Diversity Comes From the Bottom Up

"In this society where we evaluate things on the basis of polls, where we determine our revenue in the media on the basis of demographics and mass audiences, we atomize the United States down to a collection of random, almost irrelevant, almost mutually exclusive sets of opinions and motives and agendas. To do so is to basically adopt a strategy that means you will end up covering things that are irrelevant to most people because we are adding them up on the basis of a lot of characteristics that don't relate to how they live and how they depend on each other in their individual communities.

".. [F]ar from hiring in the newsroom being an indicator of where diversity comes from, it's knowing your audience, and to be truly interested in your audience from the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, and from all economic levels. That's how you ensure diversity in the stories that you actually produce or publish. To simply say that as a matter of corporate logo evolution that you're going to have an Asian and a black and a person in a wheel chair in your newsroom, and that somehow is going to give you some license to say that you're diverse, is to fall into the same category of simply determining your content on the basis of demographics.

"You can determine revenue on the basis of demographics, but you can never determine content on that basis.

"If you want total diversity, where everyone's voice sort of exists in a kind of a meaningless cacophony, you can look at the Internet. That is total diversity. But it is content free in the sense that it's just random shots of people walking down the street. [Only when] you're engaged in an interaction on the Internet does that content begin to have meaning.

"Therefore, when we think of our newspapers and our institutions and our television networks, we have to understand that they are corporate, market driven entities, and to expect from them exclusively the kind of diversity and democratization that we expect from other levels of society is to be naive. The diversity in the American media will come from the bottom up, not from the top down. That's the way it's always worked in America. It may be a sad statement, and it may mean we're going to see a lot more frightening pictures like what happened at Howard University and what happened at Santa Monica Community College on the day of the OJ verdict. But we have to understand that those pictures are stories, and they're part of the struggle to achieve diversity in the United States. The media is part of the agent for that change, but it can't be the whole thing.

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