing editor for national and international news for New York’s Newsday and a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists. ASNE planted its 1978 goal of newsroom parity “in the mud by setting a deadline of the year 2000. During that 23-year period, the over-all percentage of minorities in the city room was to increase 13 percent. Six years later, the figure had moved but 1.8 percent, giving new meaning to the term ‘all deliberate speed.’”21
In the debate over numbers in the issue of minority hiring, promotion and retention, however, the newspaper industry may have lost sight of the central fact that numbers alone are not enough. Increasing the newsroom inventory is only one of the components of that larger issue of how well and fully American newspapers serve their function as a mirror, watchdog, commentator and conscience of the society as a whole.
Ruth Allen Ollison, then an officer of the National Association of Black Journalists, recalled the reasons for formation of the Kerner Commission in the first place, suggesting that little had changed. The lessons of 1967 have not been learned, she said; America still consists of “two societies, one white, one black; separate and unequal,” on the streets as well as in the newsrooms and boardrooms. She wrote,
Leaving blacks and other minorities out of the newsgathering and dissemination process isn’t just unfair to the minorities, it is unfair and unfortunate for members of the larger society who know little, if any, truth about their fellow Americans, whose dreams can be deferred for just so long. If we accept the adage [that] those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it, we will do well to remember why the Kerner Commission was necessary.22
Payne agrees: “The challenge of the newspaper industry is the same as the warning the Kerner Commission sounded: Desegregate while there is still time.”23 In 1967, the ferment of the civil rights movement presaged the escalating urban violence that was expression of black frustration. Although there also has been increasing racially oriented urban violence in the late 1980s and 1990 – in Miami’s Liberty Town, in Boston, in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, N.Y., for example – there has been little unified dissent.
Instead, the sense is of disenchantment, disenfranchisement and disillusionment. In many ways, the sullen resignation of nonwhites in America in the 1990s may be more ominous than the eruptions of the 1960s in terms of implications for American democratic society, citizen participation and survival of the newspaper as a mass medium. If, in fact, minorities in America have given up on the mainstream mass media, either as a source of information vital to their lives or relevant to their needs, or as a medium for expression of their hopes and dreams, then both the reality and the nation’s perception of itself as a land of equality and free expression is threatened.
Increasing numbers of minorities in the newsroom certainly remains an essential first step. But as Ted Pease commented in 1990,
Let’s be clear: It is not just fatally shortsighted but wrong for the newspapers that cover America not to employ the people of America. But adding new entry-level employees to the newsroom without giving them power is a lot like adding new rowers to the oars aboard the galley ship; they power the boat, but make few decisions about speed, direction or mission.24
Others agree. Every year, the ASNE’s employment survey reveals the number of minority and other journalists hired in newsrooms in the previous 12 months, to either hand-wringing and self-congratulation by the industry. But the nose-count doesn’t reveal what this annual inventory means. The more important and more difficult question too often overlooked is what impact those minority reporters and editors have on the newsroom and – much more critical – on newspaper content and newspaper readers in the communities newspaper seek to serve.
In addressing the larger questions of newspaper content and how well newspapers serve their publics – all their publics – as purveyors of informational goods and services in a diverse marketplace of ideas, aggressive recruiting, training, retention and promotion of minorities are only tools, a means to a larger end.
What’s been missing is an understanding of the larger aim, the question of the relationship between the news product and the consuming audience. The leap of faith has been that increasing newsroom numbers somehow would magically equate to a product more salient to the diverse audiences in a market, which, in turn, would mean that more of those diverse, nonreading publics would find a way to integrate newspapers into the contexts of their lives. The equation between numbers and press performance, however, doesn’t compute. Writes Carolyn Martindale:
By some mysterious alchemy, the whole task of providing better coverage of minority issues seems to have become tied to the effort to bring more minority individuals into journalism. The idea seems to be that if we can just get more minority reporters into our newsrooms, they will make sure that we provide more accurate and representative coverage of minorities in society.25
Dorothy Gilliam of the Washington Post, addressing the 1988 national convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, said, “Statistics don’t tell the full story of how segregation in the news business affects us all. ... We must get past the numbers game to address how we provide minorities an authentic voice.”26
The larger question is critical. The newspaper industry must address the threatening contradiction of growing minority populations – particularly in urban areas, where America’s largest newspapers publish – coupled with declining penetration, especially among those same nonwhite groups. Placing the question of newspaper use and reliance by minority audiences in the larger social and cultural context also means that individual newspapers must consider how to make their products more important to individual audience members in their individual and personal contexts.
The message may finally be getting through; certainly, many in the newspaper industry say, at least, that they understand the need for greater diversity. The Associated Press Managing Editors Association Minorities Committee declared in 1984:
We believe that our future depends on it. Without continued gains in the numbers of minorities representing us as photographers and reporters and artists and editors, we likely will eventually lose the faith of both our minority readers and any prospective minority journalists. If minority students don’t see minority journalists in the industry, they won’t see any place for themselves in it either.27
Although journalists may argue that they can cover any kind of story regardless of race, religion, color or creed, they must also acknowledge that different backgrounds breed different perspectives, and a wider range of perspectives can only benefit any newsroom.
