1999 Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture
by
Gregory Favre
Vice President, News, The McClatchy Company
Delivered at University of California, Riverside
April 5, 1999

The Press-Enterprise Lecture Series was begun in Riverside, Calif., in 1966 by Howard H. (Tim) Hays Jr., then editor of The Press-Enterprise, in cooperation with the University of California, Riverside. Upon the sale of the newspaper in 1997 to A.H. Belo Corp., his son, Tom Hays, endowed the lecture and the Hays name was added to the title in honor of Tim Hays.

The intent of the Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture series is to bring to the university each year someone of exceptional achievement in journalism to address important topics related to the news media and thereby further the knowledge and interests of both the university and the community at large.

When (Marcia McQuern, president/editor & publisher of The Press-Enterprise) called and asked if I would speak tonight I was bowled over by the thought of joining the honor roll of journalists who have appeared here in years past. This is especially true since Tim Hays' name is now in the title. Tim has been and is one of the crown jewels of our business, an owner who always believed that newspapers are a public service and always battled to protect the First Amendment.

But my moment of giddy euphoria was swept away when I realized exactly what I had agreed to do.

I am number 34 on the list of lecturers, which means that 33 men and women, including one of my special heroes, the late C.K. McClatchy, have come here and have spoken with wisdom and eloquence about our craft and about our responsibilities.

What did that leave me to talk about? I studied the titles and read many of the 33 lectures and I did the only thing I could – I panicked.

But then one day shortly afterwards I was once again reading the 30-year-old words of the Kerner Commission Report, words that left bruises on the body of the press, words that ripped away much of the shaky foundation on which the press had stood for dozens of decades.

The press, the report said, "has been basking in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with a white man's eyes and a white perspective." How true that was.

And then I read the most recent report on racial relations in this country.

"America's greatest promise in the 21st century lies in our ability to harness the strength of our racial diversity," the President's panel wrote last year. "The greatest challenge facing Americans is to accept and take pride in defining ourselves as a multi-racial democracy."

Certainly, much has changed in the 30 years between the report of the commission chaired by Gov. Otto Kerner and the report of the panel chaired by Dr. John Hope Franklin. But we are still wrestling with the ghosts of the past, trying to wipe away the virus of racism and sexism that still runs much too deep in the bloodstream of this country, clogging our ability to truly get along with each other.

And those of us in the press still have to deal with our shameful past performance of excluding people of color and women in our newsrooms and in our news columns.

We have to come to grips with the fact that, for many years, much of the news media presented a narrow and distorted view of minorities and women in America, and some still do, helping to shape public opinion in a way that has contributed to the tensions in our society and has led to some ugly public policies.

Yes, there has been progress. That can't be denied. But as one Latino friend, who has achieved great success, said recently, "Sometimes it seems that we have come a long way to nowhere."

Perhaps he feels this way because for years he was unable to get a job in a newsroom, although he was extremely qualified. He had to postpone his dreams because his dreams didn't have the same chance of survival as the dreams of those of us who were not minorities.

Perhaps he feels this way because for too long he had been provided only illusions and not opportunities, only the poverty of emptiness and not the richness of hope.

Perhaps he feels this way because for years there was no clear direction to dignity and to self-determination for him to follow in his journey toward equality.

Or perhaps he feels this way because he knows that he is just one of the many hundreds of Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans, who have experienced the same door-in-your-face treatment as he did before someone finally opened the door and let him in.

Why shouldn't he feel this way? Why shouldn't another friend, an African American, who also has been quite successful, feel this way? He drove a cab after college graduation because he couldn't get a newsroom job. Now, there's nothing wrong with driving a cab, but his ambition was to be a working journalist. That's why he had studied so hard and prepared himself just like the white students in his class, and they had secured newspaper jobs. What should he feel?

As. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in one of his earliest public speeches, "There comes a time when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair."

Yes, the numbers today are encouraging. This nation's newsrooms now have more than 11 percent of people of color and many women have cracked the glass ceiling. But in 42 percent of the newsrooms there is no minority presence at all.

And the face of the nation's newsrooms is still a far cry from the rapidly changing face of America, which means we cannot rest now.

