A panel of journalists and media professionals discussed the future of diversity in journalism and its impact on current political dialogue at the School of Media & Public Affairs on Monday.
Three journalists from three organizations, including the Washington Post and Politico, discussed their thoughts on what diversity in journalism should look like, how to consider diversity beyond race and gender and the effects of President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on diversity initiatives. Ryan Levi, the D.C. chapter president of the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, moderated the discussion, which was co-sponsored by the GW Association of Black Journalists, the GW Association of Hispanic Journalists and the GW Asian-American Journalists Association.
Anita Kumar, the head of standards and practices at Politico said when she makes hiring decisions she not only considers race and gender but also the candidate’s “diversity of backgrounds,” like where they grew up or where they went to college. She said newsrooms should contain a diverse set of views so the organization’s reporting has as little bias as possible.
Kumar said conversations about journalism diversity exclusively pertained to hiring practices at the start of her career, but now there is also a shift to considering how journalists themselves cover issues like race, gender and inequality. She said after police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020, Black Lives Matter protests began around the country and newsrooms reconsidered how they covered crime as part of the country’s broader reckoning with race, like whether it was appropriate to publish mugshots.
“I think things evolve as a country evolves and the politics evolves, but I also think that we’re getting more sophisticated in how we think about things,” Kumar said.
She said there were “a lot” of conversations in newsrooms a few years ago in the wake of Floyd’s murder about how to cover issues like police brutality and immigration, but those discussions have “dissipated” since, as news organizations cover racial justice protests and movements less frequently and focus more on other political issues, like the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and the economy.
“I do feel like our attention spans are not as long as they should be,” Kumar said.
Kumar said journalists must continue reporting stories that contain diverse perspectives despite recent attacks on media diversity by the Trump administration, like shuttering diversity, equity and inclusion offices at news outlets that receive federal funding, like NPR and PBS, and threatening to punish outlets and revoke broadcasting licenses over diversity efforts.
Sabrina Rodriguez, a Washington Post national politics reporter, said she agrees diversity is “so much more” than race and gender and includes how different educational and socioeconomic backgrounds affect people’s worldviews.
Rodriguez said journalism diversity is about having a newsroom that “looks like the rest of the country” by including journalists and editors from different religions, types of families or urban and rural communities so a differing set of perspectives can inform reporting.
“You have a room that, if we’re sitting all in a meeting and we’re talking about an issue, you have people that come at it from different places, because we all come from different backgrounds and have different life experiences,” Rodriguez said.
She said as a Latina reporter she is often assigned to cover the Latino community, but the community’s internal diversity makes it difficult for her to fully capture every perspective. She said reporters of color are often treated as though their identities allow them to understand their entire community immediately.
“There’s a lot of things I don’t know about this community because I am Cuban from Miami, and that is extremely different than being Mexican-American from South Texas, and that’s extremely different from being Puerto Rican from Reading, Pennsylvania,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez said reporters need to “get specific” to accurately cover different communities instead of making generalizations based on race or gender.
“It’s not going to be as simple as, ‘Oh, ok, I wrote a story about white voters, and I wrote a story about Black voters and I wrote a story about Latino voters,’” Rodriguez said. “It is so much more complicated and rich than that.”
Philip Lewis, the president of the Washington Association of Black Journalists and a deputy editor at HuffPost, said social media can be a window to the “diversity of thought” in the world for journalists, which helps them understand their coverage better. He said social media is “not the real world,” but there is a sizable presence of newsroom leadership and journalists on social media influencing decisions made in their newsrooms based on discussions they have online.
“I think one of the most underdiscussed points of the diversity in journalism conversation is the diversity of thought,” Lewis said. “And Twitter can be, it can be really siloed, but I make my page so that I can follow a lot of different sorts of voices and figures.”
When asked how young journalists should navigate the current state of diversity in the industry, Lewis said many reporters who are ethnic minorities are facing attacks on social media, like being targeted as so-called “DEI hires.” He said the journalism community offers support systems for those under fire, like newsrooms that offer self-care days and the ability to have candid conversations about diversity and inclusion with editors.
“Generally the word ‘DEI hire’ is a replacement for another type of word, and that means a lot of our journalists are under attack in a lot of different ways, on social media in particular,” Lewis said. “Like I get called a ‘DEI hire’ every week.”
Lewis said he encourages reporters to find ways for their newsrooms to support them with whatever is going on in their lives and to use the resources available to them, like joining affinity groups like the Washington Association of Black Journalists, which provides professional education opportunities for its members and advocates for more diversity in the field of journalism.
“The community aspect, I think, is something that is sometimes under-discussed, but it’s really important too,” Lewis said.