Educational Factors in Minority Recruitment
The 1984 APME report suggested “keeping up pressure” on colleges and universities to recruit minorities into journalism and to employ those students as interns; it urged newspaper executives to “show the flag” in local schools to interest minority students in journalism careers; it suggested newsroom visits and mentor programs to “show them what it’s all about” and increased contact between staffers and students. 29
Newspapers have said they would increase the diversity of their newsrooms staffs, if only they could find candidates. Despite an increase in training programs and efforts by both universities and the newspaper industry to recruit and prepare minority entry-level applicants, the pool remains relatively shallow as compared to the population. In 1968, the Kerner Commission pointed to secondary schools as a source, saying the newspaper industry should work with schools and communities to draw more minorities into journalism. Indeed, studies indicate that decisions about college majors are made in high school, so recruitment efforts should be focused on high school students as they are in the process of career decision-making. 30
Two studies of high school students conducted in the mid-1980s provide empirical evidence of the desirability of early intervention to attract promising secondary-level students to journalism. A large-scale national study of high school students published in 1987 found that two-thirds of high school graduates had made career decisions by graduation and any subsequent changes of college major after high school tended to be to areas within the general major area of study already selected. Only 5 percent of those who said they were sure about their college majors and eventual career paths listed communication-related fields, and only one-half a percent specifically cited journalism.31
In an earlier Journalism Education Association survey, researchers focused on benefits of journalism training at the high school level. Students who had participated in journalism activities in high school – including journalism coursework and work on student newspapers, magazines and yearbooks – scored higher on all ACT tests except mathematics. Predictably, students with publications experience scored significantly higher in all phases of ACT writing tests, and the researchers found that newspaper or yearbook experience in high school, when compared with other kinds of English-class-type writing instruction, was a positive predictor of overall grade performance among college freshmen. Students participating in journalism at the high school level not only rated such experience above that of equivalent English courses, the JEA study found, but they were 10 times more likely to select some field of communication as a college major than students who had no high school journalism or publications experience.32
The newspaper industry may have started to realize that it no longer is enough to wait for candidates to come to them; more proactive, even aggressive, intervention is needed. Loren Ghiglione, president of ASNE in 1989-90, outlined the newspaper industry’s perspective in 1987 when he said indications were that higher education would “fail” to provide enough qualified minority journalists to fill newspapers’ needs in the next century.33 And there is reason for concern: U.S. college enrollment peaked in 1982, declining for the first time in 1983; the College Board projected that decline to continue at least through the mid-1990s.34 U.S. Department of Education projections confirm that there will be fewer high school graduates overall in the future. These figures show the overall number of U.S. high school graduates dropping by 16 percent from 1977 to 1987, with another 11 percent drop projected by 1992.35
In the 10-year period ending in 1986, the last year for which figures were available, overall U.S. college enrollment had grown by 13.7 percent, including a 9.2 percent rise among whites but 32.2 percent among minorities. The racial composition of full-time U.S. college students reflected those shifts, as the percentage of students who were white declined to 79.4 percent in 1986. Among minorities, more black students entered college, but their proportion of all college students declined; the number of Hispanic and Latino college students grew almost 61 percent between 1976 and 1986, and the number of Asian American students more than doubled, rising 126.3 percent.36 At the same time, trends showed more black students completing high school through the 1970s and early ’80s, but the proportion going on to college declining; in the first half of the 1980s, the number of black students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test dropped 9.1 percent, indicating less black aspiration to attend college and paralleling the decline in black college freshmen. The American College Testing Service reported that the college “access gap” between blacks and whites was wider in 1985 than ever in the 26 years the ACT had collected the data.37
The most recent federal figures show that whites earned 87 percent of all undergraduate degrees in communication in 1986-87; of the 45,393 college students graduating in all communication fields in that year, 5,290 (13 percent) were minorities, a clear indication of the limited size of the pool of prospective minority journalists.38
Factors in Minority College Enrollment
There are at least three possible explanations for the growing disparity between blacks and both whites and other racial minority groups in terms of college enrollment trends: Socio-economic trends, government financial aid levels and university selectivity.
Socio-economic: Between 1959 and 1987, minority families lost ground against whites; in 1987, 8.2 percent of white households were below the poverty level, compared to between 26 and 30 percent of black, Asian American and Hispanic households, according to federal figures.39 Through the late 1970s and early ’80s, the median family income of all white American families rose between 3 percent and 15 percent more than that of nonwhite families.40
Between 1970 and 1989, the percentage of U.S. children living in two-parent households dropped from 85 percent to 73 percent, with the sharpest declines among blacks. Since two-family households are more affluent and, thus, better able to afford college for their children, this rising incidence of single-family households has an impact on college enrollment. “Children in single-parent households face a higher risk of poverty and they also are more likely than other children to have a parent who is less educated and unemployed,” wrote Nancy Ten Kate in American Demographics magazine in February 1991. In 1989, only 38 percent of all black children in this country lived in two-parent households, compared to 80 percent of whites and 67 percent of Hispanics.42
Financial Aid: Declining college financial aid levels are another factor contributing to declining minority – especially black – college enrollment in the 1980s. The Reagan administration cut overall federal student aid programs sharply. At the same time, a 1985 student aid study by John Lee shows that between 1978 and 1983, whites and Hispanics received more college aid, but blacks were cut.43 Lee’s data end in 1983; it may be assumed that subsequent cuts in aid to education exacerbated the problem.
Selective Admissions: A third factor contributing to declining black college enrollment may be the institution of more selective college admissions requirements at many American colleges and universities in the 1980s. Bucking general college enrollment trends, journalism and mass communication programs increased in size by 5.6 percent from 1988 to 1989, enrolling some 155,300 students in 395 programs in the United States. It was the biggest journalism enrollment jump since 1984-85. From 1976 to 1988, overall college enrollment grew by 18.1 percent nationally, compared to journalism’s 32 percent increase. One result of this growing demand for journalism is that it’s getting tougher to get into top-flight journalism schools, many of which have instituted mechanisms to limit or reduce admissions.44
At Ohio University, for instance, as elsewhere, sharply rising student demand has been both good news and bad news. On the positive side, admissions committees can be more selective. Ohio instituted selective admissions policies in 1982 to limit enrollment size and to control for quality. Some quantitative criteria used in admissions include ACT and SAT scores and class rank in high school. Between 1982 and 1991, the number of black freshmen admitted as journalism majors dropped by 58 percent, from 12 percent of declared journalism majors in the 1982 freshman class to 5 percent of the 1986 freshman class. There is evidence that students who might have sought admission to the journalism school at Ohio University have started deselecting themselves because of the high standards.45
Further, even once admitted, journalism majors typically face tough “threshold” requirements including language proficiency tests, typing tests and basic newswriting courses.46
What emerges from these data is a picture of blacks – the country’s largest minority group – being left behind educationally both by whites and by other minority groups in the population. According to Manuel J. Justiz, dean of the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the federal commission that produced the study A Nation At Risk in the late 1980s, the education gap between whites and nonwhites is a threat to the nation’s domestic security. “This lack of participation in education [is resulting in] a disenfranchisement of an important part of this nation,” he said in January 1991.47 Of all college graduates in 1989, he said, 85 percent were whites, compared to blacks’ 6 percent, Hispanic/Latinos’ 3 percent and 6 percent all other ethnic groups.
