Network News Chiefs Urge “Trust” on Diversity
The presidents of the major television network news divisions today told the National Association of Hispanic Journalists that they are serious about diversity, but that the changing way consumers get their news means there are fewer traditional job openings at the networks.
The three — David Westin of ABC, Neal Shapiro of NBC and Andrew Heyward of CBS — also gave varying reasons why the networks refuse to disclose the percentages of people of color in their news operations, as local stations do, as well as newspapers participating in the annual survey of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
They also said that despite whatever changes in media consolidation rules eventually take place, Latinos will see greater coverage simply because of market forces. “The marketplace will be the determinant much more than what goes on in Washington,” Heyward said.
The chief point made by the network news chiefs at NAHJ’s New York convention luncheon was that there is “much less hostility than you think” to diversity, as Shapiro put it.
“You can say, ‘face to face, white guys who absolutely mean it — film at 11,” quipped Heyward, who asked for “a modicum of trust.”
Westin noted that at ABC, a hiring editor “must fill out a form and has to provide at least one person of color that you found and talked to.” Heyward said his bonus is tied to his diversity success, to which Ray Suarez of PBS’ “The NewsHour,” who moderated the session, said, “a lot of people in this room would like to help you get a big one.”
On disclosing the diversity numbers, Westin said “we keep very close tabs on the figures” but that the policy on not disclosing them is made above his level. Heyward said “there’s a lot of different aspects of diversity” and that an enlightened policy would insist on progress in areas beyond race and ethnicity, and also consider the diversity within the Latino community. “To make this just about numbers can be deceiving,” said Shapiro.
Westin said the field would be “radically different” in five or 10 years, and agreed with Shapiro in stressing to applicants the importance of good writing. “If you can’t write it, you can’t think it,” he said. The network news chiefs noted the expansion of internships to college campuses. “Spread the news about local news and cable. There’s a lot of places to get in,” Shapiro said.
Sulzberger: Blair fiasco was management, not racial issue (Latino Reporter)
Study Documents Absence of Prime-Time Latinos
White characters during the fall 2002 prime-time season accounted for the vast majority of screen time for characters of all races while Latino characters barely appeared on television, according to the second-year findings of a UCLA study tracking diversity on television.
“White characters accounted for 81 percent of screen time, according to the study entitled ‘Prime Time in Black and White: Not Much Is New for 2002.’ Whites appeared on television for 224 hours out of 276 hours of screen time for all characters,” says a news release.
“African-American characters accounted for about 41 hours of screen time, or about 15 percent of screen time, the study showed. Latino characters accounted for seven hours, or 3 percent of screen time, while Asian Americans accounted for four hours, or 1 percent of screen time.
“The research was based on a content analysis of 234 episodes of 85 situation comedies and dramas airing on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, UPN and The WB during three weeks in October and November.
“White characters were most overrepresented on The WB and NBC. . . . African Americans continue to be the most overrepresented on UPN, Hunt said. They account for 31 percent of all characters on UPN, despite making up about 12 percent of the nation’s population.”
Darnell Hunt, the study’s principal author, a sociologist and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, said the study showed that “the industry continues to be driven by business logics that divide the nation into market segments based on race, where the large but declining white segment reigns supreme.”
Native Journalists Start Cutting Expenses
The Native American Journalists Association, facing a financial crisis, has begun cutting expenses and plans to step up its fund raising, says its new executive director, Ron Walters. “NAJA has been in this position before. We start operating like any normal business would” in similar straits, he told Journal-isms.
The association, whose annual operating expenses run $70,000 to $80,000, and has only two to three employees, Walters said, immediately saved $3,000 a month by moving from its Minneapolis offices into Freedom Forum space at the University of South Dakota. It is considering producing its publications online instead of printing them, among other steps. NAJA’s recent convention in Green Bay, Wis., at which its budgetary problems were reported by the student convention newspaper, raised $8,000 to $10,000, Walters said.
Walters, 38, became executive director as the convention ended after Mary Annette Pember resigned, “citing family concerns and a desire to resume her freelance career,” as the Native Voice reported. He had joined the association staff as Pember’s assistant only last December. A Lakota Hunkpapa, Walters had been a reporter for the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus-Leader and for South Dakota Public Radio, among other media outlets.
Also at the convention, Patty Talahongva, a Hopi from Tempe, Ariz., and a multimedia journalist, was elected to a second one-year term as president.
More Black Columnists on Michigan Decision
- Joe Davidson, BET.com:
“It was the Supreme Court that delivered the blow to conservatives, but it’s the Bush White House that’s taking the hit . . . For the right wing, the Michigan case has become a symbol of President George W. Bush’s shaky credibility on the affirmative action issue.”
