Chapter 17:Covering a Diverse, Multicultural Society
Overview: Ethics in Reporting on a Multicultural Society
Commission on Freedom of the Press. A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 26-27.
United States National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Report of the National Advisory Commission On Civil Disorders. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1968), 211-212.
Bob Papper, “2008 women and minorities survey,” Radio-Television News Directors Association’s The Communicator, July/August 2008. (Academic archives)
U.S. Census Bureau, “U.S. Hispanic population surpasses 45 million, now 15 percent of total,” news release, May 1, 2008. The bureau gave the following estimates as of July 1, 2007: Hispanic, 45.5 million; Black, 40.7 million; Asian, 15.2 million; American Indians and Alaska Natives, 4.5 million; and Native Hawiian and Other Pacific Islander, 1 million. Update:US population for 2010 and 2000 censuses,
Mallary Jean Tenore, “New ASNE figures show percentage of minorities in newspaper newsrooms continues to decline,” poynteronline, April 4, 2012. The percentage of minorities was 12.32.
Gregory Favre and Bobbi Bowman, “Demographic changes reflect growing need for diversity coverage,” poynteronline, Jan. 9, 2009. An interview with Bowman, who has been the diversity and membership director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Phuong Ly, “As people of color become a majority, is it time for journalists to stop using the term ‘minorities’?”, poynteronline, Aug. 4, 2011; updated Aug. 5, 2011. “The word has long been used to describe people who are not white. But changing demographics make the term outdated and oxymoronic.”
The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), founded in 1975 (
The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), founded in 1981 (
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), founded in 1982 (
The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), founded in 1984 (
The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), founded in 1994 (
Paul Taylor, Mark Hugo Lopez, Jessica Hamar Martinez and Gabriel Velasco, “When labels don’t fit: Hispanics and their views of identity,” PewHispanicCenter, April 4, 2012. “Nearly four decades after the United States government mandated the use of the terms ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ to categorize Americans who trace their roots to Spanish-speaking countries, a new nationwide surveyof Hispanic adults finds that these terms still haven’t been fully embraced by Hispanics themselves. A majority (51%) say they most often identify themselves by their family’s country of origin; just 24% say they prefer a pan-ethnic label.”
The fatal traffic accident in Cheektowago, N.Y.:
“The Color Line and the Bus Line,” Arlene Notoro Morgan, Alice Irene Pifer, and Keith Woods, Eds., The Authentic Voice (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2006), 105-126. The chapter includes the transcript of the Nightline broadcast on May 22, 1996.
Video: The Nightline broadcast is on the DVD accompanying The Authentic Voice.
Eric Wray, “Reporting the Rashomon way,” The Authentic Voice, 126.
The Challenge of Covering Cultures
Robert J. Haiman, Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists (Arlington, Va.: The Freedom Forum’s Free Press/Fair Press Project, 2000), 43-44. You can download the book here:
Av Westin, Best Practices for Television Journalists (Arlington, Va.: The Freedom Forum’s Free Press/Fair Press Project, 2000), 23-24. You can download the book here:
Gigi Anders, “The crucible: Reporting on their own ethnic groups can be an excruciating challenge for minority journalists. Does it bring about better coverage?” American Journalism Review, May 1999.
Farai Chideya, “Fair share: How can we improve American media’s coverage of race, class and social mobility? Let’s ask some of the brightest minds in the business,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2013.
Issues in Covering New Immigrants
Lucy Hood, “Naming names,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2006, Newsrooms are struggling with the dilemma of whether to use the names of illegal immigrants. Anonymous sources are under fire as threats to credibility. Yet identifying undocumented immigrants could lead to their deportation.
Gabriel Escobar, “The making of ‘The Other Pro Soccer,’ ” in Morgan, Pifer, Woods, eds., The Authentic Voice, 326.
Sonia Nazario, “Ethical dilemmas in telling Enrique’s story,” Nieman Reports, Fall 2006, 27-29.
PewHispanicCenter, “2007 national survey of Latinos: As illegal immigration issue heats up, Hispanics feel a chill,” Dec. 19, 2007.
Bobbi Bowman, “The historical context of immigration,” The American Editor, March 2007. “We need to give our readers more history and more context to deepen and enrich our stories. Stories that tell readers about what has come before help point to the future.”
Peter Sterne, “No more ‘illegal immigrants’ in AP stories,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 3, 2013. The wire service no longer will use “illegal” to describe a person but will continue to use “illegal” to describe an action, such as “illegal immigration” and people entering the country “illegally.”
- Michael Diakopoulos, “What data and algorithms teach us about the language news orgns use,” poynteronline, April 12, 2013. “[M]any important issues, not just immigration, are framed by the language the media uses to talk about them. And we should be looking much more broadly at how language is used to talk about them. By combining data and algorithms with visualization, we can create a tool to help us to that.”
- Christine Haughney, “TheTimes shifts on ‘illegal immigrant,’ but doesn’t ban its use, The New York Times, April 23, 2013.
When to Identify News Subjects by Race
Keith Woods, “Guidelines for racial identification,” Feb. 25, 2000.
Steve Parker, “Is right to say the suspect is black? Or Latino? Or white?”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 12, 2009.
Lindsey Miller, “When is it appropriate to use race in crime reporting?”, Arkansas Times, Aug. 3, 2011. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette uses racial identifiers in its Police Beat column; the deputy editor, Frank Fellone, said the newsroom standard is “to use all available information provided by police.”