The potential result of such trends, said Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in 1987, is an educationally separate and unequal society of uneducated minority underclasses and educated, professional white upper classes. “We end up again with race and class dividing up,” he said. “That’s the formula for disaster in the nation.”48
A 1986 Newsweek On Campus poll offers further insights into other facets of the minority recruitment problem. In 516 personal interviews of minority students surveyed at 100 different college campuses, 42 percent cited reduced financial aid as the most important reason for declining minority enrollment; 31 percent said “minorities don’t try hard enough to get in,” and 21 percent cited “poor high school education.”49 An increasing number of black students opt for predominantly black colleges because of their homogeneity. In spite of continuing budgetary problems at most black colleges, enrollment levels are high, and some black students say they feel more comfortable and develop a better sense of personal identity at such institutions.50
Implications for Journalism Education
Aligned against this national trend of declining overall college enrollment and reduced black representation is a general shift of career field interest among journalism majors. From 1983 to 1989, the number of undergraduate degrees in news-editorial sequences dropped from 25 percent to 17.1 percent of all journalism degrees; there were 14,816 news-editorial majors in 1989, 17.7 percent of total journalism school enrollment, down from 19.5 percent (15,280 students) the previous year. Some 15.6 percent of all journalism majors in the United States in 1989 were minorities, up from 13.1 percent the year before. But only 11.6 percent of the bachelor’s degrees granted in journalism and mass communication in 1989 were to minorities, down from 12.6 percent in 1988.
“Overall, there is more bad news than good in the projected data on ethnic and racial minority representation in journalism and mass communication programs,” Becker reported. “The good news is the number of black undergraduate students seems to have increased by 2.1 percent from 1988 to 1989. This same increase is not in evidence in terms of degrees granted.”51
Of concern to some in the newspaper industry is a continuing shift in journalism enrollment, with more “journalism majors” actually concentrating in public relations, advertising and other generic communications sequences. The 1990 enrollment survey shows news-editorial ranking third in enrollment behind advertising and public relations.52 At the same time, 85 percent or more of newspapers’ entry-level newsroom hires are news-editorial graduates, and the job market is improving for such students, according to a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund study.53
Because of salary and other considerations, the overall pool of news-editorial students has shrunk, and newspapers no longer vie for the best candidates. Newspapers must change their image as an industry of low pay, long hours and poor opportunity for advancement, educators say, an image that has filtered down to college applicants who select other fields over news-editorial journalism.54
The overall decline in minority college enrollment, when coupled with declining news-editorial enrollments generally, adds up to bad news for an industry whose expressed goal is better representation of America’s racial and ethnic diversity. Journalism must compete for the best qualified candidates in a shrinking population of minority college entrants with other fields that offer better salaries and working conditions and present more encouraging images to high school seniors as they make decisions about college and career.
Even once minority students are attracted to college-level journalism, however, some fear lack of role models and a sense of disenfranchisement on campus may be enough to keep minority students from staying with journalism majors. In 1986, blacks comprised about 2 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities that are not predominantly black, undoubtedly a result of both structural barriers and a general lack of applicants with Ph.D.s to fill teaching and research positions. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, William B. Harvey argues that the lack of black faculty members poses several serious threats, including a lack of role models, which could tend to reinforce racial stereotypes in the attitudes of both young blacks and whites. Harvey writes,
Black professors are becoming an endangered academic species. The higher-education community must take action to reverse that ominous trend, not only for moral or political reasons, but because it is in our own practical self-interest, as well as that of the larger society, for us to do so.55
The lack of minority journalism educators may contribute to a lack of minorities working on student newspapers. According to some anecdotal evidence, minority journalism students find structural impediments to breaking into the white-dominated cliques at many college newspapers.56 A combined lack of role models among journalism faculty and on campus newspapers makes print “alien” to minorities, says Tom Engleman, executive director of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund. “The college press is not attracting minorities in proportion to the needs of the professional press,” he said. Campus papers are seen by many minority students as elitist and white. That structural barrier to minority student involvement in student newspapers not only mitigates against those students seeking newspaper careers upon graduation, but it serves to propagate an elitist image of the press among students; like the professional press, how can a student paper adequately cover the needs and concerns of a portion, at least, of the student population with which it is unacquainted?57
A joint study by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund and Ohio State University’s journalism school in 1988 found that 62.9 percent of all 20,560 journalism graduates in 1988 had worked for their college newspapers; 78.2 percent of news-editorial majors had been campus reporters and editors.58 Further, a 1989 study by Kent State University researchers Barbara Hipsman and Stanley Wearden found that newspaper editors valued clips – evidence of newspaper work – second only to interviews in evaluating entry-level applicants.59
In 1989, a survey of all 90 accredited journalism programs in the country found that 16.8 percent of student newspaper staffs were minorities, more than double the national average in the profession; the percentage dropped to 12.8 percent, however, when historically black colleges and the University of Hawaii were removed from the sample. Further, 62.2 percent of the papers had no minorities in upper management positions. The authors concluded that, although this “pipeline of minority workers to commercial papers is open,” minorities still experienced resistance in trying to join college papers and in attaining management positions.60
What Readership Research Shows
Beyond recruiting and training of new minority journalists, the larger question concerns how much newspaper performance has changed in regard to covering the underclasses since the Kerner Commission released its report. The answer: Not much.
