RACIALPROFILING
IN THE NEWSROOM
By David Pritchard and Sarah Stonbely
This article examines patterns of story assignments at a metropolitan
daily newspaper.Thestudy's content analysisdocuments aform of racial
profiling in which African American reporters write stories mostly about
minority issues,while white reporters write stories mostly about government
and business. lnterviews with journalists documented the widespread
belief that experienceas a member of a racial minority helps the
newspaper provide better coverageof minority issues.However,journalists
of all races spoke of racial diversity only when they were talking
about minority reporters and minority-oriented topics. The hegemony of
whitenesswas such that none of thejournalists appeared to have thought
about the role of whiteness in the coverage of the largely white realms of
politics and business.
Although journalists of color continue to be vastly underrepresented
in American newsrooms relative to the proportion of people of
color in the U.S. population, much progress has been made in the past
two decades. Minority journalists were 9.5% of all U.S. journalists in
2002, up from 8.2% in 1992 and 3.970 in 1982.' Minorities accounted for
12.95%of daily-newspaper journalists in 2004, up from 10.49%in 1994
and 5.75% in 1984.=
Increasing the proportion of minority journalists in American
newsrooms is an increasingly important subject within the news industry3with
wide agreement that racial composition of news staffs should
reflect the communities they cover? However, the discussion within the
industry focuses almost entirely on hiring and retaining journalists of
color.Little attention has been given to the ways news organizations use
minority journalists after they have been hired, making it difficult to
assess the validity of critical-race theory as it applies to diversity initia-
tives.
This article offers data about the role that race plays in the topics
reporters write about at a metropolitan daily newspaper. Content analyDavid
Pritchard is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication
at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Sarah Stonbely, who received her
M.A.from UW-Milwaukee, is a doctoral student in the Department ofMedia, Culture
and Communication at New York University. The authors thank Tameka Haynes for
expert assistance with the interviews, lessica McBride and Elana Levinefor insightful
comments on a draft of this article, two anonymous reviewersfor helpful suggestionsfor
improving the manuscript, and journalists at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for
being generous with their time and thoughts.
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sis compared the kinds of local issues minority and white reporters wrote
about at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and interviews with journalists
and editors shed light on differences we found. The results, which show
that race influenced the kinds of topics journalists covered, have important
theoretical implications, suggesting that the hegemony of whiteness
can persist even in a newsroom with a relativelyhigh level of racial diver-
sity.
Theoretical
Context
The dominant argument for proportional representation of minority
journalists in the newsrooms of mainstream American news organizations
(i.e.,that such representation will lead to more sensitive, more accurate
coverage of African American, Latino, and other minority communities)5has
never been tested systematicaly.
Implicit in the argument that more journalists of color will lead to
better coverage of minority-related issues is a second assumption: That
coverage of such issues will be, and perhaps should be, accomplished
principally by minority journalists. From one point of view, this assumption
makes sense-who better to write about historically marginalized
groups than members of those groups? From another point of view,
though, the assumption threatens to legitimize a form of racial profiling
in which journalists of color are disproportionately assigned to cover
minority-oriented issues, while white reporters cover the white-dominated
arenas of government and business in which decisions are made about
distribution of power and resources.
Having minority journalists writing mostly about relatively powerless
segments of society, while white journalists write mostly about powerful
institutions, may have a certain logic, given that people of color are
overrepresented among the powerless and whites overrepresented
among the powerful. To the extent that such practicesexist,however, they
both reinforce white dominance in newsrooms and shed light on the
social processes by which white dominance is perpetuated.
Within American newspapers, government and business beats are
widely considered the fastest tracks to management positions.
Disproportionate assignment of reporters of color to minority-related
topics reduces opportunities to attain positions of authority and influence
in news organizations. Having fewer minority editors, in turn, tends
to make news organizations less sensitive to racism, including possible
biases in how they cover minority groups.h Thus, well-intentioned practices
that assign reporters of color to minority-related topics may not only
impede advancement of journalists of color into managerial positions,but
may also contribute to lower-quality coverage of minority groups.
