Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Diversity
A glass half-full
As contentious as 1998’s overhaul of the ASNE diversity
strategy was, it was little compared to the flak Bob Maynard and others
faced in establishing the original Year 2000 goal
By Alice Bonner
Troubling as it is to many journalists, the 1998 overhaul of ASNE’s
strategy for achieving parity in newsrooms probably is better seen — and
seized — as an opportunity instead of a setback.
Pragmatically, the Year 2000 goal for newsroom desegregation has carried
an increasingly hollow ring for years in light of the actual rate of progress.
Philosophically, this crossroads can be made an occasion to applaud the
considerable distance newspapers have come from their segregated state
30 years ago and an opportunity to devise strategies for advancing the
mission with renewed vigor.
To embrace the challenge rather than bemoaning the shortfall, almost
certainly would be the advice of one of the chief architects of the 2000
strategy, Bob Maynard. Maynard was one of the champions of press desegregation
striving to revitalize the movement around the 10th anniversary of the
Kerner Commission when the ASNE goal was set in 1978. He articulated the
2000 strategy out of that year’s swirl of diversity activism. Although
he remained faithful to the ideal of fully integrated newsrooms for the
rest of his life, Maynard clearly accepted the end of the century as a
soft deadline.
“Will our newsrooms reach that goal in our lifetime?” Maynard challenged
in a Seattle speech to journalism educators a few months after ASNE’s historic
vote to adopt the 2000 strategy. “This is not a job that any one individual
or group can accomplish alone,” he said. “It is too complex, too sophisticated,
too interesting — to be left to any one segment of the news business.”
Meeting an absolute deadline mattered less than staying determinedly
on course and enlisting every available agent in the cause, Maynard counseled.
Above all, it was important to proceed with a democratically inspired vision.
“If journalism is to keep its faith with those ideals that gave us the
First Amendment, the Bill of Rights and all of the Constitution, then we
must act with determination to purge the stigma of racism from our profession.”
Journalism had little to be proud of in the first decade after the Kerner
Commission challenged the press to lower its color bar. The newsroom desegregation
movement, launched with a whirlwind of scholarships, projects and training
programs in the wake of the urban uprisings and assassinations of the late
1960s, advanced vociferously but haltingly. The virtually invisible fraction
of journalists who were not white — most of them black — on mainstream
dailies in 1968 had inched up to a barely perceptible 4 percent by 1978.
Such progress as there was had come painfully.
Many editors resisted and and some resented early desegregation efforts,
as Norman Isaacs discovered. In 1972, Isaacs, one of the movement’s pioneers,
chaired ASNE’s first Minority Employment Committee.
After two years of hammering at the need for press desegregation, Isaacs
had little good news and recommended that his committee “be suspended and
consideration given to a reactivation at a later time.” The ASNE desegregation
effort thus went into hiatus until the 10th anniversary of the Kerner report.
(Please see sidebar.)
Every major anniversary of the Kerner Commission’s urgent call for press
integration has sparked re-energized efforts toward that goal, but the
vigorous revival of 1978, led by Maynard with the support of his many allies,
has not been matched.
The April 1978 Conference on Minorities and the Media in Washington
capped a yearlong spike in the 30-year movement. The highly visible gathering
was organized by the Maynard-led Institute for Journalism Education to
coincide with the annual ASNE convention. With the Rev. Jesse Jackson as
keynote speaker, it made headlines in hundreds of newspapers. The conference,
including a reunion of nearly 100 IJE program graduates, showcased the
first extensive survey of journalists of color, conducted by Jay T. Harris,
then assistant dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.
It also publicized the Year 2000 strategy, an 11-point plan for racial
parity in newsrooms devised by IJE, and it facilitated ASNE’s enthusiastic
embrace of the Year 2000 plan. For the rest of the century, daily newspapers
would remain vigilant and vocal in desegregation efforts, advancing the
cause substantially, even while falling far short of the goal.