In the past two decades, newspaper readership studies have identified certain distinct demographic characteristics of nonreaders: Jeanne Penrose, David Weaver, Richard Cole and Donald Shaw found in 1972 that “there is some discouraging evidence that over the last 10 years significantly larger numbers of people – especially the poorer and less educated – have decided not to read the paper.” Further, they found that blacks in their study were disproportionately more likely to be newspaper nonreaders than whites.61
Leo Bogart confirmed in 1972 that blacks read far fewer newspapers than do whites.62 Two major studies also found that, in addition to leaving the newspaper audience, the urban poor had shifted their media reliance to television, relating this shift to low socio-economic status: Bradley Greenberg and Brenda Dervin found in 1970 that low-income blacks and whites alike spent significantly more time watching television than the general population;63 In their 1978 book on media use , George Comstock and his co-authors concluded from their evaluation of the literature that minorities, blacks in particular, had cut their ties with newspapers – “[T]he shift of blacks toward television as a news source is a major phenomenon of audience behavior of the past decade.”64
One ramification of this shift has been in participation in politics by nonwhites. “Blacks ... pay considerably less attention to newspapers than whites,” wrote Doris Graber in 1980. “Since newspapers are the medium which supplies the most ample amounts of standard political news, average black citizens lack this information.”65 In 1983, Margaret Latimer suggested that blacks may have “lost sight of the newspaper during presidential election season because it is a captive of television.”66 Declining newspaper circulation among minorities appear to correlate with the phenomenon of those kinds of individuals to “vote with their feet,” to sit out their communities’ political process, recent voting trends as an example.
Other readership studies have examined newspaper readers as a whole for their content preferences, not differentiating by race.67 A 1972 coorientation study concluded that although editors thought they perceived readers’ views, readers said newspapers were biased and did not represent their views.68 Lee Becker and his colleagues found that media use is a factor of age, income and education and is highest among white males; clearly, an individual’s lack of exposure, combined with lack of understanding of the media’s workings, would tend to reduce that individual’s involvement in media content.69
Other studies, however, have found the readership gap between whites and non-whites narrowing; although newspaper penetration and readership among all Americans are in decline, black readership has fallen half as much as white readership since the mid-1970s. Further, once they start the newspaper habit, black readers have demonstrated greater loyalty to their newspapers than white readers, and higher interest levels in education, health, entertainment, major crime, computers, fashion, consumer news and home improvement content than their white reader counterparts.70
Taken together, these studies of readers and their needs present a picture not unlike that offered by the Kerner Commission in discussing newspaper content in the 1960s. Reflecting the social structure in which they operate and the “market” for their research, these and other researchers concentrate on readers as a mass, with little internal differentiation, by and large ignoring nonreaders altogether. Those studies that have examined nonreaders have found, not surprisingly, that these tend most often to be minority, low SES, low education level; what has not been examined has been what caused the flight of these audiences in the first place, and what, if anything, has replaced newspapers as an informational “component” accommodated into their daily lives.
What Newspaper Content Studies Show
Another part of the numbers game – newspaper content research – provides a measure of the relative volume of the voices of nonwhites in the newspaper industry. Studies of newspaper content about and coverage of persons of color since the 1950s show little increase in terms of raw amounts of coverage, although there is evidence that the quality of coverage – how minorities are portrayed – may slowly be changing in American newspapers. It is important to recall that the primary emphasis of both the Hutchins and Kerner commission reports concerned media portrayal of constituent groups in society. The media are responsible for full, accurate coverage of news, in a context that gives it meaning, of everyone in America, the Hutchins Commission said; the news media had a moral responsibility to provide a forum for discussion of ideas and views from all segments of society.71 And the Kerner Commission condemned the press for reflecting the “paternalism [and] indifference of white America,” in the process alienating blacks from both their news products and society.72
Black perspective toward the “white press” was expressed in interviews conducted by Kerner researchers, who surveyed blacks about their media use and attitudes. One of those interviewed told the Kerner investigators:
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 the newspapers as mouthpieces of the “power structure.”73
The Kerner Commission surveys found that
1) The media generally were distrusted and disliked, but blacks mistrusted newspapers more than television.
2) Blacks saw the media – newspapers in particular – as tools of the white power structure; their sources were white, they were white, and they “support and defend these interests with enthusiasm and dedication.”
3) The media reports on black issues were shallow at best, but more often “totally false.”
4) Blacks used television and radio more as an information source than they did newspapers; more often, however, other information sources were used: 79 percent of 567 “ghetto residents” interviewed said they’d heard about developments in their communities by word of mouth.