In addition, to the extent that such practices exist, they may undermine
the very diversity initiatives that made them possible. Practices that
channel journalists of color into covering minority issues while white
journalists cover the centers of power in modern American society reinforce
white privilege and marginalize journalists who were intended to
be the beneficiaries of diversity initiative^.^ In other words, story assignments
based on race may be as much about white dominance as they
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are about inclusion of journalists of color and quality coverage of
minority communities.
When mainstream institutions such as the news media deal with
issues of race they often focus on minority races only, which-as Dyer
noted in a frequently cited essay-"has had the effect of reproducing the
sense of oddness, differentness, exceptionality of these groups, the feeling
that they are departures from the norm." Dyer added: "Meanwhile,
the norm (of whiteness) has carried on as if it is the natural, inevitable,
ordinary way of being."8
The power of whiteness flows largely from its invisibility. One
scholar wrote: "As the unmarked category against which difference is
constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to
acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural
relations."' Just as newsroom practices may reinforce the hegemonic
power of whiteness, in part through patterns of news coverage but also
through decisions that match reporters to story topics based at least in
part on racial criteria, so too do they create and re-createnorms of nonwhiteness
by constantly linking people of color with crime and other
forms of social deviance.'O However well-intentioned such practices
may be, they contribute to what Mellinger called "the embedded, surreptitious
process through which the media continually recreate racialized
identities, position people of color on the margins, and reinforce
the privileges of whiteness.""
Prior
Research
The news industry in the United States showed little interest in
non-white journalists until 1968, when the Kerner Commission
addressed a sharp rebuke to the media.I2 The commission, formed to
explain the causes of urban riots of the mid-l960s, identified the lack of
black journalists in policy-making positions in the newsrooms of mainstream
American media as a major pr0b1em.I~As the news industry
increasinglyembraced the idea of racial diversity in the 1970sand 1980s,
the commission's goal of getting African American journalists into editor
positions was largely supplanted by the idea that the racial mix of
journalists in a news organization should reflect the community which
the news organization ~0vers.I~The implicit assumption of this shift
was that mere presence of minority journalists in a newsroom will
improve coverage of minority communities and minority-related
issues.15This assumption was in place by the end of the 1980s, as
Martindale noted:
By some mysterious alchemy, the whole task of providing
better coverage of minority issues seems to have become
tied to the effort to bring more minority individuals into
journalism. The idea seems to be that if we canjust get more
minority reporters into our newsrooms, they will make sure
that we provide more accurate and representative coverage
of minorities in society.l6
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Some minority journalists, however, resisted such "racial pigeonh~ling."'~E.R.
Shipp, an African American who worked at the New York
Times before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New
York Daily News, wrote that she did not want to be "stuck in the job of
urban affairs reporter or race relations reporter" at the Times.18A minority
reporter from Los Angeles said she was "insulted by the notion that
only minorities can adequately cover minority news." She added: "You
don't have to be black to cover poverty in the ghetto, you don't have to be
Asian to cover immigration problems, you don't have to be Latino to
cover gang violence.And you also don't have to be white to cover major
city, state, and national st~ries."'~
Only one prior study has examined the effect of race on story
assignments. That content analysis of local television newscasts in twelve
communities found a pattern of what its authors called "segregated story
assignments."20AfricanAmerican reporters delivered 36%of stories with
a "black focus," but only 11%of stories with a "white focus."21Our study
extends the prior work by focusing on racial profiling at a metropolitan
daily newspaper and by including interviews with journalists in an effort
to understand reasons for any racial component in story assignments.
Specifically,the study addresses the following research questions:
RQ1: With respect to local issues at the newspaper
under study, did reporters of color disproportionately write
about minority topics while white reporters disproportionately
covered government and business?
RQ2: What rationales did journalists provide for race
being a factor in story assignments?
Context
of the
Study
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has a population of about 600,000 in a fourcounty
metropolitan area of about 1.5 million.22 The racial mix of the
city's population in 2004 was about 49% non-Hispanic white, 38%black,
9% Latino, 3% Asian-American and 1%American Indian. Outside
Milwaukee, the metropolitan area was overwhelmingly white: overall,
the four-county metropolitan area was 75% non-Hispanic white, 16%
black, 6% Latino, 2% Asian, and 1%other. The social, political, and economic
issues related to race in Milwaukee are those of urban centers
throughout the United States, especially in the so-called Rust Belt that
continues to struggle with the decline of its historically strong manufacturing
base.