There will be a day in the next century when we all will be minorities and that will happen first here in California. There will be no majority group of people and that makes it even more urgent that we learn to live together and once and for all exorcise the evils of the "isms" from our system.

During the 1960s, we had so few people of color in our newsrooms that newspapers had to urgently recruit African Americans to report on and provide insight on the civil rights movement, on the riots that left a number of our cities in flames and on the anger that spilled into the streets during those days of rage.

Yes, there has been progress since then. Unlike my Latino friend, I believe that we have come a long way from nowhere. Obviously, it is easier for me to believe that. But I also believe that it is a long way to the somewhere we need to be.

So, how do we get there? How do we make sure that we have people on our staffs who understand different cultures, who can inspire soul searching, who can provide robust debate, who through their passionate pleas will force us to always think in terms of all segments of our communities and not just one or two?

How can we help diverse people appreciate their differences, as well as what they share, if we do not have diversity in our own buildings?

How can we give our current readers and our future readers a deeper and more substantial exposure to the issues that affect their daily lives if we do not know anything about the lives of so many? How can we know the stories we are missing if we continue to be as myopic as we have been in the past?

How can we deal with the doubts and the fears of all the people if none of us have ever had the same doubts or felt the same fears as many in our communities do?

How can we tear down the barriers of bigotry if we have no one in our newsrooms who has ever felt the awful pain of prejudice?

How can we understand the humiliation of being rejected simply because of the color of your skin if we look around at our colleagues and all are white?

How can we think that we can grasp the true complexities and conflicts in our communities if we do not create a sense of place and a sense of belonging for everyone?

I cannot speak in the first person about the injustices and humiliation that people of color and women have had to suffer through the years, or of the hurt of the vile words thrown at gays and lesbians, or the cruel remarks made about the young and old with disabilities. But what I can do, and what must be done by all who are in a position to do so, is to work harder to make our staffs reflect our communities.

If we don't, we will never cut the chains that have tethered us to our reprehensible past. If we don't, we will continue to add to the huge gap that exists between the fundamental perceptions of people of color and whites in this country. If we don't, we will never succeed in connecting people together in communities of interest and in giving all people a chance to have a voice in the way they are governed.

If we don't, we will fail.

Call me an optimist or call me just plain foolish, but I won't allow myself to believe that we will fail. I won't allow myself to believe that change and acceptance and inclusion will continue to be replaced in too many places by resistance and rejection and exclusion.

But we can't wish it to happen. It will take strong leadership from the top, from the owners and publishers, from the editors and supervisors, if we are to succeed. Leadership that is informed by a moral compass, leadership with heart and soul and passion, leadership that truly cares about providing a level field for those with unfulfilled ambitions.

Yes, I know that there are those at almost every newspaper who cringe and walk away at the mere mention of diversity, who are critical and cynical about any effort to broaden the makeup of our newsrooms.

And we all should be embarrassed at the newspaper conventions when dozens of editors and publishers run for the exits when a diversity segment is next on the program. God forbid that we should be exposed to other viewpoints.

If we are to succeed, we must make diversity a company-wide policy at every newspaper, inject it into our values just as we inject our journalistic standards into those values.

We must constantly examine ourselves and our newspapers, asking ourselves if we are being inclusive, if voices different from ours are being given an opportunity to be heard, if those unlike us are able to see themselves in our news and advertising columns, if we are abolishing the stereotyping that still appears too often in too many newspapers, if we are miscovering or undercovering wide groups of people.

We must give more thought as to how we can fill the pipeline with more minority candidates, reaching down as far as the elementary schools to encourage young people to join us. Then we need to help them with scholarships and internships.

We must work harder on retention and promotion of minorities and women, shattering the artificial walls and ceilings, making sure that people do not have to forget who they are to have an equal opportunity to become what they want to be.

We must foster a welcoming environment at our newspapers, create mentoring programs internally and externally to ease the strains of new responsibilities for all of our people, and provide training for everyone in our buildings so that they can relate to the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial society of today.

We cannot rest now.

In the past 20 years the net increase each year of minorities in newsrooms has been about 200. And we would need to add more than 1,200 minorities this year to increase the percentage from 11-plus to 12-plus. One percentage point.