5) The media failed to provide background or balance about events in the “ghetto” and didn’t report bad things about whites (such as vigilante groups and police brutality) or good things about blacks (such as blacks assisting police or treating the wounded).74
In conclusion, the Kerner Commission said,
These failings of the media must be corrected and the improvement must come from within the media. A society that values and relies on a free press as intensely as ours is entitled to demand in return responsibility from the press and conscientious attention by the press to its own deficiencies.75
Subsequent analyses of newspaper content found little improvement, however, in terms of how and how deeply the press covered minorities in America. In 1976, Michael Ryan and Dorothea Owen examined eight major metropolitan newspapers and found that coverage of social trends and issues – McCombs’ “broad secular sweep of history, the major trends and thrusts of the times” – accounted for only 8.8 percent of the total newshole; the majority of all news coverage was traditional spot news coverage.76
Carolyn Martindale’s 1990 study of the coverage of blacks in four leading U.S. metropolitan newspapers – the Atlanta Constitution, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times – found that coverage of blacks accounted for 5 percent or less of the newspapers’ total newshole from 1950 through 1989. Although these four newspapers’ devoted more space in the 1980s to blacks than they had previously, the coverage was highly stereotypical and lacked depth.77 An earlier Martindale study found that stereotypical coverage in the same found papers had risen from 1960 to 1970s, representing between 8 percent and 18 percent of the paper’s total coverage of black Americans. Martindale concluded that white editors “may unconsciously convert stereotypes about blacks into a sort of mental grid or framework through which they filter news about blacks.”78
A longitudinal content case study of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch coverage of minorities in 1965 and 1987 by Ted Pease found that not only did event-oriented, or spot news, dominate content, but that the amount of minority news content as a proportion of the total news hole had not changed at all over the 22-year period. “[I]n Columbus, at least, minorities have made little progress since 1965 in terms of having their voices and concerns heard, their problems discussed, their triumphs and sorrows reported and their opinions considered,” he concluded.79 In their study of Los Angeles Times content between 1940 and 1966, Paula Johnson and her colleagues found that coverage of blacks did not keep pace with growth of the black population except in times of racial unrest.80 Thom Lieb’s study of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine in the context of demonstrations by blacks in 1986 against the magazine’s anti-black tone concluded that “biased and deficient coverage still exists in the media, even among the most prestigious and enlightened outlets.”81
These and other studies conducted before the Kerner Commission echo the commission’s findings: Press portrayals of minorities are predominantly negative or stereotypical, focusing on spot-news events and ignoring the kinds of stories that might provide greater understanding of multicultural issues throughout society.
These kinds of descriptive studies help translate the numbers game into support for changes in newspaper structure and suggestions for policy change both in the newspaper industry and in society as a whole. While simply counting minorities in the newsroom doesn’t translate into coverage and performance, an inventory of minorities in positions of gatekeeping authority over news content and editorial agenda-setting may indicate progress toward the goal of forcing the newspaper industry into the 20th century.
Marilyn Gist, examining the impact of negative media content about minorities from a social learning perspective, discussed the question of perspective in a 1990 article. Citing two proprietary newspaper content studies, she said most newspaper content about minorities is “consistent, revealing and disturbing.” Most coverage of minorities is negative – about gangs and drugs and crimes, low achievement, poverty and broken homes, she said; coverage that is not negative tends to portray minorities as having triumphed over negative, as anomalies. Gist discussed the impact of such images on readers:
To the extent that it is a common practice to portray African Americans most frequently in a negative light ... or as positive examples from a negative context, strong signals are being sent to developing African American youth about what they can become. ... [And] where does a white child learn what to expect of minorities, how to think about them? Again, the media present powerful images, and often quite biased ones. Nor are the children the only ones influenced by these messages; many adults, who have never known or cared to see the balanced picture, find reinforcement of their beliefs in the daily media.82
The key to finding a way to present less consistently negative images of minorities, she concluded, is to expand the ethnic and racial diversity of media gatekeepers. It’s not that white media gatekeepers are wrong or evil, but that their perspectives are limited. She wrote:
For much of its history, this country was mono-cultural and, with the exception and frequent exclusion of African Americans, it was racially homogeneous. It is rarely necessary to think of one’s culture, values and perspectives when they rarely contrast with those that may be different. As we shift to a culturally pluralistic society, we see more contrasts and begin to recognize that the dominant group in society is culturally unique, as is each minority group. We must recognize that this dominant group has its own values, assumptions and perspectives on events – often an exclusionary perspective – and its own cultural anchors for many of its judgments.83
Clearly, one of the keys in altering the content of American newspapers, in making the press live up to the Hutchins Commission’s vision, will require more minority gatekeepers in positions to help white news managers see and understand the news more completely. The American Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation’s 1990 study found that 9 percent of news/editorial managers and executives were racial minorities.84 But ASNE’s 1991 employment survey, focusing specifically on newsroom positions, found that just 5.8 percent of newsroom gatekeepers were nonwhites.85
Respondents to a 1988 ASNE nationwide survey of upper-echelon minority news executives – assistant managing editors to publishers – “painted a bleak picture for other persons of color” in newspapers. That study found just 45 persons of color in upper-echelon positions. Some 86 percent of respondents said they had encountered racism and resistance to their rise through the ranks; many of those said those attitudes were “a reflection of society as a whole.”86
This theme is reflected in a 1988 Louis Harris poll for the NAACP and the Colored People’s Legal Defense Fund, which found that although 53 percent of American adults thought George Bush should do more for minorities, responses on that question were sharply divided along racial lines. The poll showed that perceptions between the races were “worlds apart.” Half of whites said they thought the Reagan administration had helped minorities, but 78 percent of minority respondents said the Reagan administration had “tended to keep blacks down.” In response to the report findings, Julius Chambers, director of the Legal Defense Fund, said, “If you look at the questions where there is disagreement, most of them indicate one’s racist attitudes.”87
Many of those attitudes are spawned by ignorance, which breeds fear and perpetuates the separation that has, if anything, increased since Kerner. Les Payne told a meeting of leaders of the National Association of Black Journalists in March 1988 that media coverage of minorities is in large part to blame for social attitudes, just has it had been in the 1960s:
The offering pattern has African Americans disproportionately included in negative coverage – as prostitutes, drug dealers, welfare recipients, second-story men, unwed mothers. It is a strange place, this black world the media project by commission and omission. Within the feature pages of many newspapers, snowstorms and floods rarely disturb black residents. Gypsy moths don’t attack their lawns or eat the leaves of their trees. Their children don’t run away from home or go on vacation. Or get married. Or shop at suburban mall. Or ice skate. Or take in a play.88
Beyond the societal attitudes toward race described by Payne and the Harris poll results and by the anecdotal evidence contained in the Pease-Stempel survey, Martindale suggests that another barrier to full diversity in newspaper content is structural. The expectation that increasing numbers of minorities in the newsroom will somehow magically solve problems of biased and uneven coverage is unfounded, Martindale says; although nonwhite reporters and editors do and must bring new perspectives and heightened sensitivity to the newsroom, the scarcity of nonwhite news decision-makers and attitudes of society make personnel practices only part of the solution. The form in which American newspaper journalism has evolved, she says, works against equality. She wrote,
The way journalists perceive news – as discrete events and as controversy – tends to produce a distorted picture of black Americans and race relations, as does the way news is gathered and written – with reliance upon official sources and emphasis on objectivity. These traditional news values and news-gathering practices, although they have served American journalists and their audiences well for many decades, often seem to produce a kind of coverage that is detrimental to relations between the races. In addition, the media’s economic nature and place in society seem to further inhibit the media’s ability to present an unbiased portrayal of black concerns and other matters.89
The problem goes back to who the news gatekeepers are, Austin Long-Scott told a meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 1990. Traditional news values, priorities and practices – isolated event coverage, the importance of conflict and controversy, reliance on official sources and the power structure and economic reliance of newspapers on advertisers and their affluent customers – all conspire to warp the news, he said.