The Journal Sentinel is Milwaukee's only general-circulation daily
newspaper, with a weekday circulation in 2004 of about 245,000 and a
Sunday circulation of about 430,000.23Of the 176people who wrote copy
for the Journal Sentinel (e.g., news reporters, columnists, and sports writers,
but not photographers, editors, or administrators) in fall 2003, 14.7%
(26) were members of minority groups (African Americans, Latinos, or
Asian American~).~~The racial mix of the JournalSentinel's newsroom was
more representative of its circulation area than was the case for most of
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the nation‘s largest daily newspaper^.^^ Despite the newspaper‘s relatively
good record in hiring minority journalists and stated interest in
diversity, studies have shown that race influences newspaper coverage
of crime in Milwaukee, as it does in other American cities.2h
This article is based on content analysis of Journal Sentinel coverage
of ”localpublic issues” over a three-week period in fall 2003, as well
as on interviews with journalists at the paper. We defined the concept
”Local Public Issue” (LPI)by defining its component parts. An issue is a
subject of debate that satisfies both of the following conditions: First,
that the debate is capable of being resolved, and second, that various
groups and J or organizations have differing views about how it should
be resolved. A public issue is an issue whose resolution would have an
impact on a significant portion of a community, not just on a few individuals.
A local public issue is of primary importance to the city of
Milwaukee, rather than to suburban communities or other areas. Falling
outside of the definition of Local Public Issue were many staples of
newspaper coverage, including sports, crime, and entertainment.27
Because we were interested in examining links between LPIs and the
reporters assigned to write about them, material without bylines (e.g.,
editorials and news briefs) was excluded. All bylined Journal Sentinel
stories that mentioned LPIs during the three-week period from Oct. 20
through Nov. 9,2003, were included.
Several characteristicsof each LPI mention were coded, including
the race of the byline reporter. The data permitted us to evaluate the
extent to which minority reporters covered topics that dealt disproportionately
with minority concerns.Journalists of all races often used the
adjective ”urban” to refer to such topics.
Operational Definitions. The variable ”LPI Topic” had three possible
values: (a)minority issues, (b) issues of broader interest featuring
a prominent minority public figure, and (c)those issues of broad local
relevance that had no overt racial context. Minority issues were those
that focused disproportionately on people of color in Milwaukee.
”Issues of broader interest” featured prominent minority public figures
(e.g., the category ”law enforcement administration” featured the county
sheriff and the city police chief, both African Americans). The third
value included all local public issues with no overt racial component.
Most government and business-related stories were in this category.28
Overall, 90 stories focused on LPI’s during the study period. Each
LPI mention was coded by two graduate students. Inter-coder reliability
was acceptable, with both coders agreeing on the LPI in 83 of the 90
cases (92.2%agreement, Scott’spi = .S6).29The seven discrepancies were
resolved through discussion between the two coders, sometimes involving
this article’s first author.
The variable “Race” consisted of three values: white, African
American, and Latino. Journalists’ races were common knowledge in
the Milwaukee journalism community, which includes the authors of
this study. Very few LPI stories were written by Latino reporters, so for
Method
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the quantitative analysis of the content we combined stories written by
African Americans and Latinos into a “minority” category.
To gain insight into patterns of coverage, seven members of the
Journal Sentinel news staff were interviewed. Another provided extensive
comments after seeing an early draft of this article. The interviews, taperecorded
and transcribed verbatim, were conducted by two female graduate
students, one white and one African American. Because the interviewees
were of different races and many interview questions focused on
race, we believed that a biracial interviewing team would elicit the most
reliable answers.3o
Findings RQ1 asked how reporter race related to kind of story.Of the 90 total
mentions of Local Public Issues, 68 (76%)were in stories written by white
reporters, 19 (21%)were in stories written by black reporters, and 3 (3%)
were in stories by Latino reporters (seeTable 1).
Although white reporters wrote the stories containing 76%of all LPI
mentions, they wrote none (0%)of the nine stories about LPIs of relevance
mostly to minority communities. In stark contrast, white reporters wrote
45 of the 49 stories (92%)about LPIs with no overt racial or ethnic component.
