Racial profiling in the newsroom

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 84, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 231-248

  Pritchard, David ^a   Stonbely, Sarah ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MILWAUKEE   (United States)

^b NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AFRICAN AMERICAN; MINORITY GROUP; RACIAL IDENTITY;

EID: 34848835073     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900708400203     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. David H. Weaver, Randal A. Beam, Bonnie J. Brownlee, Paul S. Voakes, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 21st Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007), 12.
2. American Society of Newspaper Editors, "Tables from the 2004 Newsroom Employment Survey," April 20, 2004, available at http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=5147 (accessed June 14, 2006).
3. Terry Adams and Johanna Cleary, "The Parity Paradox: Reader Response to Minority Newsroom Staffing," Mass Communication & Society 9 (1, 2006): 45-61, 45.
4. See, e.g., American Society of Newspaper Editors, ASNE Statement on Newsroom Diversity, October 20, 1998, available at http:// www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=1669 (accessed 14 June 2006).
5. In addition to leading to improved coverage of minority communities, greater levels of minority staffing are often assumed to bring economic benefits for mainstream news organizations, such as increased newspaper readership and subscriptions by people of color. See Richard Gross, Stephanie Craft, and Glen T. Cameron, 'Diversity Efforts at the Los Angeles Times: Are Journalists and the Community on the Same Page?" Mass Communication & Society 5 (3, 2002): 263-77. Little research is available to test that assumption, though one study of twenty-five communities found no relationship between minority staffing in local daily newspapers and minority readership. The same study found a negative relationship between increased minority staff and the proportion of African Americans who believe what they read in their local newspaper. See Adams and Cleary, "The Parity Paradox."
6. See, e.g., Don Heider, White News: Why Local News Programs Don't Cover People of Color (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000);
7. and Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Federico A. Subervi-Vélez, Sharon Bramlett-Solomon, and Don Heider, "Minority Journalists' Perceptions of the Impact of Minority Executives," Howard Journal of Communication 15 (January-March 2004): 39-55.
8. Gwyneth Mellinger, "Counting Color: Ambivalence and Contradiction in the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Discourse of Diversity," Journal of Communication Inquiry 27 (April 2003): 129-51, 130.
9. Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29 (autumn 1988): 44-64.
10. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. and expanded ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 1.
11. This point, especially with respect to African Americans, is made convincingly in Carol A. Stabile, White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in U.S. Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006).
12. Mellinger, "Counting Color: Ambivalence and Contradiction in the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Discourse of Diversity," 129.
13. On the newspaper industry's view on minority journalists before 1968, see Alf Pratte,"'⋯ But There are Miles to Go': Racial Diversity and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1922-2000," Journal of Negro History 86 (spring 2001): 160-79.
14. Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).
15. This is not to say that interest in having journalists of color in decision-making positions has entirely disappeared. Fairly recent empirical studies that document the importance of minority news executives include Heider, White News: Why Local News Programs Don't Cover People of Color; and Rivas-Rodriguez et al., "Minority Journalists' Perceptions of the Impact of Minority Executives."
16. Raymond N. Ankney and Deborah A. Procopio, "Corporate Culture, Minority Hiring, and Newspaper Coverage of Affirmative Action," Howard Journal of Communication 14 (July 2003): 159-76.
17. Carolyn Martindale, quoted in Richard Gross, Patricia A. Curtin, and Glen T. Cameron, "Diversity Efforts in the Newsroom: Doin' the Right Thing or Justa Case of Show Me the Money?" (paper presented at the annual meeting of AEJMC, New Orleans, August 1999).
18. Pamela T. Newkirk, "Guess Who's Leaving the Newsrooms?" Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2000.
19. E.R. Shipp, "Excuses, Excuses: How Editors and Reporters Justify Ignoring Stories," in The Business of Journalism: Ten Leading Reporters and Editors on the Perils and Pitfalls of the Press, ed. William Serrin (New York: New Press, 2000), 57-74.
20. Ted Pease and J. Frazier Smith, The Newsroom Barometer: Job Satisfaction and the Impact of Racial Diversity at U.S. Daily Newspapers (Athens, OH: E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, 1991), 24-25. Similar comments also can be found in Gerald Michael Bush, We Need to Talk: Cultural Diversity and the Flow of News (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 2000), 8, 10-11, 57, 139, 146.