Those priorities require that journalists make a large proportion of their news coverage judgments by reaching back into their cultures for the values, knowledge and understanding that will tell them where to go next. The cultures in which they were trained, the cultures they have learned to be comfortable in, both empower their news judgments and limit them. We talk in this profession as if journalism is governed by rational rules. When in fact what the public gets to know is often determined by the absence of a clash of different cultures within the newsroom. All of us are both supported by and prisoners of the cultures we know, the cultures in which we are comfortable, the cultures we believe in. We run all our critical decisions, the personal and the professional, from marriage through hiring and front page decisions, through cultural filters before we act on them. What is a cultural filter? It is a way of using your ignorance to deny my experience because it is not your experience.90
Conclusions and Research Agenda
Place the reports of the Hutchins and Kerner commissions on the table beside the newspaper content, readership and personnel research and one conclusion comes clear: Despite all the good intentions of leaders and others in the newspaper industry, the press in America is failing in its mandate to provide society with the information it requires to function. Recruitment programs have begun to add diversity to American newsrooms, but the questions remain about how willing those long-entrenched in the business will be to share power and perspective with journalists of other cultures and viewpoints.
If what Carolyn Martindale describes as the “mysterious alchemy” of minority hiring programs is to work in changing newspaper performance, then examination of the roles played by newly hired minority gatekeepers is required. What positions do these relatively new additions to the American newspaper social system hold? What aspirations do they have for their careers as newspaper journalists? How satisfied are they with their choice of newspaper careers? And what role does race play in the new newsroom climate?
Past research and the history of efforts to provide broader perspective and more inclusiveness in American newspapers seem to point in some obvious directions for further examination of issues of race and newspapers. The ultimate question, of course, is how well the “alchemy” alters the final newspaper product. But a related question is what role do journalists of color play in American newsrooms, and how do their new perspectives inform the performance of newspapers. If a primary strategy is, first, to hire a more diverse newspaper workforce, then the next logical question is how well America’s new workforce functions within the structural context of the old.
These and other questions about issues of race and job satisfaction in the newsroom direct this study of both white and nonwhite newsroom professionals at American newspapers. Broadly speaking, the study seeks information on these questions:
1) What is the racial, cultural and ethnic makeup of American newspaper newsrooms in the 1990s?
2) Are minority journalists at American daily newspapers more or less satisfied than their white co-workers with their choices of newspaper careers?
3) How do the career aspirations and expectations of minority and nonminority journalists differ?
4) Are minority journalists more or less likely than their white co-workers to leave the profession?
5) How satisfied are minority and white journalists with their career prospects?
6) What role does race play in the newsroom, in assignments, advancement, promotions and the overall climate for journalists of color in the newspaper workplace?
Answers to these questions will provide information on how well newspaper industry efforts at improving performance to serve a more pluralistic society are working, and a benchmark barometer reading on questions of job satisfaction that affect the overall newsroom climate for journalists of color.
• • •
NOTES
CHAPTER 3 – INDUSTRY EFFORTS ON RACE ISSUES
1. Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus. (New York: Ballentine, 1972), p. 321.
2. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, op. cit., p. 113.
3. Ted Pease, “Ducking the Diversity Issue: Newspapers’ real failure is performance,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (3): 24-37 (Summer 1990), pp. 24-25.
4. American Society of Newspaper Editors Minorities Committee, Achieving Equality for Minorities in Newsroom Employment: ASNE’s goal and what it means, (Rochester, NY: American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1986).
5. Chuck Stone, “Journalism Schools’ Students and Faculty in the Year of Kerner Plus 20,” Kerner Plus 20, National Association of Black Journalists meeting, March 16-18, 1988, p. 7.
6. ASNE Committee on Minority Employment, cited in “ASNE on Minorities,” Columbia Journalism Review, 11:1 (May/June 1972), p. 51.
7. John W.C. Johnstone, Edward J. Slawski and William W. Bowman, The News People: A Sociological Portrait of American Journalists and Their Work. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 26, 198.
8. Edward J. Trayes, “The Negro in Journalism: Surveys Show Low Ratio,” Journalism Quarterly, 46:5-8 (Spring 1969).
9. Edward J. Trayes, “Still Few Blacks in Dailies, But 50% More in J-Schools, Recent Survey Indicates,” Journalism Quarterly, 47:356-360 (Summer 1970).
10. David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 23.
11. U.S. Census Bureau and Task Force on Minorities in the Newspaper Business, Cornerstone for Growth: How minorities are vital to the future of newspapers (Reston, VA: American Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation, 1989).