In the other category of stories-those about topics of relevance to
minorities, but also of broader interest-white reporters wrote 72%of the
stories, while minority reporters wrote 28%.
The relationship between a reporter’s race and the local public
issues he or she wrote about was statistically significant (chi-square =
35.09,2 df, p 5 .OOl). The racial focus of an LPI topic was strongly associated
with reporter race. The greater the minority focus, the more likely
that a minority reporter covered it. Similarly,the less the minority focus,
the less likely that a minority journalist did the reporting. The conclusion
of a pattern of racial profiling is difficult to avoid. White reporters tended
to write about power and about issues of perceived general interest, while
black reporters wrote mostly about minority issues.
RQ2 asked about reporter perceptions of this pattern. We turned to
Journal Sentinel staff members to answer the question. All eight informants
were asked whether reporters’ races influenced their beat assignments or
story assignments. Each interviewee’sinitial answer was “no,” regardless
of his or her race. However, the “no” was inevitably followed by a qualifier:
journalists are assigned to stories, or choose stories, that match well
with their knowledge and experience.3I For example, accordingto a white
male who had eighteen years of experience at Journal Communications
newspapers (interviewers’ comments in italics):
We get the feeling that people are assigned to stories, or beats,
depending on their race.
No, I don’t think so. There may be some small element of that,
where you try to match a person with their knowledge, and
experience and familiarity with sources in a particular segment
of the community.
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TABLE 1
RaciallEthnic Identities of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Reporters
and the Kinds of Local Public Issues They Covered
Issues of Relevance Broad Issues with Issues with No Overt Totals
Mostly to Minorities Black Public Figures Racial Component
White
Reporters 0 (0%) 23 (72%) 45 (92%) 68 (76%)
Minority
Reporters 9 (100%) 9 (28%) 4 (8%) 22 (24%)
Chi-square = 35.09, 2 df, p 5.001
After more discussion, the journalist was asked whether diversity
in the newsroom determined whether a story was published at
all.
You [lookingat and gesturing toward the AfricanAmerican
interviewer] would look at an issue perhaps differently than
I would, just because of your background, your experiences...You
don't want a newsroom full of people with the
same mindsets. ..I also think that a good reporter, regardless
of race, ethnicity, religion, will be able to cover a story as
well as anybody else.
So, it sounds like you're saying that a good journalist would be
able to know what elements of a story need to be covered and put
[them]in there, regardless of...
Yes.
...but you're also saying that the people in the newsroom, with
all the different ideas and everything, will possibly influence
how a story gets written, otherwise it wouldn't matter if it was
a homogeneous crowd or it was peoplefrom all over Milwaukee.
Yeah, I think so, I think it would perhaps change the way,
yeah, I think it might change not the way a story is written
but what's reported, I guess. There's a small difference in
that... Just having that different perspective to suggest
looking at it a different way, in terms of doing the report-
ing.
Does it take the person with the interest, and with the background,
and with the knowledge, to bring the story to light? I
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mean, I guess the basic question is, how are stories detected?
The white journalist responded to this question by telling of
his interest in mountain biking, and of a time when he suggested a
story about elderly mountain bikers to his editors. They liked the idea,
and a story on the topic was written and published. The journalist
explained:
If I didn’t have that outside interest, we wouldn’t have
done that story; the newspaper wouldn‘t have done that
story. So I think that happens in, there are other areas
where that happens. People will see something in their
own neighborhood, in their own community that will turn
into a story; maybe they’ll do it, maybe someone [else] will
do it.
So, whether or not a person brings their bias, for lack of a better
word, to the story, they might still report it objectively but the stoy
might go undiscovered ifsomeone didn‘t know about something that
was going on in the community.. . So it does matter, if there’s diversity
or not.
Right, but like I said, not only racial or ethnic diversity but
you would want people with diverse interests.... diverse
lifestyles too... I think someone who lives out in the suburbs
and has three children is going to have a different perspective
than someone who’s, you know, a gay male living
alone in the downtown area.
Given that a reporter’s interests help determine whether a story
makes it into the paper, we asked whether that meant race or ethnicity
makes a difference in what gets reported. The journalist agreed that
race and ethnicity could play a role, especially in a reporter’s choice of
sources, a choice that could influence the nature of the story.