If we have any hope of reaching the goal of the nation's newsrooms reflecting the population mix of America in the foreseeable future, then we need to stop trying to affix blame, stop pointing fingers at each other, stop filling meeting rooms with angry words instead of hopeful ideas.

Let us confess up front that our past performances cannot be justified. We can't wish away the harm we have caused for so many. We can't stop time and tell those we have ignored for so many years that we are sorry and that their children and grandchildren shouldn't think badly of us.

We can't. So let's find things we can do and do them.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors and others are hard at work seeking solutions.

Nothing is off the table at this point. Paying off student loans, starting summer journalism camps for students, creating a farm system so that smaller papers can work with larger papers, reaching out to minorities graduating in other disciplines, doing something about our starting salaries, developing institutes for non-journalism majors and dozens of other ideas.

The Associated Press Managing Editors and ASNE are asking every American newsroom to call a time-out during the week of May 17 and talk about diversity in coverage as a core value. Take the time, they are asking, to examine your own newspaper and have a candid conversation about how you are really doing in portraying the life of your communities.

There is no reason that every newspaper in the country shouldn't be participating in this endeavor. Don't be afraid to look in the mirror. You may not be the fairest of them all, but you will get better if you pay attention to the reflected image.

Or as the English essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle once said, "What we have done is the only mirror by which we can see what we are."

On another front, the Freedom Forum, a foundation that has quilted diversity into part of everything it does, is making a special effort to expand the pipeline of people of color. The Chips Quinn program, one of the more successful initiatives, is being doubled in size to include more than 90 students.

And the wonderful thing about the Chips Quinn scholars is that almost all come from journalism programs that are too often overlooked, and 88 percent of them remain in the news media, a large percentage in newspapers.

The folks at the Freedom Forum will be doing more things. They are searching for good ideas, just as many others are doing.

And then we have to take these ideas and breathe life into them.

We have no choice. We can't continue doing only what we have been doing. We need bold initiatives if we have any prayer of making things better. We need to shine the light of knowledge on this goal we pursue. If we don't, that goal will remain a dark and distant vision.

We cannot rest now.

It is our responsibility to help build bridges between people so that someday we can eliminate the discord and distrust and discontent which has become part of the fabric of this nation.

And we have to do it at a time when there are those who are preaching and pretending that all of a sudden we all are colorblind and the need to act affirmatively is long gone.

Tell that to the children who don't have access to good schools as they are growing up and are then made to feel that it's their fault they are behind. Tell that to the many people who are not allowed full membership in our society, not allowed to exert their own worth as human beings. Tell that to the wounded stranded on the side of the road to progress.

Tell that to the many millions who live under the poverty line. Or to the mothers whose children do not live beyond the age of one because there was no pre-natal or postpartum care available. Tell that to the millions of Americans starving for the bread of hope while so many of our own closets are filled to the brim. Or to those who just want a chance to prove that they have something to offer.

Tell that to those who have fallen through the safety nets because those nets have been shredded by political leaders who play to the haves and ignore the have-nots. Or to one of every two African American children who are living in poverty, or to the Latino migrant workers who live in hovels and break their backs to put fruit and vegetables on our tables, or to those who believe that their only outlet for dissent is violence, who have guns and knives in their hands rather than pens and pencils because that is the only environment they have ever known.

Tell that to the African Americans in and around Jasper, Texas. Or to the African Americans in Trenton, North Carolina, where the mayor says they are not qualified to serve in government and, besides, he says, they would rather work for whites.

Or tell it to anyone who heard or read about the radio host who made one of the most blatantly racist remarks possible after playing a song by black hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill. Or tell it to tens of thousands of Native Americans, who, as the presidential report said, have become this country's "most invisible minority".

No, there can be no softening of our commitment as long as there are so many hard hearts out there, as long as there are those who would exploit our differences to enrich themselves, even though we should be celebrating those differences rather then fearing them.

There will be many times when we will suffer the onslaught of criticism, we always have and always will, especially when there is a crisis in our communities. But we must not waiver in our resolve. We must not give in to those who yell the loudest. But rather we must work harder to bring civil discourse and understanding to the discussion table.

