Last Friday, I attended seminar at Western Kentucky University on diversity and excellence in journalism, taught by Keith Woods of Poynter Institute. Keith did a great job, and I’m not just saying that because we are longtime friends. (Keith was my very first real newspaper editor, when I was still a college student, way back at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)
Most of us understand the need for “diversity,” at least on a superficial level. But in this seminar, I learned several different ways of thinking about it.
Here are some lessons I posted on my Twitter account.
- Diversity is needed to make up for biases of the individual, newsroom, and society.
- Diversity is needed to include those who have been left out of news coverage, and mitigate historical bias.
- Diversity is a way of being ethical: It improves fairness and accuracy.
- Diversity means understanding sources, giving context to facts, and explaining the complexity of issues.
- Acknowledge differences in order to appreciate them.
- Identify people by race in a story only when it’s relevant, and then explain that relevance.
- When identifying some people in a story by race, identify all. Don’t just ID the minorities and not white folks.
I discovered an example of the latter just this morning in a CNN story one of my students found about a recent incident outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant. The story says a man named Troy Dale West Jr. allegedly beat a woman named Tashawnea Hill after a brief exchange. Hill said the man shouted racial epithets at her. Hill is described as African-American, but the man’s race is not mentioned, even though the story says the FBI is investigating the incident as a possible hate crime. A mug shot of West ran with the story, leaving us to make assumptions about his race.
Not identifying this man’s race incorrectly leaves the impression that everyone is white, unless otherwise stated.
Honors Intro to Media Writing 