- Norman Lockman, Wilmington (Del.) News-Journal:
“Now that the Supreme Court has put a stake into the heart of racial quota systems, beware of the dark spirits who continue to moan about unfairness of race consciousness in subjective decisions about choosing college applicants. They are the ghosts of segregation past. Some of them are even black, like Justice Clarence Thomas.
“By some kind of selective amnesia, they are the folks who seem to forget that as recently as the 1960s it was standard operating procedure to give racial preference to all white people, regardless of who, what or where they were, over all dark-skinned minorities regardless of their qualifications. There was a blanket racial preference for everything; schools, colleges, white-color jobs, skilled blue-collar jobs, membership in craft and trade unions, housing, bank loans, mortgages, insurance, country clubs, hotels, bars, restaurants, resorts, even buses, trains and water fountains in the South.
“Anybody who thinks affirmative action matches that kind of racial preference has some screws loose. This was not ancient history. It was happening in the lifetimes of most of the squawkers and their parents, which means they are direct beneficiaries of this white skin privilege, whether they like to admit it or not.”
- Sheryl McCarthy, Newsday:
“[Justice Clarence] Thomas is a strange man who has a tortured relationship with both blacks and whites. He’s quick to criticize those blacks who promote a cult of victimhood and who are constantly looking for handouts. But the minute his lackluster Supreme Court nomination was threatened by scandal, he cried “race” and “victim” with the best of them.
“. . . As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her majority opinion this week, we’re only about 25 years away from a day when minorities will no longer need affirmative action. In saying it ought to go out the window now, Thomas is wrong. But if he insists, he should practice what he preaches and step down.”
- Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune:
“If affirmative action were eliminated at elite schools, the admission probability for white applicants at those schools would rise only to 26.5 percent from 25 percent, according to ‘The Shape of the River,’ a 1998 study on race in college admissions by two former Ivy League presidents, economist William Bowen, who headed Princeton, and political scientist Derek Bok, who headed Harvard. Of course, blacks would feel more of the pain numerically. That 1.5 percent admissions gain for whites would come at a cost of about half of those colleges’ black students, the authors estimate.
“. . . As with abortion, gun control and other hot-button political issues, each side in the affirmative action debate can make a legitimate claim to moral virtue. But neither has a monopoly on it. Maybe we could achieve Martin Luther King’s dream by trying to pretend that race does not exist, as some affirmative action opponents propose. O’Connor’s endorsement of diversity wisely recognizes that we will get there more quickly by taking race fully into account.”
- Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press:
” . . . Having minority students in white classrooms makes all races richer in intellect. It gives white students cultural acumen they would otherwise not have. And it gives minority students a view of students unlike themselves, but whose preferences rule America.
“So nothing has really changed except the University of Michigan had better unveil a system that is harder to quantify. Maybe the university should just use “president’s prerogative” to ensure diversity.
“And we’ll continue to argue about diversity for another 25 years, or until we deal with the conditions that lead to its absence.
“Or we can just wait for those conditions to change.”
- Stan Simpson, Hartford Courant:
“Demographers have told us that in the not-so-distant future America’s ethnic minority population will make up the majority. Having diverse college campuses, workforces and leadership ranks has always made good business and strategic sense.
“Now, more of our attention should be on this confounding scholastic achievement gap between white students and their black and Latino colleagues. These gaps threaten to undermine the spirit of affirmation action because it will shrink the pool of qualified college applicants of color and give opponents of affirmative action fodder for misguided notions about inferiority.”
. . . And Al Franken Gives Cartoonists His Take
“Looking at the faces here, I have to applaud you for not letting this affirmative-action nonsense” affect the profession, comedian Al Franken told the overwhelmingly white male Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, according to the Pittsburgh City Paper.
Franken is a veteran of NBC-TV’s “Saturday Night Live” and author of the 1996 best-seller, “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.” Editorial page editors and cartoonists have explained the lack of diversity by pointing out that the editorial cartooning field is shrinking and thus has not produced many hiring opportunities.
William Safire Not Letting Up on FCC
Conservative New York Times columnist William Safire is not letting up in slamming the Federal Communications Commission for relaxing ownership restrictions. On Thursday, he applauded the Senate Commerce Committee for voting to roll back the FCC decision.
“This first step toward stopping the takeover of both content and distribution of information was taken because enough of the audience got sore and made it an issue,” Safire wrote. “I’m proud of the part played by The New York Times, which not only ran my diatribes but front-paged the illuminating coverage by Stephen Labaton, including his note that the Times Company was lobbying for cross-ownership.
“No thanks go to the biggest media, where CBS’s ’60 Minutes,’ NBC’s ‘Dateline’ and ABC’s ’20/20′ found the rip-off of the public interest by their parent companies too hot to handle. Most network newscasts dutifully covered the scandalous story as briefly and coolly as possible, failing to disclose how much it meant to their parent companies, which were lobbying furiously for gobble-up rights.”