This is especially true today when we have so many shrill and obscene voices preaching collision and division without adequate counterpoints, voices that hurt rather than heal, voices that promote confrontation rather than cooperation.

All you have to do in too many cities is turn on your radio and you can hear the voices of those who live in the extremes, or ride the Internet and you can read what they have to say, or, sadly, in some cities, pick up the daily newspaper and you will find that the extremists are overly represented.

We in the news media have an obligation to frame the discussions better and wider so that people across the total community can understand all that is involved.

How else can we hear and discuss different viewpoints and different ideas that grow out of a person's life experience? How else can we cut through the hypocrisy and rhetoric?

Someday we all will be asked what we did to improve a society in which discrimination was tolerated as long as it didn't enter our own immediate lives; what we did in a society where there was so little concern for those on the outside looking in.

We will be asked if we involved ourselves in the struggles, if our hearts and our help were on the side of those who were deprived of equality of treatment.

How will we answer?

We simply can't isolate ourselves from the opinions and thoughts of others unlike us if we have any hope at all of publishing newspapers that will relate to our changing reader base in the next century.

We can't win as a people if we do not fight the good and right fight against intolerance and indifference and institutional racism and sexism.

We cannot rest now.

The history of newspapers is littered with our failures to anticipate what is coming and not being prepared to act ahead of the changes in society. This has been especially true on major movements in this country.

Just look back a few decades: Only a few journalists were there when a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, inspired by a courageous woman named Rosa Parks, helped launch a major drive for civil rights for all, a drive during which Dr. King marched thousands of Americans through the valley of lost hope to the mountaintop of dreams, putting his own freedom at risk to gain freedom for others.

Only a few journalists were on the front lines early on in Vietnam reporting the truth of what was happening and giving legitimacy to the protests that were stampeding across this nation.

We missed the start of the women's movement, missed the conservative tide that came in with Reagan, missed the fallout from the need to have two incomes in almost every household, missed the return of voters to the center in last year's elections.

We didn't do a very good job in the beginning on the state of health care and child care and elder care. And these are just a handful of the stories we were tardy reporting for our readers.

We have to stop missing and start hitting.

If we become irrelevant in people's lives, we will not have newspapers to publish. Surely, that is a message that even those whose hearts and minds can be found only at the bottom line can understand.

There are many economic issues in our business that are driven by the demographic changes exploding across the map, and as the population becomes more and more diverse these issues will grow in numbers and importance.

Look around and you will see that more minorities are starting businesses each year. More minorities are rising up in the corporate world each year. More niche publications serving the minority communities are being created each year, independently and as adjuncts to mainstream newspapers. Each of the minority groups represents billions of dollars being circulated in the marketplace.

So if you need some reason other than that it is the right thing to do, then a persuasive business case can be made for diversity.

We cannot rest now.

Even though there are those who predict we will be "fossilized" by the Internet, I believe that with the proliferation of media, print and electronic, newspapers will be the last mass medium, the last and best hope to bring people together, to create social cohesion, to help free us from the fears that drive so much of the hatred in this country, fears which have been passed on from generation to generation.

But if indeed we are the last mass medium, then that's exactly what we must be. We cannot, as some have already done, restrict our circulation drives only to those areas of our cities that some advertisers want and many of our executives believe are the designated best areas of the cities.

If we do that, we can't be the real truth-tellers in our cities and we can't help people piece together the fragments of modern life and learn from each other and from our differences. If we do that, we will be operating in the darkness of ignorance.

If we do that, we should fail.

I know that change is washing over us and there are days when the tornado of technology leaves us wondering if we are going to be blown away with the wind.

But I also believe that if we stick to our core values, and a commitment to diversity must be high among those values, then we will survive the storm and continue to be the news and advertising source that people know and trust the most in their communities.

We cannot rest now.

Newspapers are more than a collection of facts and information. I have always thought of a newspaper as being alive, printed words that can be invested with all of their potential.

