Last Updated: January 26, 2000
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Hiring issues
Survey analysis finds that the difference in hiring
rates between whites and minorities is increasing
The Kerner Commission’s findings have been repeated so often that many
of us can recite them by heart: “The media report and write from the standpoint
of a white man’s world,” the 1968 report said, criticizing “a press that
repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the
indifference of white America.”
Eradicating that became a priority for the ASNE in 1978, and how to
do it — aside from education — seemed simple enough: get more minority
writers, reporters, photojournalists and editors into America’s newsrooms.
But this year, as ASNE’s former goal of achieving racial “parity” in
the newsroom by 2000 falls far short, here comes more bad news on the diversity
front: Back in 1968, editors complained that, “We can’t find qualified
Negroes.”
Today, more and more minority J-school grads seem to be unwanted.
That’s one finding of a research team from the University of Georgia,
whose analysis of hiring patterns of recent journalism school graduates
shows that race is a predictor of whether eager young journalists can land
a newspaper job. White students are finding jobs easier to come by than
minority grads with comparable credentials, the study says.
Lee B. Becker and his colleagues Edmund Lauf and Wilson Lowrey find
“strong evidence that race and ethnicity are associated with lower levels
of employment among journalism/mass communication graduates.”
Since 1987, Becker, of the University of Georgia’s journalism school,
has directed an annual journalism employment survey of new J-school grads.
The new analysis of how minority graduates have fared looks at 10 years
of the survey data.
Just as affirmative action efforts across the country are being scaled
back because they’re seen as no longer needed, things seem to be getting
worse in terms of entry-level placement of minority journalists. “Minority
status appears to be becoming ... increasingly negative in its contribution
to the hiring outcome,” the researchers report.
The study finds an employment gap between whites and minority journalism
graduates that is worsening. When factors like grades, internship experience,
the quality of the journalism program and other variables are held constant,
the study finds that although gender doesn’t seem to affect whether a new
graduate gets a job offer (actually, women do slightly better), race does.
The effect is worst among black graduates, the Becker team found. Hispanics
also had a tougher time getting jobs than whites, while Asian-Americans
seem least affected by the race factor.
Though couched in careful academic language, the Becker report’s message
seems clear: Intentional or not, racism still appears to be alive and well
in entry-level hiring practices at U.S. newspapers.
That conclusion is borne out by ASNE’s own hiring and retention figures.
About 4 percent of newsroom staff were minorities in 1978, when newspaper
companies declared a more diverse workforce a top priority; today, that
proportion is just 11.55 percent. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau projects
the U.S. minority population will hit 28 percent next year.
And cities where the nation’s largest newspapers circulate, of course,
already have “minority” populations approaching or above the 50 percent
mark.
Becker and his colleagues point out that the hiring data underline the
need for continuing affirmative action efforts to address embedded social
inequities in the work place. “The evidence argues convincingly that policies
designed to offset biases in the labor market have not been effective,”
they write. “A strengthening of those policies — rather than a weakening
of them — seems to be in order.”
It may not be racism, the researchers observe, although they say racism
can’t be ruled out from the data. The culprit may be “informal hiring methods,”
they say — hiring that results from social contacts and friendships, and
the tendency for people to hire others who are like them.
Such practices may not be illegal, and may even be understandable, but
they also represent an insidious and self-perpetuating barrier to changing
the face and performance of American newspapers.
The study’s findings aren’t a surprise to Federico Subervi of the University
of Texas at Austin, outgoing chair of the Commission on the Status of Minorities,
part of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
But the findings do make Subervi angry.
“This study documents the still-pervasive negligence in the portrayals
of ethnic minorities in the same media that fail to hire them,” said Subervi,
who also consults with the National Council of La Raza on media portrayals
of the Latino community.
“If anyone still wants to make any more lame excuses to eliminate affirmative
action, this study should throw them — both the excuses and maybe some
of the excusers — out the window,” Subervi said.
Pease is head of the Department of Communication at Utah State University.
