'Race Relations and the Media in the 21st Century'

Remarks at National Press Club on newsroom diversity

By Charles L. Overby
Chairman and CEO, The Freedom Forum

07.23.01

Printer-friendly page

Charles L. Overby

Editor's note: A video Webcast of Charles Overby's luncheon address to the National Press Club is available from the NPC's Web site. An audio Webcast of this event is also available from National Public Radio. Program runs approximately 50 minutes. Real Audio/Real Player is required to view/listen to these Webcasts, and a minimum 28.8 Internet connection is recommended for best results.

Thank you, Dick Ryan, for that generous introduction. I'm grateful for the leadership of Dick at the National Press Club. I've known Dick since we covered the 1976 presidential campaign together. We could tell some interesting stories about that campaign.

I also appreciate the leadership of your program chair, Frank Aukofer. Frank was a scholar for a year at The Freedom Forum and the First Amendment Center.

The Washington press corps is often criticized in and outside Washington as a monolithic group of pack journalists. I know first-hand that both Frank Aukofer and Dick Ryan represent the best of the Washington press corps. The readers in Milwaukee and Detroit know that, too.

I'm also pleased that so many students could be in the audience today. I'm particularly happy that students from my alma mater, the University of Mississippi, are here as part of their participation in the Trent Lott Leadership Institute.

I want to say a special thank you for the life of Katharine Graham. This morning a memorial service was held for this courageous publisher and owner of The Washington Post. She was a leader in encouraging newspapers to improve their diversity. She was always gracious and interested in the work of The Freedom Forum and the Newseum. We'll miss her.

I want to pay special tribute to Eric Price, deputy mayor of economic development for the District of Columbia. Eric was the leading player, along with Mayor Anthony Williams, in working out the $100 million sale of land to The Freedom Forum on Pennsylvania Avenue.

This transaction will allow us to build a major new home for The Freedom Forum and its four priorities: the First Amendment, International press freedoms, newspaper newsroom diversity and the Newseum. Our new Newseum will be dazzling, a state-of-the-art facility that will attract millions of visitors over time. It will represent the largest public education program designed to teach about news and the First Amendment anywhere in the world.

I want to say to this national audience that Mayor Williams and the D.C. Council have demonstrated to us that the District of Columbia is an exciting, positive place to do business. It's a new day in Washington, D.C.

If you have questions about our new Newseum, I'll be glad to answer those in the Q&A session.

But I'm here today to talk about a more important subject: race relations and the media in the 21st century.

This is an issue that we'll feature in our new Newseum. The history of minorities in the United States has been told only partly or not at all, largely because their voices have been absent in the media until recently. Even now, minorities are poorly represented in newspaper newsrooms.

Perhaps because of our Newseum, I have become much more fascinated with history and its relationship to the present and future.

One of the journalists we feature in our Newseum is Frederick Douglass, one of the most eloquent editors of the 19th century or any other time for that matter.

Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery at an early age and began writing anti-slavery essays in an abolitionist newspaper called the Liberator. He started his own paper in 1847 and named it The North Star, after a song sung by slaves.

In the audio tour at the Newseum, you can hear Douglass offer this poignant commentary: "You degrade us and then ask us why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don't know."

The more I read, the more I understand that the past really is the prologue to the future.

The issue today is not freedom for minorities. It's jobs.

Some of you will recall the comment of author William Faulkner, from my home state of Mississippi. He said, "The past is not dead. The past is not even past."

We live at a special time in history. Few people have the opportunity to live in the prime of their lives straddling two centuries. There is something more ennobling and more enduring about doing things at the turn of a century.

I believe the famous black leader W.E.B. DuBois understood that when he addressed the Pan-African conference in London in 1900. DuBois made a forecast that sadly turned out to be true. He said, "The problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line."

As clearly as DuBois saw the future, he probably could not have imagined that 100 years later, with the dawning of the 21st century, we would still be talking about how to provide equal opportunities for minorities in America.

I am a product of the South. I attended segregated public schools. I rode on buses where blacks had to sit in the back, and I ate at the all-white lunch counter at Woolworth's in Jackson, Mississippi.

I didn't know enough at the time to give it much thought. I lived in the status quo.

Today, of course, I see the gross inequities that the status quo delivered to minorities in the South. I covered as a very young newspaper reporter some of the civil rights demonstrations that led to a major change in the status quo.

I watched a sea change in racial attitudes. But today I understand that what appeared to me to be great progress in race relations in America came very, very slowly and only begrudgingly.

It took almost 70 years into the 20th century, nearly 70 years after W.E.B. DuBois predicted "the problem of the color line," for a president to be moved to form a commission to examine the divisive issue of race in the United States.