An African American female reporter also initially cautioned
against ”jumping to the conclusion” that race is a factor in determining
which reporters write about which stories. As the discussion continued,
however, she spoke of the tendency for minority reporters at the Journal
Sentinel to cover minority topics.
With regard to black reporters covering black issues, or
things oriented to the central city, I prefer my beat-I love
my beat.
What is your beat?
My beat is urban affairs...and I just think it lends itself to
authentic reporting, in terms of, I likebeing able to tell the stories
of my people through this paper.
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Yeah...
...and I do know, I mean, if you have a problem with that, as
a black reporter, that's an issue.
lfyou have a problem with what?
If you have a problem with only being sent to cover black
issues, and you want to do something else, that's a major
problem.
Really, why?
Because then it moves outside of, this is what I want to do.
I've had exposure, I covered, as a matter of fact, I filled in for
the county government reporter, like, for two months before,
because my background is city government, urban affairs
reporting. ... However, if I'm a reporter who happens to be
black, who wants to get exposure in other areas when I'm
not allowed to, that's a problem.
After the "Really, why?" question, the journalist seemed reluctant
to return to the subject of black reporters being assigned to cover
minority issues. When asked whether race matters in reporting on a
story, she told of trying to get an interview with a black minister.
When the minister finally met with her, he said he had been reluctant
to grant the interview because a white reporter from the Journal
Sentinel had once written a story about him that emphasized his
attire-a brightly colored suit with lots of jewelry-rather than the
issues he had spoken about.
The white reporter was preoccupied with ... the outward
appearance and did not necessarily focus on what [the
minister] thought were the key issues. So [the minister]
had written [the Journal Sentinel] off; ... and not only did
[the reporter] piss [the minister] off, he pissed the whole
congregation off. .... So that's a long answer to your question
as to whether [race] makes a difference. Often times
if you don't have exposure in a certain culture you have to
ask questions.
The message was that a reporter of one race might have to invest
more time and energy to cover topics with sources of a different race.
The implication was that it is more efficient to match the races of
reporter and source so that the reporter would not have to work SO hard
to understand an unfamiliar culture.
Another interviewee was a Latino man who had worked at the
newspaper for twenty years. Like his colleagues, he initially denied
that race had anything to do with the topics reporters wrote about.
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He said, however, that racial diversity is "vital for the survival of the
newspaper."
It's not that non-minority reporters, basically white
reporters, can't report on minority affairs, it's just that
minority reporters bring a sense of the culture, a sense of
the street wisdom, to their story that white reporters generally
don't have. I think if you want to reach a new generation
of readers, it helps if you have not only minority
reporters but also minority editors, who are sensitive to
issues that may escape white people.
So, race does matter in reporting a story.
What do you mean?
So, in other words, an African American reporter and a white
reporter sent out to do the same story, will bring back different sto-
ries.
We don't know that. But we know that, in our efforts to diversify
the news, you have to have a diverse newsroom...
It's interesting ...because there is such an effort to divers@ the
newsroom, that's kind of like admitting that race does matter.
One of the credibility factors in a news story is how many
sources do you have. It used to be, the old thinking was,
well, if you have both sides of the story you have a balanced
article, well that's not true. You need more than both sides of
the story -you need all sides of the story, you need a hemispherical
look at an issue. Because one, it makes it fairer, more
accurate; but it also brings context to the many readers that
you have: black, white, brown... it also increases your knowledge
base.
Do you think that certain reporters might be able to get different
sources than other reporters based on their ethnicity?
I wouldn't say it's sourcing as much as it is, knowing what
questions to ask; knowing and having a better set of ears on an
issue than other reporters can have. ...You want a newsroom
with a big pool of talent, and everybody brings something to
the table, and ethnicity is something that can be brought to the
table.
In other words, race matters. The journalists at the Journal Sentinel
understood this, as did the editors. The editor-in-chief said that the newsroom
should be diverse not only in terms of race, but also in terms of sex,
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background, socioeconomic status, religion, and experience. We asked
him specifically about the tendency for African American reporters to
cover minority-oriented issues.
Do you think that African American reporters generally gravitate
to the stories that are about the African American population in
Milwaukee?
