Covering minorities
Do we write too much about minorities? Do we publish too many photos of minorities? Some readers tell me we do.
I asked members of our reader advisory panel what they thought. I got 105 responses.
* 58 said our coverage was fair; it was balanced and reflects the makeup of the city.
* 25 said we do write about minorities too much.
* The remainder were ambivalent or off topic.
It's an interesting concept, this notion that we publish too many stories and/or photos of minorities. Most of the photos we publish actually illustrate stories that are not race-centered at all; they are simply photos of people who happen to be black, which is really the minority people are talking about.
I've never heard a good explanation of why photos of African Americans in a daily paper that serves a city whose population was 37 percent black in the 2000 Census is bothersome or objectionable. And every time I've run a check on the front pages of each of our sections, I find that we publish many more photos of white people than any other race or nationality.
A selection of the comments:
We have something like 180 ethnic or religious backgrounds represented in our community. All deserve attention.
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Which minority? Women, men, whites, non-whites, physically-challenged, financially-challenged, fiscally-fit, youth,senior citizens? We all belong to some minority or subset of humanity. All news affects some facet of our lives in some way.
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I look forward to the day that we do not judge articles in the paper if they are about blacks or whites but about human beings.
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Until those people who criticize you for writing about minorities is willing to let the minorities speak for themselves, then it's part of a community news organization's responsibility to be the voice for that group. Keep the articles coming, please.
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I wonder who you are trying to reach. What % of readership is minority? Before I retired from teaching I tried to use newspapers in my class and few, if any minorities, had access to them.
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It seems that every picture of school kids is from some poor minority school. The mostly white middle class kids from our schools would like to their schools covered or have candid pictures taken there, too.
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Considering the "large" minority population here, I sometimes think even more articles should be devoted to minority problems. As a "white" woman who moved here from the west coast, I feel the South has a long way to go in improving race relations.
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We are all minorities. It is good that we read about one another.
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I feel minorities are focused on more than non-minorities. I am usually amazed when I see a photo, or an article that shows a non-minority, which does not happen very often.
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Yes, I agree that you definitely do this. You seem to forget that we are in "the Deep South" still and you seem to have very one-sided journalism.
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Well, the minority is rapidly becoming the majority in this country. So maybe it's not the writers that need to adjust their thinking, but the readers.
Comments (3)
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I am amazed that this is even an issue. We have people who don't believe that racism even exists any more - I would say that it certainly does. Wed Sept. 24 sports page is still on my desk for some reason. C1 appears to have 3 black men, 1 asian girl, 3 white girls & 4 white men (from what I can tell). Pages C2-C3, 3 white men, 1 black man, 1 white girl. I can't believe I'm even doing this - but people who feel this way are wrong about too many minorities being featured. Do they actually look through the paper every day and tally it up? Why don't you take pictures of your child's school & activities and send them in to the Guilford Record if you're concerned they're not getting enough press?
Posted on October 1, 2008 2:10 PM
I think the more precise question to ask is not if minorities are covered too much in your publication, it is what is the context in which they are covered?
I beleive the perception is that when a Black person has his or her picture in the paper it is related to that person's involvement in criminal activity.
We are all human beings on this earth, but the conversation about race will never be over until folks are willing to acknowledge that race drives our actions and decisions and even some of our institutions in this nation.
Posted on October 1, 2008 2:56 PM
Wow! who has time to write a story about minorities being in the paper, who cares. Its shamefull that prejudice still exist amoung a changing world. Maybe thats why so many of us "blacks" :) are voting for change.
Prejudice even now is promoted in the newspaper. Not long ago on the first page they had a picture of a black man for arm robbery it was the cover story. Then under that in a smaller subsection they had a picture of two white men for Murder. Now im no PhD, but it seems as the people who killed someone would have drawn more attention to me than some black guy who robbed someone and let them live.
Posted on October 4, 2008 12:28 AM