Network news presidents who spoke today at a convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists challenged Safire.
ABC News President David Westin, for example, said that “World News Tonight” did two reports on the issue and that it was discussed on the Sunday “This Week” program. It was a big topic on MSNBC, said NBC News president Neal Shapiro. But CBS News President Andrew Heyward said “it did not get massive coverage anywhere” because “for most of the audience, it’s a relatively arcane matter. It’s not because of corporate interests,” he said.
Ex-Editor Sues Greg Moore Over “Manure” Quip
“If nothing else, Denver Post editor Greg Moore is a straight shooter — the rare executive who doesn’t squeeze the juice from his words before uttering them,” writes Denver’s Westword weekly.
“In the case of former Post assistant city editor Arnie Rosenberg, however, Moore may wish that he’d been more circumspect. Rosenberg, a veteran of over three decades in journalism, is suing Moore and the Post because the editor said ‘the way to clean up a place is not to move manure around the barnyard’ following an observation about Rosenberg’s firing made at a well-attended staff meeting last year.
“‘I was hurt very badly,’ notes Rosenberg, currently an assistant city editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. ‘It was a horrible thing to say. How can you say that about somebody in front of five people, much less a hundred people?'”
As Journal-isms reported last Nov. 8, “Several sources told Westword that the audience of Posters reacted to the bon mot with an ‘audible gasp,’ in part because the departing ACE, who’s on the job until Nov. 8, was present. Moore didn’t go quite that far, but he allowed that ‘I saw some people’s eyes get bigger.’ He emphasizes that the remark ‘had nothing to do with’ the ACE, or anyone in particular.
Instead, it was simply his way of stressing that ‘change is part of this process.'”
Ad Boycott Threatened Over Loss of Columnist
Protesting the reassignment of columnist Miguel Perez to reporter, Latino activists in New Jersey today said they were announcing the organization of a committee to “develop a boycott” of all advertisers in Perez’s paper, The Record of Hackensack, N.J., “who make their profits by selling goods and services to Latinos in New Jersey.”
They were joined by veteran journalist Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte of the University of Texas at Austin, who wrote that columnists “are still a rare group — I cannot imagine anyone throwing one away in this day and age as the Latino community grows.”
Jennifer Borg, vice president and general counsel of The Record’s parent company, told Journal-isms that the reassignment was not a demotion and that the paper wanted Perez to take a “broader role, a more expansive role” in covering the Latino community, and that the paper has been pleased with the results. “We’re clearly looking for more news reporting,” she said. “He’s one of several columnists whose job titles have changed.”
The Rev. Miguel A. Rivera, president of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, and Jose A. Morales, a delegate of the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey, held a news conference at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention in New York.
Lisa Guerrero to Report on” Monday Night Football”
Lisa Guerrero will replace Melissa Stark as reporter on Monday Night Football, ABC officially announced Wednesday, says Rudy Martzke in USA Today. Guerrero, given a three-year contract, becomes the first Hispanic broadcaster on Monday Night Football.
Guerrero previously worked on Fox’s “Best Damn Sports Show Period.”
Spanish Channel Could Improve English Version
Time Warner Cable launches NY1 Noticias, one of the nation’s only 24/7 Spanish-language local news networks, on Monday. It will be a companion to NY1, New York’s English-language 24-hour cable news channel.
Steve Paulus, senior vice president and general manager of NY1, told TVSpy.com’s Stephen Warley that NY1 Noticias will make NY1 better “just by the fact that we are covering more news in the Hispanic community.”
“TVSPY: What would you consider success after your first year?
PAULUS: I think just to build credibility within the Hispanic community. Do a good job covering breaking news. I’m not going to sit here and say we’ve got to be making a profit, but due to automation and due to the fact that we can draw on the resources of NY1 the cost factor for this channel is not as large. I think the credibility issue is going to determine whether we are a success or not.
“I think a great side effect of this channel is that it is going to make NY1 better because I think you are going to see a much more representative depiction of the population on NY1 just by the fact that we are covering more news in the Hispanic community.
“You know, Latinos make up 40% of New York’s marketplace. It really is the hottest market and everyone is talking about the Hispanic marketplace. When I tell people that I’m launching a Spanish channel, they say that’s so smart, what a great idea. For me, it’s a no brainer. I think the cable penetration is no where near reaching most of the Hispanic population, so you’ve got to figure there is tremendous business opportunities out there and we are finding that from advertisers as well. Everyone has a different budget line for the Hispanic community. I think we are going to be successful on a commercial level. The challenge is to be successful on an editorial level and to live up to that level of anticipation that people are displaying.”