I think that most African American reporters that are on the
metro staff have more interest in doing coverage of issues in
the city than they do probably, in the suburbs.
Okay,but the city includes a ton of stories. Do you think that they
generally lookfor stories that are more.. .
Sometimes, it just depends, they, sure they would, some of
the cases we have more often apply for a, we had an opening
to cover urban affairs, as opposed to covering education
in [a suburban/rural county] or something like that. ...As
far as their picking the stories they do, it’s a collaborative
effort with the editors.
The Journal Sentinel has no formal policy that would channel
minority reporters toward minority-oriented stories, or white reporters
toward stories about government and business. Given the lack of an
explicit racial component in the process of deciding who covers what,
we asked the editor how it happened that African Americans who covered
city news at the Journal Sentinel were all reporting on minorityrelated
issues.
Is it plausible to say that right now,at the Journal Sentinel,
African Americans are largely doing African American-related
stories?
No.
It’s not?
Well, you could go around the paper and you’d find, ... I
guess on how you define it. Sure, there are some that do stories
that are a lot more towards the African American community
and others that don‘t.
Who’s an example of someone who doesn’t?
[Here the editor mentioned a black reporter who covers
sports and another who used to cover police, but who at the
time of the interview had been covering entertainment for
the feature section for many months.]
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I guessfeatures and sports were not included in our study because
they‘re not local public issues, as we defined them, meaning hard
news.
I mean, Eugene Kane [an African American columnist who
writes almost exclusively about minority issues] writes a column,
I don‘t know whether that was.. .
That would’ve been included because he probably would’ve been
mentioning these issues.
Right, so he writes a lot about issues that happen in the
city, he’s interested in issues having to do with, with race,
and certainly a majority of his columns have to do with
race, so I guess in the process there are stories where people
get paired up with people ... It’s not as simple as the
reporter just, I mean, sort of going off on his own ’cause
you‘ve got African American editors, the head of photography
is African American, one of the metro editors is
African American.3z
The editor, like our other interviewees, was hesitant to
acknowledge that reporters’ races determined, at least in part, the
issues they covered. His comments suggested that reporters gravitate
to topics about which they have the greatest interest and knowledge.
If minority reporters have greater interest in and knowledge
about minority issues, that‘s why they write most of the stories about
such issues.
Black reporters were somewhat conflicted about race being a
factor in determining which stories were covered by which reporters,
as evidenced by the comments of the African American woman who
said it was a ”major problem” if a black reporter wanted to cover nonminority
issues, but that she liked “being able to tell the stories of my
people.” An African American man with several years at the newspaper
was reluctant to criticize story assignments based on reporter
race. ”When editors assign minority reporters to cover minority
issues, they (the editors) think they are doing a good thing, and many
times they are,” the reporter said. “I don’t think it’s fair to say or suggest
it’s somehow wrong to do that when the intent is actually to
draw upon the presumed insights of a reporter based on his or her life
experiences.”
Discussion
Our study has two principal findings. The first is that race is an
important determinant of the topics reporters write about: Minority
reporters at the Journal Sentinel who dealt with Local Public Issues
usually did so in the context of stories about the minority population
in Milwaukee, while white reporters generally did not deal with
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minority issues. The second finding is that reporters and editors
alike rationalized the situation by saying reporters were assigned to
stories and beats at least in part based on their life experiences,
which in a majority-minority city such as Milwaukee are heavily
influenced by race.
We have given the provocative label ”racial profiling” to this set
of practices, and indeed the results of our study do provoke thought.
Content analysis suggested that race was an important factor in topics
journalists wrote about. Interviews confirmed the importance of race,
and also documented the widespread belief that a journalist’s experience
as a member of a racial minority is valuable as the newspaper
strives for accurate and thorough coverage of issues of importance to
African Americans and other minority groups. However, racial experience
was explicitly valued only in the case of minority journalists. The
invisibility of whiteness is such that none of the journalists we interviewed
mentioned the idea that being white might be useful in covering
the overwhelmingly white worlds of government and business.