21. Paula M. Poindexter, Laura Smith, and Don Heider, "Race and Ethnicity in Local Television News: Framing, Story Assignments, and Source Selections," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 47 (December 2003): 524-36.
22. Poindexter, Smith, and Heider, "Race and Ethnicity in Local Television News: Framing, Story Assignments, and Source Selections," 531.
23. Information in this paragraph not attributed to other sources comes from U.S. Census Bureau, Wisconsin Quick Facts, available at http:// quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/55/55000.html (accessed July 19, 2004).
24. Rick Romell, "Circulation drops at paper," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 4, 2004.
25. Our method of counting produced a proportion of minority journalists slightly lower than contained in the 2004 ASNE Newsroom Employment Survey, which stated that 17.8% of the Journal Sentinel's journalists were members of minority groups. See http://www.asne.org/ index.cfm?id=5146#Wisconsin (accessed July 20, 2004). See also Gregory Stanford, "Media have a way to go on the road to diversity," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 28, 2002.
26. Of the forty highest-circulation newspapers in the United States, only eight had news staffs with a racial composition more representative of their circulation areas than the Journal Sentinel. Bill Dedman and Stephen K. Doig, "Does your newspaper's staff reflect the racial diversity of the community it serves? A report for the Knight Foundation on 1,413 American newspapers and their circulation areas," May 2004, available at http://powerreporting.com/knight/top200.html (accessed July 20, 2004).
27. With respect to Milwaukee, see David Pritchard, "Race, Homicide, and Newspapers," Journalism Quarterly 62 (autumn 1985): 500-08;
28. and David Pritchard and Karen D. Hughes, "Patterns of Deviance in Crime News," Journal of Communication 47 (summer 1997): 49-67. For similar findings from another city,
29. see Richard J. Lundman, "The Newsworthiness and Selection Bias in News about Murder: Comparative and Relative Effects of Novelty and Race and Gender Typifications on Newspaper Coverage of Homicide," Sociological Forum 18 (September 2003): 357-86.
30. At the time of the study, the Journal Sentinel had minority reporters covering suburbs, sports, entertainment, and technology, beats that fell outside of the study's focus on Local Public Issues relevant to the city of Milwaukee.
31. A complete list of the Local Public Issues and the values they were assigned is available from the first author.
32. William A. Scott, "Reliability of Content Analysis: The Case of Nominal Scale Coding," Public Opinion Quarterly 19 (autumn 1955): 321-25.
33. Scheduling problems forced one interview (with the newspaper's editor-in-chief, a white man) to be conducted by only the white woman in the interviewing team.
34. Space constraints prevent us from including comments from everyone who provided them. However, the views of the journalists whose comments are not included in this article were entirely consistent with those that the article does report.
35. The title of the African American metro editor, one of six metro editors at the newspaper, was "urban life editor." As noted earlier, the adjective "urban" is often code for "minority" in modern American news organizations.
36. See, generally, Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content, 2d ed. (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996);
37. and Dan Berkowitz, ed., Social Meanings of News (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997). For example, a study of local television news in thirty-six markets found that "Black anchors and reporters spoke from the same perspective as White; there was no difference in their reporting, which is precisely what their job descriptions and professional roles demanded." The authors of that study concluded that "structural forces have far more bearing on the nature of news images than the racial identifications of the personnel."
38. See Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 84-87.
39. The most prestigious beats at American newspapers, including the Journal Sentinel, are those that deal with power. These are largely government-oriented beats, and in the fall of 2003 every Journal Sentinel reporter assigned to one of the following areas - Milwaukee city government, Milwaukee county government, the state capital bureau in Madison, and the Washington, D.C., bureau - was white.
40. Gregory Stanford, "Racial split played out; Barrett faces big challenge," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 11, 2004.
41. Mellinger, "Counting Color: Ambivalence and Contradiction in the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Discourse of Diversity," 130.
42. Poindexter, Smith, and Heider, "Race and Ethnicity in Local Television News: Framing, Story Assignments, and Source Selections."