Help Wanted: Black Journalists

BY JESSICA HANTHORN
247-4537
March 19, 2005 HAMPTON -- The news media should do a better job of covering black families, and the key way to do that is get more African-American representation in journalism, according to a noted panel of journalists who gathered at Hampton University on Friday.
"We did not finish the job of telling the story of the black family," said Jack E. White, a former Time magazine columnist and editor. "The black community is much more complex than we thought it was in the 1960s, and the media continues to oversimplify our story."
The session was part of Hampton University's 27th annual Conference on the Black Family, which started Wednesday and ended Friday. The conference, hosted this year by HU's journalism school, focused on ways to repair and restore black families.
The journalists - who now work as professors at HU - gathered to discuss how the media has portrayed the black family since the 1968 Kerner Report. That report, released by an 11-member panel appointed by President Johnson, criticized the media's coverage of black communities, saying they had "failed to analyze and report adequately on the racial problems in the United States."
Speakers also included former New York Times columnist Earl Caldwell, sports journalist Doug Smith and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts. They called on more African-Americans to work in the news media and own media companies to help improve coverage.
Several panelists argued the media still does a poor job analyzing and reporting racial problems more than 35 years after the Kerner Report's release.
"Media did then, and do now, render our lives in primary colors and in the most simplistic ways possible," said Pitts. "Our community is rendered in a very few stock ways."
However, when white people own many media companies and most working journalists are white, it's often difficult to get stories about black people into the newspaper, said Smith, who worked for years at USA Today.
Smith shared a story:
When he wrote a piece for USA Today about tennis players Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, the story ran on the front page. But a similar story about Venus and Serena Williams was delegated to the sports pages. He thinks USA Today's leadership didn't see the importance of the story. "When you have an operation that is still controlled, essentially, by whites, it's difficult to get them to understand," he said. "We need more black people in the boardrooms in the news media."
The Kerner Report also said the journalistic profession has been "shockingly backward" in hiring, training and promoting African-Americans.
Today, the numbers of minority journalists are still low. Just 5.4 percent of journalists were black in 2004, according to a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. But, of minorities in newsrooms, the percentage who work as supervisors has grown. In 1978, 4 percent of minority journalists worked as supervisors; that number increased to 20 percent in 2004.
The number of minorities working as journalists in 1978 was about 3.9 percent, and in 2004, that number had grown to nearly 13 percent. The panelists said it's not enough. News outlets need to do more to recruit black employees, and black families should do more to own media businesses.
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