The idea that a journalist’s race influences the quality of the
stories he or she writes assumes that professional and organizational
norms are relatively weak influences on the news a given journalist
produces. Very little research has addressed this question directly,
but the weight of scholarly opinion is that professional and organizational
norms are the most important influences on journalistic
Power in the United States is principally the affair of whites, even
in a majority-minority city like Milwaukee. Might it be that, without
any overt racist intent whatsoever, the newspaper assigns whites to
cover power in an unconscious recognition that power is a “white“
issue?34The reach of our data does not extend far enough to support
such a conclusion, but it is one of a number of plausible possible explanations
for the patterns we found. Another plausible explanation is that
minority journalists prefer to cover minority issues rather than issues of
power or of more general interest. Such an explanation would be consistent
with the views of some African American reporters, including
one who said, “With black reporters, I think the reason most end up
writing about ‘black‘issues is because African Americans in general are
preoccupied with social and racial issues and thus gravitate toward
those kinds of stories more.”
However, it may also be important to bring non-white perspectives
to coverage of the centers of power. A black columnist for the
Journal Sentinel, reviewing the newspaper’s coverage of the 2004
Milwaukeemayoral race, wrote: “Thispaper is not perfect; it does make
mistakes. An unfortunate example was the absence of black reporters
and editors in all but the periphery of the mayoral coverage.”35
The reporters all told us of being assigned to do stories they had
suggested on topics which, they agreed, may not have been done-or
may not have been done as well-by someone of a different race or
background. They all agreed that diversity in the newsroom was good
and necessary primarily for this reason.
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That said, our findings validate critical-race theory in two ways.
The first was the invisibilityof whiteness in discussions about the bases
for story assignments. The journalists, whatever their race, spoke of
racial diversity only when they were talking about minority reporters
and minority-oriented topics. Thehegemony of whiteness was such that
none of the journalists appeared to have thought about the role of whiteness
in the coverage of the largely white realms of politics and business.
Unless whiteness and its effectsbecome visible, the pattern of racial profiling
that our content analysis revealed is likely to endure.
A second way in which our findings validate critical-race theory
has to do with the irony of diversity initiatives in journalism. Although
the Journal Sentinel had one of the most racially diverse news staffs (relative
to the composition of the community it served) of any large newspaper
in the United States at the time of the study, the pattern of racial
profiling we found was an empirical verification of Mellinger's hypothesis
that a newspaper diversity initiative "actually privileges whiteness
and marginalizes the very journalists of color whom it purports to welcome
into the fold."36 By and large, reporters of color covered Local
Public Issues of secondary importance to people in the newsroom.
Everyone acknowledged (although reluctantly in some cases) that
minority reporters' race was a factor in the topics they covered. In contrast,
no one even whispered that race might have been a factor in the
choice of white reporters to cover centers of power such as politics and
business. The implicit notion was that minority reporters get their
assignments because of their race, while white reporters get theirs
because of hard work and talent. Such thinking keeps journalists of
color at the margins of news creation and newsroom decision making.
Our study analyzed only three weeks of news content,but the patterns
of content in those weeks were typical of Journal Sentinel content
for the several months before and after the data-collection period. Our
confidence that we chose a representative three-week period was bolstered
by the fact that none of the stafferswe interviewed suggested that
the pattern of results was inaccurate.
The racial component in Journal Sentinel story assignments was
similar to the pattern of "segregated" assignments found by a study of
local television news in twelve c~mrnunities.~~Nonetheless, additional
research at different news organizations in different cities would be
helpful in determining how widespread racial profiling in the newsroom
may be.
NOTES
1.David H. Weaver, Randal A. Beam, Bonnie J. Brownlee, Paul S.
Voakes, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 22sf
Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn ofa New Millennium (Mahwah,NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007), 12.
2. American Society of Newspaper Editors, "Tables from the 2004
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Newsroom Employment Survey,” April 20, 2004, available at
http:/ /www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=5147(accessedJune 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/ indexsfm?id=1669 (accessed 14June 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 AfricanAmericans who believe what they
read in their local newspaper. See Adams and Cleary, “The Parity
Paradox.”
6. See, e g , Don Heider, WhiteNews: WhyLocal News Programs Don’t
Cover People of Color (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000); and
Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Federico A. Subervi-Vblez, Sharon BramlettSolomon,
and Don Heider, ”Minority Journalists’ Perceptions of the
Impact of Minority Executives,” Howard Journal of Communication 15
(January-March2004):39-55.
