Thumbs Down for "Coloring the News"

Newsrooms need to pay attention despite new book that rejects diversity initiatives

by David V. Hawpe

Conservatives think we liberals pay too much attention to numbers, at least when it comes to the issue of diversity. They think the effort to make the percentage of ethnic minorities in major American institutions match the percentage of minorities in the American population is at best fatuous, at worst damaging.

Indeed, "Coloring the News," a new book by the conservative Manhattan Institute's William McGowan, is subtitled, "How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism." McGowan's indictment of media efforts to foster diversity in staffing and content is as caustic as it is wrong-headed.

He describes the diversity programs of the Gannett company as "highly codified and rigid." What he might have said, instead, is that Gannett is serious about holding its folks accountable for their progress toward more representative newsrooms and more inclusive news coverage.

It's true, as he charges, that part of every Gannett manager's annual evaluation focuses on this issue. It should. You don't make progress without paying attention. McGowan treats as a damaging revelation the fact that Gannett runs an annual "All-American" review of content, looking at each of its newspapers' efforts to "mainstream" minorities. He calls this "covering the news by racial numbers," because each newspaper gets a grade.

I call it sensible. Why shouldn't we look hard at what we publish and see whether all parts of the community are represented in our choice of sources to quote, people to photograph, issues to cover? That makes good business sense, but also constitutes good journalism and should meet anybody's test of fairness.

McGowan cites examples of over-reaction to such scrutiny. For instance, he recalls an edict at one Gannett newspaper that at least one of every six faces in a photo series be a "person of color." That was over-reaction, not corporate policy. In all my 16 years as a Gannett supervisor, nobody has ever given me that kind of marching order.

McGowan quotes a columnist at that same newspaper as saying that Gannett executives insisted one out of every 10 op-ed pieces be written by a non-white. I have been responsible for the editorial and op-ed pages in Louisville, during the entire 16 years of Gannett ownership, and nobody has ever suggested, much less imposed, a quota of minority columnists.

Even McGowan concedes that "the notion of die-hard liberals standing around in the corners of newsrooms plotting to infuse news reporting with left-wing bias is a caricature." He says, "the problem is both more subtle and more insidious."

Here is the heart of his argument: that what he calls the diversity "regime" has meant "certain unfashionable or disfavored voices are overlooked or muted for a variety of reasons, and certain groups feel more empowered in journalistic shouting matches than others." He says, "the actual intellectual or ideological diversity of news organizations has contracted."

Maybe it has in some places. If so, that's not the fault of Gannett, Knight-Ridder or the other major media firms that push their properties to make progress on issues of diversity. Instead, such failures can be laid at the feet of local editors who don't explain to staffers what the policies really are, what they are intended to accomplish and how news values remain paramount in the process.

News executives who think they are pleasing corporate higher-ups with hiring, promotion and news content decisions dictated by rigid racial and ethnic quotas are not doing themselves, or their organizations, any favor. And you don't have to do it to survive. Nobody has asked me to do it. I'm still here.

Critics like McGowan minimize history. When my friend Merv Aubespin came to the art department of The Courier-Journal in 1967, you could have held a convention of all the newspaper's black professionals in a broom closet. Merv always says, "I was like a fly in a bowl of milk."

Just before civil disturbances broke out in 1968, the Courier news leadership came to the art department, asking Merv to accompany a white reporter, Bill Peterson, to the West End for coverage of a rally protesting police conduct. The situation turned ugly. Merv sent Peterson back to the newsroom for his own safety and, for the next two days, called in observations to reporters at Sixth and Broadway who wrote our stories.

After that, C-J executives recruited Merv to take special training at Columbia University and become the paper's only black reporter.

McGowan underplays the progress we've made in newsroom after newsroom across America since the Kerner Commission issued its report urging us to pay attention. The Kerner report blamed lack of diversity for the media's failure to analyze and report adequately on race problems and for its habit of writing and reporting "from the standpoint of a white man's world." That approach, the report said, was "not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of society."

Acting on such criticisms, the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1978 committed the nation's newspapers to reflecting America's racial and ethnic diversity by the year 2000. But despite all the hyperventilation and over-reaction that McGowan charges, despite all the alleged hiring and promotion "by the numbers," after 20 years the numbers still didn't look good. When it became obvious the 2000 goal wouldn't be met, ASNE simply changed its target date to 2025.

If McGowan is right about the climate in the newsroom, minorities should feel, if anything, overly empowered. But, in fact, they are leaving the business at a disproportionate rate. As a result, the proportion of non-white journalists in American newsrooms actually fell in 2001, from 11.85 percent to 11.64 percent.

I admit it. I do pay attention to those numbers. So do the people for whom I work. I think all of us in America should pay attention.

David Hawpe is vice president and editorial director of The Louisville Courier-Journal. He is a 1999 winner of national Walker Stone Prize for Editorial Writing, as well as the Anthony Lewis Media Award for Public Advocacy. Hawpe is a 21-year member of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association; chairman of the APME Ethics Committee (1993-1994), and former chairman of the Diversity Committee. In the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he successfully lobbied for full reporting of newspapers' minority hiring records and created the first ASNE guide to hiring, training and retaining minority journalists. He can be reached at Dhawpe@louisvil.gannett.com.