Making Coverage More Inclusive of the Entire Community
Yanick Rice Lamb, “Take time to examine your sources,” Quill, October/November 2002, 38. (Academic databases)
Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparity in Coverage
Cynthia Tucker, “Our opinion: Media blackout for this bride,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,May 8, 2005. (News databases)
Shaila K. Dewan and Sherri Day, “Police wonder if cabby erred before a killing,” The New York Times, May 14, 2004.
Bob Garfield and Av Westin, On the Media, National Public Radio, April 21, 2001. Garfield interviews Westin about racial discrimination he has observed in television news.
Stereotyping in Coverage
Shannon Kahle, Nan Yu and Erin Whiteside, “Another disaster: An examination of portrayals of race in Hurricane Katrina coverage,” Visual Communication Quarterly, Vol. 14, Spring 2007, 75-79. “The study uses a content analysis to explore portrayals of race in newspaper photographs from four national newspapers … . The study found that the photographic coverage of Katrina, while ostensibly sympathetic, reinforced negative stereotypes about African-Americans, while conversely depicting Caucasians in powerful roles.” (Academic databases)
Covering Gay and Lesbians in the News
Bao Ong, “Is sexuality part of the story?”
National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, “NLGJA’s stylebook supplement on LGBT terminology,”
Robert Dodge, “Gays and lesbians on September 11,”
The case of Maj. Alan G. Rogers:
Donna St. George, “Army officer remembered as hero,” The Washington Post, March 22, 2008.
Deborah Howell, “Public death, private life,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2008.
Case study:Edward Schumacher-Matos, “The furor over gay conversion therapy,” NPR, Aug. 4, 2011. The NPR ombudsman reports on angry reaction to Alix Spiegel’s nine-minute Morning Edition segment Aug. 3 that interviewed two gay men who had undergone lengthy therapy intended to make them heterosexual. One found the experience humiliating and the other saw it is beneficial. As Schumacher-Matos wrote, the concern of many listeners was that the segment was “legitimizing a mostly discredited therapy” and “wrongly made homosexuality seem like a disease or lifestyle choice, striking at the very self-identity of most gay men and women. … The overwhelming criticism from listeners was that Spiegel was guilty of creating a false balance.”
Updates on Membership in UNITY: Journalists of Color
The National Association of Black Journalists voted on April 20, 2011, to withdraw from UNITY, with which it had been affiliated since 1994. NABJ cited concerns over funding. See “FAQs on UNITY withdrawal”:
UNITY has invited NLGJA to join, and the invitation has been accepted, NLGJA announced on Sept. 19, 2011. A news release said: “NLGJA's mission to advance the interests of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender journalists is consistent with UNITY's mission of ensuring that American newsrooms, and consequently news coverage, reflects the diversity of our communities.”
Case Study No. 20: When a Story Gets Its Subject Arrested
Sharyn Vane, “Too much information?”, American Journalism Review, June 1998.
Barry Yeoman, “Good story, bad result: A profile puts the subject at risk,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1998. (Academic databases)
Read the text of “Heart Without a Home”[separate file in this folder].
Additional Case Studies
Shooting victims’ criminal records: African American readers of The Buffalo News protested when the paper reported that seven of the eight victims of a bar shooting on Aug. 14, 2010, had criminal records. Four of the shooting victims were killed. The paper’s story on Aug. 22 mentioning the criminal records quoted experts as saying that “past or present association with crime begets a certain lifestyle risk.” The story quoted one of the experts as saying, “It doesn’t mean that the people deserved it or in any way had it coming,” and the story also quoted family and friends who objected to reporting the criminal records as an insensitive act. When the story appeared, African Americans renewed those objections and said the newspaper did not respect the feelings of black people. Editor Margaret Sullivan met on Sept. 1 with an audience of 700 African Americans and listened as speaker after speaker expressed outrage. Sullivan wrote about the episode in: “After the shouting: bridging the divide,” Nieman Reports, Summer 2012.
Covering a gay/lesbian “KissOut”: Since 2005, The Daily Collegian at PennsylvaniaStateUniversity has been running photographs of same-sex couples kissing during the annual Valentine’s Day “KissOut” staged by the campus lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender organization. The 2005 front-page photo was followed by the publication of a letter to the editor from an undergraduate student who deplored having to see “a bunch of queers kissing public.” That in turn was followed by an outpouring of 400 more letters to the paper, reflecting a diversity of opinion about KissOut and about the paper’s coverage. In the years since, reaction to the demonstration and the coverage has been subdued. PennState professor Russell Frank analyzes the case in an essay, “Sucking Face at DearOldState,” for Media Ethics Magazine, July 1, 2010:
The editors’ convention: A Chinese American journalism student was among a diverse group of college students invited to help produce a daily newspaper during the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April 2001. She was assigned to take a picture of the Capitol Steps, a Washington comedy troupe, during entertainment for the editors gathered at the convention. What she saw angered and humiliated her. The actors depicted Chinese in caricature. And at least some of the editors, who at their convention affirmed their commitment to racial diversity in their newsrooms, were laughing. [See separate file in this folder.]
The Yorkrace riots: Thirty years after race rioting in York, Pa., the two newspapers in the city published retrospectives and noted that two homicide cases stemming from the rioting had never been solved. Local politicians and civic leaders objected to bringing up these unpleasant historical facts, and they put economic pressure on the newspapers.
- A summary of the case. [See separate file in this folder.]
- A “Media Matters” television documentary on the case, “Reckoning in York, Pa.” Includes a video clip.