Most of us are familiar with the 1968 Kerner Commission Report that warned, in a very telling way, "Our nation is moving toward two societies — one black, one white — separate and unequal." This is exactly what DuBois was saying 70 years earlier.

The Kerner Commission pricked the conscience of the news media. The report said, "By failing to portray the Negro as a matter of routine and in the context of total society, the news media have, we believe, contributed to the black-white schism in this country."

At that time, the news media were mostly white. In 1978, the leaders of the American Society of Newspaper Editors decided to make this an issue. Two of the ASNE leaders who pushed for improvements in minority hiring remain close colleagues of mine at The Freedom Forum: John Seigenthaler, who was editor of The (Nashville) Tennessean at the time; and John Quinn, who was chief news executive of the Gannett Company.

ASNE began to report annually the percentage of minorities in the newsrooms of daily newspapers.

In 1978, the first survey showed dismal results — 4 percent of the people in newsrooms were minorities vs. a national minority population of 19 percent.

The ASNE leadership set a goal of parity between minorities in newsrooms and the national population by the year 2000.

The attention from ASNE editors began to work. The number of minorities doubled and then tripled from 1978 levels.

But by the end of the century, the hiring of minorities had leveled off, even as the minority population in the country continued to rise dramatically.

The minority numbers in newsrooms stood at less than 12 percent vs. about 30 percent nationally. In fact, for the first time since 1978, the numbers diminished slightly.

In 1978, the issue largely focused on hiring African-Americans. Today, we know that Hispanic-Americans also are grossly under-represented in newsrooms. And the subject of Asian-Americans and Native Americans is hardly discussed at all.

Making matters worse, about 44 percent of the country's daily newspapers have no minorities at all in their newsrooms.

That is an ill omen as we enter the 21st century.

The problem for newspapers is underscored when you look at what is happening on the broadcast side. Recently released figures by the Radio-Television News Directors Association show minority numbers at English-speaking TV stations at an all-time high — 22 percent.

So why are newspapers unable or unwilling to increase the number of minorities in their newsrooms? And equally important, why does it matter?

It matters because newspaper leaders must decide in the 21st century whether they will preside over a mass medium or a niche medium. The inability for nearly one-third of all Americans to see themselves fully represented in newspapers threatens the future of newspapers as a mass medium.

I believe strongly in the future of newspapers. But my crystal ball is hazy when it comes to seeing whether it's a mass audience or a niche audience.

We should not waste our time in the 21st century relying on the status quo of the 20th century. We should not kid ourselves that mostly white newspaper staffs can interest minority readers. We should realize that white editors and reporters can mean well, but they cannot reflect the warp and woof of daily living of minorities.

I believe that most editors agree with these comments, but they increasingly are frustrated in their efforts to hire minority journalists, particularly at medium and small-sized daily newspapers. Many of these editors are beginning to give up. They find themselves unable to do anything about it on their own.

Some say this reflects "diversity fatigue" on the part of editors.

The time has come to think more creatively, take more risks, invest more money in new things to increase the number of minorities available to go to work in newspaper newsrooms. The status quo of the 20th century simply will not work.

We need to double the number of minorities in newsrooms to achieve parity with the national minority population. We need to attract at least 6,500 new minority journalists to newspaper newsrooms. That's 10 times more than we hired last year.

We must look in new places, beyond journalism schools. The 20th century pool of minority candidates is too shallow. We don't need a pool. We need a lake. We need an ocean. We need to redefine how we attract and retain qualified minority journalists to newspapers.

Is it possible?

I think it is, particularly if we think outside the box.

The Gannett Company became a leader in minority hiring when then-Chairman Al Neuharth and Senior Vice President/Personnel Madelyn Jennings told publishers their bonuses would be affected by their success in minority hiring. That changed the status quo.

In the past year, we have held small meetings around the country with editors. We asked them what needs to happen to change the status quo.

We have found at least four recurring obstacles.

First, the number of minorities expressing interest in journalism in college and high school is not nearly enough to significantly increase the hiring pool.

Second, many minorities lack the experience of their white counterparts after college because they are less likely to work on student newspapers or have summer internships.

Third, many minorities are unwilling or reluctant to work in medium-sized or small communities. Most of the country's 1,480 daily newspapers serve these communities.

Finally, when minorities do go to work at these smaller dailies, they often are hired away by the larger daily newspapers

The Freedom Forum has attempted to address each of these four issues in a significant and different way.

First, we have found that not nearly enough is being done to interest young people in journalism. We have hired four recruiters to work full time as what I call journalism missionaries. And we have produced a recruiting video that features young people who give great testimonials about the excitement of newspaper careers. We are distributing this video free to thousands of high school guidance counselors and local newspaper editors.

I'm happy to say that the Knight Foundation, under the able leadership of Hodding Carter, is developing some important initiatives involving high school journalism.