12. ASNE Minorities Committee, “1990 Annual Employment Survey,” April 5, 1991.
13. Ibid. Despite an economic downturn in 1990 that resulted in the first decline ever in the total number of journalists employed at U.S. daily newspapers, the nearly 1 percent increase in the number of minorities in newspaper newsrooms brought the total percentage to its highest level ever. In 1991, America’s 1,595 newspapers employed 55,700 news-editorial professionals, down from 56,900 in 1990; 4,900 of those were nonwhite, 400 more than the previous year. In 1990, minorities accounted for 22.5 percent of all new newspaper hires and 33.8 percent of all interns.
14. David Lawrence Jr., Preface, Cornerstone for Growth: How minorities are vital to the future of newspapers. (Reston, VA: Task Force on Minorities in the Newspaper Business, 1989), p. 3
15. Ibid.; Judith D. Hines, The Next Step: Toward Diversity in the Newspaper Business, (Reston, VA: American Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1991), p. 3.
16. David Lawrence Jr., chairman, Task Force on Minorities in the Newspaper Business, address to annual meeting, January 26, 1989.
17. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, op. cit., p. iii.
18. The Commission on Freedom of the Press, op. cit.
19. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, op. cit., p. 212.
20. Andrea Ford, “At the current rate of progress, ‘It looks like you’re lying,’” ASNE Bulletin, May/June 1987, pp. 20-21.
21. Les Payne, “Desegregation in the City Room: 20 Years After Kerner,” Kerner Plus 20, National Association of Black Journalists meeting, March 16-18, 1988, pp. 11-12.
22. Ruth Allen Ollison, “Electronic Media 20 Years After the Kerner Report,” Kerner Plus 20, National Association of Black Journalists meeting, March 16-18, 1988, pp. 9-10.
23. Payne, op. cit., p. 12.
24. Pease, op. cit., p. 25.
25. Carolyn Martindale, “Improving coverage of minorities,” Minorities in the Newspaper Business, 4:3 (August-September 1988), pp. 2-3.
26. Dorothy Gilliam, address to the national convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, July 3, 1988, Portland, Oregon.
27. Associated Press Managing Editors Association, “Preface,” APME Minorities, (Miami: Associated Press Managing Editors Association, 1984).
29. Ibid.
30. Judee K. Burgoon, Michael Burgoon, David B. Buller, Ray Coker and Deborah A. Coker, “Minorities and Journalism: Career Orientations Among High School Students,” Journalism Quarterly, 64, Nos. 2-3, (Summer-Autumn 1987), pp. 434-443; Judee K. Burgoon, Michael Burgoon and David B. Buller, “APME Research: Why minorities do not choose journalism: Academic and career orientations among students,” Minorities, (Miami: Associated Press Managing Editors Association, 1984).
31. Ibid.
32. Journalism Education Association, High School Journalism Confronts Critical Deadline: A Report by the Journalism Education Association on the Role of Journalism in Secondary Education. (Blue Springs, MO: Journalism Education Association, 1987), pp. 9-11.
33. Loren Ghiglione, “Shrinking pool of minority applicants demands early intervention,” Minorities in the Newspaper Business, January/February 1987, p. 1.
34. Interview with Patricia Patten Cavender, Associate Director of Admissions, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, October 21, 1987; The College Board, Measures in the College Admissions Process: A College Board Colloquium, (New York: The College Entrance Examination Board, 1986).
35. U.S. Bureau of Census, “Educational Attainment in the United States: March 1987 and 1986,” Current Population Reports, Population Characteristics, Series P-20, No. 428; National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education and Digest of Education Statistics, 1989.
36. The National Center for Educational Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1989), p. 193, Table 175; Solomon Arbeiter, “Minority Enrollment in Higher Education Institutions: A Chronological View,” Research and Development Update (New York: The College Board, May 1986). pp. 1-3.
37. Arbeiter, ibid.; Bureau of Census, Statistical Abstracts of the United States, (Washington: Department of Commerce, 1990).
38. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1989. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1989), 25th edition.
39. Ibid., p. 25.
40. Pamela Christofel, “New Dimensions in Education and Work,” in Arbeiter, op. cit., p. 6.
42. Nancy Ten Kate, American Demographics, February 1991, p. 11; See “Marital Status and Living Arrangements, March 1989,” Current Population Reports, Population Estimates and Projections Series P-20, No. 445. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1991); Ibid.; Statistical Abstracts, 1990, op. cit.
43. John B. Lee, Student Aid and Minority Enrollment in Higher Education, (Washington, DC: American Association of State Colleges and Universities, January 1985), p.16.
44. Lee B. Becker, “Enrollments increase in 1989, but graduation rates drop, Journalism Educator, 45:3: 4-15 (Fall 1990); See also, Cynthia F. Wilson, “Getting in Gets Tougher As J-Schools Swell,” presstime, November 1990, pp. 6-9.
45. Data from Ohio University Office of Institutional Research, 1990
46. Wilson, op. cit.
47. Manuel J. Justiz, “Changing Demography and Implications for Free Society,” the Poynter Institute for Media Studies conference, “Redefining the News: Reaching New Audiences Through Diversity,” St. Petersburg, FL, February 6-8, 1991.
48. Quoted in John Schwartz and Paul Wingert, “Why the Decline?” Newsweek on Campus, February 1987, pp. 16, 18.
49. “Poll on Racial Issues,” Newsweek on Campus, February 1987, p. 18. Poll conducted by Gallup Organization for Newsweek on Campus of 516 personal interview surveys on 100 college campuses between Oct. 21 and Nov. 6, 1986. Claims margin of error of +/-6 percent.
