Newsrooms refusing to report on their own diversity status
You cannot improve what you cannot measure: an old universal rule embraced also in the diversity context by more and more companies, industries and organisations who conduct and publish yearly their diversity and inclusion reports; from Microsoft and Google to the European Parliament and the governments. News media regularly report on those: the gender gap, the pay gap, the authority gap, the missing perspectives of underrepresented groups in the news. But are newsrooms willing to drive a change, clean up their own mess and air their dirty laundry in public?
Apparently and sadly, no.
Nieman Lab has offered us very interesting insights on how the news industry is doing their housekeeping on diversity surveys. According to them, the News Leaders Association’s diversity survey, the biggest diversity survey of the industry that has been conducted since 1978, is going down the drain because of the strong resistance the news organisations are showing against answering.
The survey was paused in 2020 for a couple of years, due to low participation from the newsrooms and resumed this year, with renewed energy and ambition, led by Meredith Clark, a professor at Northeastern University – who ended up resigning due to the lack of responsiveness.
Clarks’ goal was to reach at least 1,500 responses in order to produce a statistically solid report and worked hard to get them: unfortunately, she did not reach more than 303 responses…
“What has become abundantly clear to me is that diversity can never be a measure of goodwill. You don’t get to transparency about diversity by relying on people’s goodwill,” Clark said.
“It feels like supreme hypocrisy on the part of the journalism industry,” she added. “Transparency and doing the digging and the reporting — all of that is so germane to what we understand journalism to be. And we are absolutely unwilling to do it among ourselves.”
Clark also, before pledging to continue the efforts through her own research center at Northeastern, gave away a couple of very eloquent answers she received while trying to make news leaders respond to the questionnaire:
- “We’re not participating in your woke diversity exercises, you snowflakes.”
- ‘Well, what am I supposed to do, check between the legs of everyone who works for me?’”
Well done, gatekeepers!
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