NPR journalism and diversity

According to National Public Radio's ombudsman, the National Association of Black Journalists wonders aloud about black senior staffers at NPR who have left recently:

"It is NABJ's belief that actions speak much louder than your words," said the NABJ letter on Tuesday. "It is not enough to provide internships for young people or hire them into entry-level positions. Diversity must also be reflected among the managers who decide what news gets covered and who gets to cover it."

To which NPR chief Vivianne Schiller said:

"Well, that's too bad, but let me explain something to our friends at NABJ. I'm trying to run a national news organization that's suffering through serious budget cuts, like every other news organization in this country. We will not discriminate in hiring or firing on the basis of race, but we do not have the luxury now, in this time of intense difficulty for journalism, to set aside jobs for journalists on the basis of race. We're all struggling to keep our heads above water these days, and professional competence, not demographic desirability, must be by far the most important factor in hiring and retaining personnel."

No, actually, this is what she said:

"I couldn't agree more that NPR must increase the diversity of its staff -- particularly in management and editorial," wrote Schiller in response to NABJ's letter. "I am on the record with the media and our employees, stations and board in acknowledging that NPR must take a leadership position in diversity, just as we do in high-quality journalism and digital innovation."

The NABJ's kind of complaint, and NPR's kind of response, is completely unexceptional in mainstream journalism. If top media executives spent a fraction of as much time worrying about viewpoint diversity as they do about ethnic diversity, we might have a truly more diverse media in terms of content. In any case, I wish folks like Vivian Schiller, instead of kowtowing to people like the NABJ, would instead challenge them to recruit more minorities for college journalism programs. I haven't looked at any numbers lately -- so if you have access to them, please correct me -- but in general, minority candidates for journalism jobs are relatively scarce. A friend of mine at a big newspaper told me a couple of years ago about trying to recruit a Hispanic for a plum position, and having a very difficult time finding qualified applicants. He said that there's so much demand for minorities now that the media outlets with the greatest resources tend to scoop up the better candidates as quickly as they come on the market.

It is unjust to come up with a racial quota for achieving "diversity" in a newsroom, without taking stock of what a newsroom's needs are, and what the pool of minority candidates consists of. Most newsrooms are suffering from dramatically shrinking budgets, and are letting people go, not hiring them. To expect newsrooms in which fewer people are having to do more work with less to commit itself to hiring people on the basis of their ethnic background -- which unavoidably means putting white journalists at a competitive disadvantage through no fault of their own -- is morally wrong. With so many journalists of all colors terrified of losing their jobs now, the idea of having minority set-asides for fewer and fewer newsroom positions is hard to justify, or so it seems to me.

In fact, with all the layoffs in newsrooms, a higher percentage of minorities are working in journalism today. But according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (of which NPR is not a part, I'm pretty sure), there's no way newsrooms can keep parity in diversity hiring with the growth of non-whites in the population. But you know, so what? Personally, I don't care whether the people who write and edit my newspaper (or produce my favorite news radio shows) are white, brown, black, or spumoni-colored. I don't care if they're gay or straight. I just want them to give me news and information that's well-written, accurate and relevant. If every story is written and edited by an African-American (or an Asian, or a Hispanic, etc.), that's perfectly fine with me. Journalism is not a product that can be created like widgets, with people like interchangeable parts.

To be clear, I'm certainly not against trying to diversify one's newsroom staff; in, for example, a newsroom like the one I work in, if you don't have people who can speak Spanish (even if they're not Hispanic), you're going to be at a disadvantage in covering much of Dallas. On the other hand, given our readership demographics, and given how fast and how far our circulation has fallen, it's a serious question as to whether or not it's a wiser use of resources to hire a reporter based on his or her ethnicity (this, on the theory that you can reach out to ethnic communities), or to hire another reporter, whatever his or her ethnic background, who is better prepared to cover the news, period, or who is more capable of covering news likely to be more interesting to the largely white suburban communities who make up the bulk of our newspaper's readership. These are the kinds of decisions journalism executives are having to make all the time now. I'm not saying one decision is right, and the other is wrong. You have to know the circumstances. I am saying, though, that for the NABJ or any other activist group to tell a news organization struggling to stay alive that it "must" meet a certain quota in minority hiring is unrealistic in this economic environment. It's like telling telling the British commanders being pushed toward Dunkirk that they had better make sure that a sufficient number of Welshmen are placed in senior officer positions, or else.

This continued agonizing among journalism executives with "diversity" (which I put inside ironic quotes because they have a very specific take on diversity that excludes diversity by other measures, i.e. religion, politics, and so forth) takes place on a planet different from the one we're actually living on. Here we are watching an entire industry sink like the Titanic, and these well-meaning folks want to make sure that enough chairs on the deck are reserved for people of color.