Perhaps that's why I like some thoughts from the great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He expressed the belief that knowledge can be transformed when there is an atmosphere of excitement and an environment of imagination. In that context, he wrote, "a fact is no longer a bare fact, it is no longer just a burden on the memory, it is energizing as the author of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes."

I can't think of any place where there should be more of an atmosphere of excitement and an environment of imagination than in a newsroom. The search for facts and the search for truth and sharing what we learn with others is what we do and what gives our work meaning.

This world in which we live today is much more complicated than it ever has been. All of our clear and unquestioned guidelines have been caught up in an avalanche of contemporary conflicts.

This world is filled with too many people who have become blind to human dignities and to the spiritual values that give our lives purpose and direction, a world in which we have not nearly scrubbed away the harsh stains of bigotry and awful atrocities from the soul of this nation.

It is a time when communities as we have known them are breaking up, public places are becoming scarce, a time when there is an evaporation of the interests we share with our neighbors, a time when groups of people are losing a connection with us and with each other.

There are at least 150 ethnic and racial groups in this nation today. You can walk on almost any public school campus in California, or walk on the campus here at UC Riverside, and you can see what much of the rest of America will look like sometime in the next century. And our challenge is to reflect and accurately report on this wonderful pluralism that is our future.

This makes our jobs tougher. But it also makes what we do more important and more rewarding, if we do it well. If we give our readers the layers of information they need and do it with depth and sophistication. If we put context and perspective into our reporting and do not oversimplify as so many of our TV brethren and talk show hosts do. If we fully understand and buy into the fact that the value of communities must be asserted.

And if we have any hope at all of building communities that are rich in spirit and togetherness then we have to examine ourselves through the lens of history and then ask tough questions.

How are we listening and to whom are we listening? What voices are we getting into the paper, those who yell the loudest or those who have something thoughtful to say? Do we capture the language that people use and convey the nuance and essence of stories? Do we really know who our readers are and what they expect of us? Are we guided by a set of values that are reflected in what we do? Are we too frightened to embrace change?

And, perhaps most of all, we must ask ourselves what do we gain if we are commercial and financial successes, pleasing Wall Street and those whose only imperative is making money, but we do not serve our communities and those who live in them?

We cannot rest now.

Diversity is understanding and cherishing all of our differences, recognizing all of our backgrounds and beliefs and lifestyles, all of our physical and psychological contrasts, recognizing that we become better when we share ideas and experiences.

There have been many times in our history when we needed to help unwrap the garments of righteousness which have covered the obvious wrongs in our society. And that time has come again.

If the legacy we leave is simply empty talk about achieving true diversity, in the people we hire and in the papers we publish, then our legacy will be one of shame.

To avoid such an ignoble result, we need to work harder than we have in the past. We need to be smarter then we have been in the past.

Listen to the late Pablo Casals, one of the world's musical geniuses, when a reporter asked him, "Mr. Casals, you are 95 years old and you are the best cellist in the world. Why do you continue practicing six hours each day?"

Mr. Casals replied, "Because I think I can still make progress."

Wise words, indeed.

There is so much progress left to be made, so much anger to calm and dreams to fulfill, so many problems to solve for the moment and solutions to seek for all seasons, that we can never pause in our efforts.

We cannot rest now.

And when I think about all of our challenges I am reminded of a story I read years ago. It was about a father and a son who were sitting together in their living room one night and the father was trying to read his newspaper. But the son kept pestering him and he couldn't read.

Finally, the father grabbed a magazine and turned to a page where there was a map of the world. He tore it into pieces and gave them to his son to put together again.

Well, in almost no time the boy returned with the completed map and the father was astounded.

"I didn't know you knew so much about the geography of the world?" the father said.

"I don't," the boy replied, "I didn't bother with the world. You see there is a picture of a person on the back and I just put the person together right and the rest of the world came out all right too."

The obvious answer comes from the uncluttered mind of a child: Solutions begin with each of us individually.

We need to ask if we have put ourselves and our institutions together right, ask if we have made a difference or have even tried to do so, ask if we have created an environment where no one is invisible, ask if we can look around at our colleagues and see a rainbow.

Only when the answer is a resounding yes, yes to each of these questions, only then will we be able to say, well done.

And then, and only then, can we rest.