Overview: Reporting on a Multicultural Society
Chapter 17: Covering a Diverse, Multicultural Society
Overview: 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.
Demographics of the Nation and the Newsrooms
US Census Bureau, “As the nation ages, seven states become younger, Census Bureau reports,” June 26, 2014. http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-118.html#
US Census Bureau, “Projections show a slower growing, older, more diverse nation a half century from now,” Dec. 12, 2012.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population/cb12-243.html
Bob Papper, “Women and minorities in newsrooms,” Radio Television News Directors Association, July 11, 2016. Survey highlights: “Record number of minority TV news directors; mostly down minorities numbers in radio; record number of women TV news directors and women in TV.”
American Society of News Editors, “ASNE releases 2016 Diversity Survey results,” September 9, 2016. Minority journalists comprised 17 percent of the workforce in the 737 newsrooms that responded.
Pew Research Center, “US unauthorized immigrant workforce size stable after Great Recession,” November 3, 2016. Pew estimated that 8 million workers, representing 5% of the civilian workforce, were unauthorized in 2014. The number was unchanged from 2009, the year the recession ended.
Phuong Ly, “As people of color become a majority, is it time for journalists to stop using the term ‘minorities’?,” Poynter, Aug. 4, 2011. “The word has long been used to describe people who are not white. But changing demographics make the term outdated and oxymoronic.”
Covering Diverse 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:
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.
Lonnae O’Neal, “Kaepernick saga raises questions about the media,” The Undefeated, September 1, 2016. When the San Francisco 49ers quarterback sought to call attention to racial issues by refusing to stand for the national anthem during a preseason game, only NFL Network’s Steve Wyche was the only journalist to question him about the protest. Wyche said being an African American “helped him see the layers of intersection.” O’Neal’s article calls attention to the scarcity of journalists of color covering sports.
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.
Paul Taylor, Mark Hugo Lopez, Jessica Hamar Martinez and Gabriel Velasco, “When labels don’t fit: Hispanics and their views of identity,” Pew Hispanic Center, 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 survey of 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.”
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 orgs use,” Poynter, 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, “The Times shifts on ‘illegal immigrant,’ but doesn’t ban its use, The New York Times, April 23, 2013.
When Racial Sensitivity Is an Issue in Coverage
Keith Woods, “Guidelines for racial identification,” Feb. 25, 2000.
Yanick Rice Lamb, “Take time to examine your sources,” Quill, October/November 2002, 38. (Academic databases)
Shaila K. Dewan and Sherri Day, “Police wonder if cabby erred before a killing,” The New York Times, May 14, 2004.
Cynthia Tucker, “Our opinion: Media blackout for this bride,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 8, 2005. (News databases)
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)
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 used racial identifiers in its Police Beat column.
Corey Hutchins, “The Dominion Post on ‘suspicious activity’,” Columbia Journalism Review, Jan. 16, 2014. The paper in Morgantown, W. Va., published an item saying the sheriff’s department asked for help in identifying “a black man” who was “involved in some suspicious activity.” Under intense criticism, the sheriff’s department asked the paper to publish a more detailed description and an explanation of why the man was being sought.
Alessandra Stanley, “Wrought in Rhimes’s image: Viola Davis plays Shonda Rhimes’s latest tough heroine,” The New York Times, Sept. 18, 2014.
Followup: Margaret Sullivan, “An article on Shonda Rhimes rightly causes a furor,” The New York Times, Sept. 22, 2014.
Victor Mather, “In the ring he was Ali, but in the newspapers he was still Clay,” The New York Times, June 9, 2016. When Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali, sportswriters did not acknowledge it for years. w.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/sports/muhammad-ali-name-cassius-clay-newspapers.html
Covering Gay and Lesbians in the News
Jennifer Vanasco, “AP’s first usage guidelines on ‘husband, wife,’ ” Columbia Journalism Review, Feb. 21, 2013.
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.
Organizations of Minority-Group Journalists
Several of these organizations offer style guides to help fellow journalists avoid insensitivity in news coverage.
The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), founded in 1975 ( The NABJ style guide:
The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), founded in 1981 ( The AAJA Handbook to Covering Asian America:
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), founded in 1982 (
The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), founded in 1984 ( Using the “Resources” tab, orders may be placed on the website for the book “100 Questions, 500 Nations: A Resource Guide to Covering Indian Country.”
National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, founded in 1990 ( “Stylebook Supplement on LGBT Terminology” may be downloaded at:
The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), founded in 1994 (
UNITY: Journalists for Diversity, founded in 1996 (
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: Columbia University 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.
Case Study: 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)
[The text of the News & Observer story is in a separate file in this folder.}
Additional Case Study: A Report on Gay Conversion Therapy
Edward Schumacher-Matos, “The furor over gay conversion therapy,” NPR, Aug. 4, 2011. The NPR ombudsman reports on an 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 of the men 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.”
Additional Case Study: Shooting Victims’ Criminal Records
Many 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. http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102774/After-the-Shouting-Bridging-the-Divide.aspx
Additional Case Study: 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. As the actors depicted Chinese in caricature, she was angered and humiliated. She was also offended because 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.]
Additional Case Study: The York Race 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, who objected to publicizing these unpleasant historical facts, put economic pressure on the newspapers. [See separate file in this folder.]