Last Thursday, Pamela Newkirk, author, media critic and professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at New York University, visited a class of mine to give us her thoughts on media, race and the newsroom. When the discussion ended, I found myself feeling a duality of emotions: one of disheartenment and inspiration.
Among many points Newkirk explored in her discussion, the one that resonated with me most profoundly was her view on the best means to achieve a plurality of African-American experiences within the mainstream media. Does this require a stronger and more vigilant black press or greater newsroom diversity?
Slate.com's Jack Shafer addressed these issues effectively when he posed the question, Why no mention of race and class in TV's Katrina Coverage?, an article which explored why the majority of the mainstream press circumvented discussions of race and class when reporting on the New Orleans disaster.
In my experiences, the media has too often left discussions of race to either overzealous pundits or isolated news items that often fail to result in a more expansive discussion. Pamela Newkirk has writen an extensive catolog of items on the question, so I won't try to be ambitious (or, perhaps, I should) and try to condense years of research into a blog post.
Nonetheless, the question lingers. Newkirk doesn't have the answer, and neither do I. Thus, the pink elephant still lingers.
Dan Smith @ Wed, 04/26/2006 - 4:47pm
I think this is an especially important issue in light of the recent and incredibly disheartening examination of the number of minorities in newsrooms this year.
Less than 14% of newspaper reporters are non-white, a number that essentially saw zero growth from the same time last year. It's absurd, really, just from the angle of comparison to population breakdowns.
On the bright side, if it can be called that, almost 31% of interns were non-white. If we take that as a potential forerunner for what a newsroom looks like in the near future, there's reason for hope.