Posted on October 1, 2018

The White House Press Room Is Overwhelmingly White. Does That Matter?

Paul Farhi, Washington Post, September 30, 2018

The New York Times hired its seventh reporter to cover the White House last month, giving the newspaper one of the largest contingents of correspondents on the beat. {snip} All seven are white.

{snip} The White House reporting staffs of the largest and most prominent outlets, particularly newspapers and newswires, tend to be the least racially diverse of all.

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Does racial background affect how a reporter covers a story? Or is it just one factor that determines how a journalist sees the world, the way age, gender, education, religious affiliation, regional and economic background, ideological leanings, or military service might?

News organizations have declared their intention to diversify their staffs since at least the late 1960s, after the Kerner Commission report on the causes of the urban riots of that decade attributed some of America’s racial divide to a highly segregated media. Newsroom recruiters often say the underlying goal of greater diversity isn’t simply numeric, but journalistic: People from different backgrounds see the world differently and can offer these perspectives to readers and viewers.

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Minority journalists accounted for 16.6 percent of the workforce in 2017, compared with 11.3 percent in 1997, according to surveys by the American Society of News Editors. By contrast, the U.S. population as a whole is 39 percent minority, including white Hispanics and Latinos, according to the Census Bureau.

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{snip} In its 104-year history, the WHCA [White House Correspondents’ Association] has had only one nonwhite president, and only five nonwhite correspondents have served on its board, according to George Condon, a White House correspondent for the National Journal who is writing a history of the organization.

The number of minority journalists at the White House, particularly African Americans, has waxed and waned, rising during the Clinton and Obama presidencies and falling during the George W. Bush and Trump administrations, said April Ryan, a correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks who has covered the White House for 21 years.

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Asked about the Times’s minority hiring record, spokeswoman Eileen Murphy {snip} noted that 60 percent of the paper’s new newsroom hires last year were female or minority journalists.

But she also said, “At the White House currently, our lineup includes gender but not racial diversity, and that is something we’re aware of and focused on getting right.”

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Politico will have seven reporters on the beat when its latest hire comes aboard next month; none is a minority. The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and USA Today also have no minority reporters on their teams covering President Trump. The Associated Press has six reporters on the beat, one of whom is an African American.

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Other news outlets have somewhat more diverse rosters. The Washington Post’s six-person team includes two nonwhite reporters; Bloomberg’s eight-member White House reporting staff also has two.

The six leading television networks field a generally more diverse group of correspondents. Although white males are the lead White House reporters for ABC, CBS and Fox News, all of the networks employ women and nonwhite journalists in prominent reporting positions.

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The limited number of minority reporters means that issues of concern to minority communities — such as Trump’s controversial initiatives to change the nation’s immigration system — are reported by people who probably don’t have much personal connection to the issue, said Yvonne Leow, who heads the Asian American Journalists Association.

At the same time, news organizations as well as readers and viewers don’t know what stories aren’t being told as a result of the composition of their staffs, said Hugo Balta, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Hispanics and Latinos don’t want to hear only about immigration restructuring, the prism through which mainstream reporting about Latinos is typically filtered, he said. The topic is important, “but to a community that is mostly U.S.-born, it’s not the only area of interest or concern when it comes to government or motivation to vote.”

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