Second, we are addressing the gap in minority journalism experience in college by offering the most intensive and ambitious minority journalism internship program in history. This internship and scholarship program, called the Chips Quinn Scholars program, now trains more than 150 minority journalists every year.

Professor Lee Becker of the University of Georgia estimates that 1,300 minority journalists sought jobs with newspapers last year. We know that only half that number were hired. Professor Becker thinks more internships can close that gap.

We must find a way to increase the number of internships so that no minority journalism student who wants an internship is turned away.

The third problem is lifestyle. Many minorities do not want to live in smaller communities. There is no question that newspapers in larger communities are able to pay more.

The Freedom Forum has developed an incentive to get more minorities to work on smaller newspapers. We have teamed up with ASNE and the AP Managing Editors. The Freedom Forum is funding ASNE/APME fellowships that pay minority journalists a $10,000 a year stipend on top of their normal salary to work at newspapers under 75,000 circulation — $10,000 a year for two years, a total of $20,000.

Lastly, we believe more can be done to hire minorities who will not leave smaller communities. We believe there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people of color who are working in other careers who would like to work for newspapers in their hometowns but are in other jobs.

We believe this is true of teachers, law enforcement officers, retired military people and countless others who would enter newspaper careers in the middle of their lives if only they could be trained.

So we have created the Freedom Forum Institute for Newsroom Diversity (FIND) at Vanderbilt University to train non-journalists for newspapers. We will pay the expenses for this 12-week intensive program, plus housing, plus a stipend. Each participant will be paired with a newspaper and a job after graduation. The classes start in January.

So these are four areas that The Freedom Forum is addressing to pump new life and energy into the diversity effort for newspapers.

We expect to spend at least $20 million over the next few years to advance this cause.

We don't expect every program to be a panacea. But we believe it is better to risk a significant amount of money on new programs rather than play it safe with incremental improvements to the status quo.

You'll recall that I said earlier the past is prologue to the future.

That was underscored to me recently when I read a great book by Professor David W. Blight, called Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

I'll close with three references from his book that show how the past and the future relate to one another.

Dr. Blight writes about a Northern professor sympathetic to Southern blacks who moved to the South after the Civil War. He confessed after a year to having compassion fatigue. In the 21st century, we must not allow diversity fatigue to overtake us. Commitment, leadership and hard work are more important now than ever before.

Black writer and historian William Wells Brown is quoted in Professor Blight's book as saying in 1874: "There is the feeling all over this country that the Negro has got about as much as he ought to have."

We must not allow ourselves to grow content or complacent in the 21st century about opportunities for minorities. We must not allow empty rhetoric about quotas to become a code for secretly saying, "Minorities have got about as much as they ought to have."

And finally, Professor Blight quotes the venerable Frederick Douglass as saying in 1875: "In his (the black person's) downward course, he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resented at every step of his progress."

I say that the resentment of the 19th and 20th centuries must finally give way in the 21st century to a new effort and a new enlightenment for minorities in the workplace everywhere, particularly in newsrooms.

The problem of the color line in the 20th century represents the opportunity of the 21st century.

After delivering his formal remarks, Overby answered questions from the National Press Club audience for about 25 minutes. Edited excerpts follow:

Q. What is your vision of the ideal newsroom?

A. A newsroom should look like its readers. Newspapers have made significant progress in the hiring of women, and when that happened, suddenly even more women were hired as women moved into hiring positions. And we're just beginning to see it now in the area of minorities. Where minorities are in a position of influence and a position of hiring, suddenly qualified people appear — presto, magically — whereas they never were found before. We all tend to hire people who are like us. So if newspapers are to have any kind of vibrant future, they must represent their full readership. If you want a niche newspaper, appealing only to the 10 percent elite, OK, fill up the newsroom with that 10 percent elite. But if you want it to be a mass medium serving all of the readers in your community, you'd better get an audience and an employee base that looks like your community.

Q. How do you, as a middle-aged white guy, contribute to diversity in the media? Aren't you part of the problem? What percentage of The Freedom Forum is minority?

A. Well, thanks for the friendly questions. (Laughter.) The only thing a middle-aged — thank you for that — white male can do is to try to hire people more than those just like himself. And if you look at The Freedom Forum, we have about 27-28 percent minorities working there. I don't take individual credit for that. The people in positions of hiring authority do that. We have to start at home. Every newspaper has to start at home. You can preach the subject all day long, but that's one of the problems. We do so much preaching, all of us, that we rarely get down to the reality of it. White people in leadership positions need to put more than rhetoric behind it. We need to put money behind it, we need to put resources behind it and we need to put commitment behind it.