50. Connie Leslie, “A Separate Peace,” Newsweek on Campus, February 1986, pp. 21-22.
51. Becker, op. cit., pp. 11-14.
52. Ibid.; Ben H. Bagdikian, “Three Problems With J-Schools,” presstime, November 1990, p. 32.
53. Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, 1986 Journalism and Mass Communications College Graduates – Where They Went to Work: 23rd Annual Survey Conducted by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, (Princeton, NJ: The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, Inc., 1987). See also Raleigh C. Mann, “What’s Wrong With News-Editorial (Print) Journalism? Students Reject it as a Curriculum or Career Path and State Their Reasons,” presented at 1987 Convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, August 3-6, 1987; Mary A. Anderson, “Tough Times May Be Ahead For Attracting Top J-Students, presstime, October 1987, pp. 28, 30.
54. Ibid.; Bagdikian, op. cit.; Mann, op. cit.; Wilson, op. cit.
55. William B. Harvey, “Where Are the Black Faculty Members?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 1986, p. 96.
56. Rick Greenberg, “The College Press: Why minorities are turned off,” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1987, p. 43.
57. Lee B. Becker and Thomas E. Engleman, “Enrollments in Programs in Journalism and Mass Communication, 1987-88,” The Ohio State University and Dow Jones Newspaper Fund annual report, pp. 12-13.
58. Ibid.
59. Barbara J. Hipsman and Stanley T. Wearden, “Skills Testing at American Newspapers,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (1): 76-89, Winter 1990.
60. Stanley T. Wearden, Barbara J. Hipsman and John Greenman, “Racial Diversity in the College Newsroom,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (3): 8-95.
61. Jeanne Penrose, David H. Weaver, Richard Cole and Donald L. Shaw, “The Newspaper Nonreader 10 Years Later: A Partial Replication of Westley-Severin,” Journalism Quarterly, 54:4 (Winter 1974), p. 638.
62. Leo Bogart, “Negro and White Media Exposure,” Journalism Quarterly, 49:1 (Spring 1972), pp. 15-21.
63. Bradley S. Greenberg and Brenda Dervin, “Mass Communication Among the Urban Poor,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 34:2 (Summer 1970), 224-235.
64. George Comstock, Steven Chaffee, Nathan Katzmann, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Roberts, Television and Human Behavior, (NY: Columbia University Press, 1978) pp. xv., 300.
65. Doris Graber, Mass Media and American Politics, (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1980), p. 125.
66. Margaret Latimer, “The Newspaper: How Significant for Black Voters in Presidential Elections?” Journalism Quarterly, 60:1 (Spring 1983), pp. 16-23.
67. See, for instance: Judee K. Burgoon, Michael Burgoon and Miriam Wilkinson, “Dimensions of Content Readership in 10 Newspaper Markets,” Journalism Quarterly, 60:1 (Spring 1983), pp. 74-80; Gerald C. Stone, “Community Commitment: A Predictive Theory of Daily Newspaper Circulation,” Journalism Quarterly, 54:3 (Autumn 1973), p. 509.
68. Ralph K. Martin, Garrett O’Keefe and Oguz B. Nayman, “Opinion Agreement and Accuracy Between Editors and Their Readers,” Journalism Quarterly, 49:3 (Autumn 1972), pp. 460-468.
69. Lee B. Becker, D. Charles Whitney and Erik L. Collins, “Public Understanding of How the News Media Operate,” Journalism Quarterly, 57:4 (Winter 1980), pp. 571-578,605.
70. Task Force on Minorities in the Newspaper Business, Cornerstone for Growth: Why minorities are vital to the future of newspapers. (Reston, VA: American Newspaper Publishers Association, 1989); see also, Ted Pease, “Cornerstone for Growth: Why minorities are vital to the future of newspapers,” Newspaper Research Journal, 10 (4): 1-22.
71. A Free and Responsible Press, op. cit.
72. The Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders, op. cit., p. 203.
73. Ibid., p. 206.
74. Ibid., pp. 206-207.
75. Ibid., p. 203.
76. Michael Ryan and Dorothea Owen, “A Content Analysis of Metropolitan Newspaper Coverage of Social Issues,” Journalism Quarterly, 53:4 (Winter 1976), pp. 634-647.
77. Carolyn Martindale, “Coverage of Black Americans in Four Major Newspapers, 1950-1989,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (3): 96-112, Summer 1990.
78. Carolyn Martindale, “Changes in Newspaper Images of Black Americans,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (1): 40-50, Winter 1990. See also, Carolyn Martindale, “Coverage of Black Americans in Five Newspapers Since 1950,” Journalism Quarterly, 62:324-325 (Summer 1985).
79. Edward C. Pease, “Kerner Plus 20: Minority News Coverage in the Columbus Dispatch,” Newspaper Research Journal, 10 (3): 17-37, (Spring 1989).
80. Paula B. Johnson, David O. Sears and John B. McConahay, “Black Invisibility: The Press and the Los Angeles Riot,” American Journal of Sociology, 76:4, p. 707, 712.
81. Thom Lieb, “Protest at the POST: Coverage of Blacks in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine,” presented to the Minorities in Communication Division of AEJMC, 1988 National Convention, Portland, July 1988.
82. Marilyn E. Gist, “Minorities in Media Imagery: A Social Cognitive Perspective of Journalistic Bias,” Newspaper Research Journal, 11 (3): 52-63, Summer 1990, pp. 58-59.
83. Ibid., pp. 56-57.
84. American Newspaper Publishers Association, “Annual Employment Survey, 1990,” June 1, 1990.
85. “ASNE Newsroom Employment Survey,” 1991, op. cit.
86. 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).
87. Louis Harris, Inc., “The Unfinished Agenda on Race in America,” January 11, 1989; see also, “Poll: More ought to be done for minorities,” Columbus Dispatch, January 12, 1989, p. 1.
88. Payne, op. cit., p. 12.
89. Carolyn Martindale, The White Press and Black America, (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1986), p. 32.
90. Austin Long-Scott, address to Plenary session, “Meeting the Multicultural Challenge of the 1990s,” Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication national convention, Minneapolis, August 12, 1990.
• Chapter 4.