7. 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.
8.Richard Dyer, ”White,” Screen 29 (autumn 1988):44-64.
9. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White
People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. and expanded ed. (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2006), 1.
10. 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).
11.Mellinger, ”Counting Color: Ambivalence and Contradiction in
the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Discourse of Diversity,”
129.
12. On the newspaper industry’s view on minority journalists before
1968, seeAlf Pratte, ”’...But There are Miles to Go’: Racial Diversity and
the American Societyof Newspaper Editors, 1922-2000,“Journalof Negro
History 86 (spring 2001):160-79.
13. Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders (Washington:U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).
14. This is not to say that interest in having journalists of color in
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decision-making positions has entirely disappeared. Fairly recent
empirical studies that document the importance of minority news executives
include Heider, WhiteNews: Why Local News Programs Don’t Cover
People of Color; and Rivas-Rodriguez et al., “Minority Journalists’
Perceptions of the Impact of Minority Executives.”
15. Raymond N. Ankney and Deborah A. Procopio, ”Corporate
Culture, Minority Hiring, and Newspaper Coverage of Affirmative
Action,” Howard Journal of Communication 14 (July2003):159-76.
16. Carolyn Martindale, quoted in Richard Gross, Patricia A. Curtin,
and Glen T. Cameron, ”Diversity Efforts in the Newsroom: Doin’ the
Right Thing or Just a Case of Show Me the Money?” (paper presented at
the annual meeting of AEJMC, New Orleans, August 1999).
17. Pamela T. Newkirk, “Guess Who’s Leaving the Newsrooms?”
Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2000.
18. 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.
19. 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, ZOOO), 8, 10-11, 57, 139, 146.
20. Paula M. Poindexter, Laura Smith, and Don Heider, “Race and
Ethnicity in Local Television News: Framing, Story Assignments, and
Source Selections,“ Journal of Broadcasting G. Electronic Media 47
(December 2003):524-36.
21. Poindexter, Smith, and Heider, “Race and Ethnicity in Local
Television News: Framing, Story Assignments, and Source Selections,”
531.
22. Information in this paragraph not attributed to other sources
comes from US.Census Bureau, Wisconsin Quick Facts, available at
http:/ /quickfacts.census.gov/ qfd states155/55000.html (accessed July
19, 2004).
23. Rick Romell, “Circulation drops at paper,” Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, May 4, 2004.
24. 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.
25. Of the forty highest-circulation newspapers in the United States,
only eight had news staffswith 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
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1,413 American newspapers and their circulation areas,” May 2004,
available at http:/ /powerreporting.com/knight/ top200.html (accessed
July 20, 2004).
26. With respect to Milwaukee, see David Pritchard, ”Race,
Homicide, and Newspapers,” Journalism Quarterly 62 (autumn 1985):
500-08; 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, see Richard J. Lundman,
“The Newsworthiness and Selection Bias in News about Murder:
Comparative and Relative Effects of Novelty and Race and Gender
Typificationson Newspaper Coverage of Homicide,” Sociological Fovum
18(September2003): 357-86.
27. 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.
28. Acompletelist of the LocalPublic Issues and the values they were
assigned is available from the first author.
29. William A. Scott, ”Reliability of Content Analysis: The Case of
Nominal Scale Coding,” Public Opinion Quarterly 19(autumn 1955):321-
25.
30. Schedulingproblems 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.
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. 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); and Dan Berkowitz, ed., Social
Meanings of News (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997).For
example,a study of local televisionnews in thirty-six markets found that
”Blackanchors 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.”
See Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White
Mind: Media and Race in America (Chicago:University of Chicago Press,
34. 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 followingareas-Milwaukee city govern-
2000), 84-87.
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ment, Milwaukee county government, the state capital bureau in
Madison, and the Washington, D.C., bureau-was white.
35. Gregory Stanford, “Racial split played out; Barrett faces big challenge,“
MilwaukeeJournalSentinel, April 11,2004.
36. Mellinger, ”Counting Color:Ambivalence and Contradiction in the
American Societyof Newspaper Editors’ Discourse of Diversity,” 130.
37. Poindexter, Smith, and Heider, “Race and Ethnicity in Local
Television News: Framing, Story Assignments, and Source Selections.”
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