Q. What about the problem of the retention of minorities in newsrooms?

A. One of the reasons the ASNE figures went down in 2000 is because of retention problems. The newspaper industry hired as many minority journalists as it had in the past, about 600, but as 600 were coming in the front door, about 700 were going out the back door to other places. We are giving ASNE $50,000 to do a survey on why. Anecdotally, we're finding through some of our programs, like the Chips Quinn internship program, that minorities coming into newsrooms for the first time find them to be weird places. We have a mentoring program that allows them to call and say, "Hey, am I being singled out because I'm a minority, or do they treat everybody this way?" And generally, they treat everybody that way. But minorities might not understand that.

Q. Do you think newspapers will become more diverse out of virtue or because of bottom-line interests?

A. I don't care. I don't care whether they do it out of virtue or whether they do it out of bottom-line interests, as long as they do it. Haven't we found that pragmatism is what moves most things? I've tried to study the issue of race relations. That has been so true, from the outset: Pragmatism, rather than virtue, moves things. Go back to the Emancipation Proclamation. It's real easy to think that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln solely for virtue. There was some virtue attached to it, but the truth is the North was having problems with the Civil War, and one of the reasons was that slaves were continuing to run the farms and the plantations, allowing the white Southerners to continue to fight. And so the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in states where the rebellion was still going on. It didn't free the slaves everywhere; that didn't come until the 14th Amendment. It did have an impact, but it was just pragmatic. The Kerner Commission to which I referred did not come about in 1968 because the president and the leaders of Congress decided one day, "Race has become a divisive issue. We should take a look at it." It came about because there were riots going on in the cities, and they were forced to act. Well, I hope that it doesn't take slavery and riots to make us think that hiring more minorities in newsrooms is a good thing. But the bottom line does motivate a lot of people in the business, and, that being the case, I hope it will motivate them toward more hiring of minorities.

Q. What advice can you give reporters and Washington bureau chiefs to encourage or perhaps pressure their top management to hire more minorities?

A. I think almost everyone who works at a newspaper can be a personal recruiting service. A lot of times established editors just don't know a lot of people out there, and reporters are in a position to bring people from places where they used to work. I have worked with journalists who have made that one of their top agendas in addition to reporting and editing the news, and they were able to find minority people.

Q. How can newsrooms become more multiracial at a time when more and more newspapers are laying off reporters and editors, or have hiring freezes?

A. That's the question for 2001 and 2002. All these initiatives that I've discussed with you today would have been a lot easier in the mid-1990s. We're about to find out whether people are willing to put their money where their mouths are. Obviously, there are hiring freezes going on all over the country. It is going to have a dampening effect on the hiring of minorities. All too often when people are let go or people aren't hired because of a hiring freeze, minorities are the first to suffer. So, we just have to keep the issue on the front burner.

Q. An editor has two final candidates for a job: a white journalist who is well qualified, and a black journalist who is a little less qualified. Whom should the editor hire?

A. I think you have to say, what are the qualifications? If the qualifications mean who can write the most crisp lead by a margin of 10 percent, that takes away the whole equation of what a person with a diverse background brings to a newsroom. Newspapers miss so much in a community that they don't even know it. If somebody is slightly less qualified to write a lead, that's part of the equation. But they might be 20 percent more qualified to bring more kinds of news to the newspaper, and more readers. I think that the issue of diversity requires more than the five W's (who, what, when, where, why). Diversity hiring requires a larger vision.

Q. How can someone get the $10,000 annual stipend to work at a newspaper?

A. Check out our Web site (www.freedomforum.org) or call Mary Kay Blake, our senior vice president for partnerships and initiatives, for details.

Q. What about the new Newseum being planned for Washington, D.C.?

A. I believe that the new Newseum is going to be stunning. If you've been to our Newseum in Arlington, Virginia, you know that it's state-of-the-art, and it's fun, and that you learn a lot. A lot of our comment cards have young people in particular saying it was the most fun thing they did in Washington. The main reason we will be moving is that you have to fish where the fish are. You can fish in a pond that has three fish, but you might catch every fish that's in the pond, and you're still only going to have three fish. Arlington has been terrific, and we've had a half-million visitors a year there, but in downtown Washington, right there on Pennsylvania Avenue, that's where the tourists are. And the whole purpose of the Newseum is to educate. We hope people will be entertained as well. But that's where they are. And that's why we are so excited about being there.

On that side of Pennsylvania Avenue, as good as that address is, the tourists really haven't been coming. The city believes, and we believe, that the Newseum will become a new gateway to that whole area — the MCI Center, the convention center and all of that. People have been stopping at the Mall, and the new Newseum will cause people to want to come all the way over. What's going to attract them? We think the design of the new Newseum will, and we will have three times as much space, and we will have even more state-of-the-art gizmos and things that will make life interesting there. You can tell that I'm excited about the new Newseum. Four years from now when we open up, in 2005, I think it will be the most exciting place for tourists to go in the whole city of Washington.