Although sometimes overlooked in the understandably disappointed assessments
of press desegregation progress, the advances made in 30 years have come
at the cost of an extraordinary convergence of determination, intellect
and tenacity — with no small amount of choreographing of events.
In 1978, nothing was easy or automatic along the road from Honolulu
(where ASNE’s Eugene Patterson asked Dick Smyser, editor of The Oak Ridger,
Oak Ridge, Tenn., to revive the dormant minorities committee) to Washington
and the vote to adopt.
One formidable ally of the movement from the 1970s forward, was Gannett
executive John C. Quinn, who masterminded the ASNE leadership’s momentous
meeting in Oak Ridge in February 1978. Quinn encouraged Maynard and other
diversity leaders to attend that session, where Maynard promoted the ideas
of both the April IJE gathering and the 2000 strategy. As the 1978 ASNE
convention program chair, he arranged for effective interaction of IJE
and ASNE constituencies. The IJE leaders were determined to gain ASNE support
for the Year 2000 goal.
Nancy Hicks Maynard, who organized the 1978 IJE conference, recalled
that the objective was “to get the industry to commit to change, to (accept)
that diversity was valuable, by whatever definition. ... We did such a
good job of getting the industry to think they thought it up (the Year
2000 plan), that a lot of people believe they did. The real strategy was
to get them to own it,” she said. “And at some level, they did.”
The IJE triumph of 1978 was short-lived. Taking the desegregation vow
was one thing; producing results was quite another, as newspapers soon
proved. By 1982, ASNE’s Minorities Committee, chaired by Albert Fitzpatrick
of The Beacon Journal, Akron, was sounding a dismal warning that
the odds of achieving truly integrated American newspaper industry by 2000
ranged “somewhere between slim and none.” After the 1978 revival, the rate
of desegregation had “declined consistently and increasingly during each
of the last five years — the very years in which the most sustained and
broad-based push was being made,” Fitzpatrick’s committee report said.
An even bleaker picture emerged in 1983, as the committee under John
Seigenthaler’s leadership reported. “Progress in the employment of minorities
came to a virtual halt during the last year. ... The number of minorities
in newsrooms increased this year by only one-tenth of one percent. This
is the lowest rate of increase since the survey began in 1978. Minority
employment was static at 5.6.”
Maynard remained optimistic. He had by then expanded his role from a
leading advocate of press desegregation to its primary icon as first editor,
then publisher and owner of The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune.
The measure of progress on desegregation was a classic example of seeing
the glass half-empty or half-full, he said in 1984. “In one sense the change
from what was to what is, is spectacular. When we started (the IJE program),
less than one percent of all the professional journalists in the U.S. were
non-white. The number today is around six percent. So you could say that
is real progress, and it is.” Still, Maynard said, the industry’s goal
of reaching parity by 2000 required 15 to 20 percent minority newsroom
employment, and “unless we do some real scrambling, there’s no way we’re
gong to make that.”
Indeed there has been a good deal of real exertion toward the goal of
press desegregation in the last 30 years. The problem has been neither
a lack of energy or enthusiasm, it seems, but rather one of having too
few engaged in the efforts. Most journalists have not been invested in
the cause, though all clearly have a stake in its success. Even the best
diversity efforts have been carried by a small cadre of committed editors
and leaders while the majority remained aloof, even indifferent.
This crossroads represented by the 2000 deadline presents an opportunity
to expand the commitment, even while reshaping it.
As Maynard told the educators in Seattle 20 years ago: “Small as that
figure of four percent may be, it represents progress. It shows that this
job can be accomplished. ... There is no reason I know of that we can’t
get to the figure of 20 percent non-white in this industry. If we had not
reached the figure of four percent, we could wonder if there were a structural
obstruction of some basic sort. But the fact that we have come as far as
we have suggests that we can go all the way.”
This article and its sidebar are excerpted from Bonner’s “Changing
the Color of the News: Robert Maynard and the Desegregation of Daily
Newspapers,” a Ph.D. dissertation pending approval at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Bonner is director of the Center for the Study of Race and Media
at Howard University.
