Whites Write 93% of Front-Page Political Stories
NAHJ Wins RTNDA, SPJ Approval for Joint Meeting
Whites Write 93% of Front-Page Political Stories
The 4th Estate, a non-partisan project to aggregate data around the 2012 elections, released Thursday an infographic, “Bleached: Lack of Diversity on the Front Page,” “that shows that over 93% of front page print articles covering the 2012 Presidential Election were written by white reporters.
The percentage of articles written by Asian Americans is 3.3%, by African Americans is 2.9%, and by Hispanics is 0.7%,” the election-year monitoring organization said.
” ‘I was shocked when I saw these numbers,’ says Michael Howe, 4th Estate’s co-founder. ‘Our data shows there is a large disparity between the representation of minority reporters writing the most influential stories in our society and the 2010 Census data numbers.’
“Earlier this year, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) released a survey of the 2012 minority representation at various print organizations. ‘The delta between our infographic and the ASNE survey is a fascinating study,’ says Jonas Eno-Van Fleet, 4th Estate’s Director of Operations.
” ‘Some of the data matches very closely, such as the percentage of New York Times reporters who are Hispanic (4%), while some of the data is quite different, such as the numbers for the San Francisco Chronicle. We found no minority reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle writing front page election stories, while the overall minority representation of their staff is over 20% according to the ASNE survey.’
“The most striking under-representation of minorities in the 4th Estate data is that of Hispanic journalists. . . . While the ASNE study reports that 27% of the Miami Herald staff is Hispanic, the 4th Estate data found none of the Miami Herald front page election articles were written by Hispanic journalists. . . . There are a few bright spots such the percentage of front page articles written by African American reporters at Dallas Morning News.”
NAHJ Wins RTNDA, SPJ Approval for Joint Meeting
“The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) will partner with the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) at the annual Excellence in Journalism Conference in 2013 in Anaheim, Calif.,” NAHJ announced on Thursday.
“Earlier this week, the SPJ and RTDNA boards both voted to approve the partnership. NAHJ’s board met on Oct. 19 and voted unanimously to approve its participation at EIJ13. . . .”
