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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Racism and Mainstream Media By Jeff Cohen When newspaper executives make a commitment to change, they often show great prowess in meeting their goals: Consider the breathtaking speed with which they added color graphics and lifestyle sections to their pages. When it comes to fulfilling their 1978 pledge to integrate people of color into their staffs, however, most newspaper editors are moving slower than a Gutenberg press. The American Society of Newspaper Editors' goal was to achieve minority employment at daily newspapers "equivalent to the percentage of minority persons within the national population" by the year 2000. Racial minorities now constitute 11.6 percent of news staffs but 27.3 percent of the country's population. At the rate newspapers are going (ASNE last year extended its deadline by 25 years), they won't reach their goal until late in the next century. Slightly more diversity can be found in TV news staffs, and far less in magazines. But few top news executives in any medium -- real decision makers -- are people of color. This lack of diversity has consequences in terms of content. To take a relatively trivial example, when the decision was made at Time magazine to darken a cover picture of O.J. Simpson, only the lone nonwhite person in the room objected. A more important consequence is the narrow, distorting lens through which racial minorities are frequently portrayed in mainstream news. Studies commissioned by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have found that only about 1 percent of the 12,000 stories aired yearly on the three network TV evening newscasts focus on Latinos or Latino issues -- and roughly 80 percent of these stories "portray Latinos negatively," often on subjects like crime, drugs and "illegal" immigrants. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2527 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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