I am a young black man attending Cal State Long Beach and I understand that my race is sorely underrepresented when it comes to the average university’s demographics, including at my own. Although I have come to grips with this being a common thing, I was still surprised to see how few black journalists there are. While African-Americans make up roughly 12% of the U.S. population, only 4.74% of journalists are African-American. Being a journalism major has helped me to understand why there is a need for us, and other minorities groups as well, for that matter, to be journalists.
Firstly, it’s important because just like in any other industry, diversity in journalism is imperative. Diversity allows for a fresh flow of perspectives, interests, ideas, and viewpoints to be taken into account or utilized. Also diversity allows for minorities to get proper representation so that their perspectives and such will not be overlooked, misinterpreted, or taken for granted.
More specifically, it’s important that African-Americans be journalists because the news media is something that has been unforgiving to blacks and has played a factor in the perpetuation of negative stereotypes. A study completed in 2000 by Travis L Dixon and Travis Linz found that African-Americans accounted for 21% of arrests in California, but represented 37% of the crime perpetrators on local news stations in LA and Orange county. In 2015 a study completed by "The Color of Change" showed that a sample of four local news stations in New York City distorted the representation of black criminals by an average of over 20%. If more African-Americans were working in the news industry, particularly in positions of power, then we most likely wouldn't see them being disproportionately shown as criminals as often.
Another example of the news medias unfair coverage of African-Americans, is more often than not, the media uses negative words like "thugs" or "criminals" to describe black protesters as opposed to white rioters. With African-Americans covering news events it is much less likely that something like this would occur. If African-Americans don’t try to take a more active role in journalism then the biases of other ethnic groups could cause blacks to continue to be framed much more negatively in news stories.
Lastly, it is important that we cover news events so that when there are good positive newsworthy stories about African-Americans, they won’t be overlooked. A perfect recent example of this is rapper Akon’s recent Lighting Africa initiative which aims to use solar power to bring electricity to 600 million Africans. The amount of news coverage this story received dwarfs in comparison to the news coverage that surrounds any of the frivolous antics of the Kardashian family. An African-American would be much less likely to choose not to cover a good story about African-Americans compared to other races. This is important because covering only negative stories about African-Americans leads people to view them much more negatively.
After expressing my viewpoint on why it’s important for us to become more active in journalism, I think it’s fitting to end this article with a quote from Dr. Umar Johnson’s keynote speech at the CSULB Black Student Union’s 36th annual Black Consciousness Conference...
“If we don’t tell our story, then who will?”
