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Carole Simpson calls for diverse newsrooms

(A transcript of an address delivered by Carole Simpson at the Radio Television News Director's Foundation Luncheon in 2000)

...Good afternoon everyone and welcome to one of my favorite events at the RTNDA conventions every year…the scholarship luncheon. I get so energized when I meet all of these fresh-faced, ambitious, talented young people, who will be taking our industry well into the new century.

Carole Simpson Copyright 1988 Capital Cities/ABC Inc.

Last night I took them all out for a social gathering and we had the best time getting to know each other. But they wouldn't let me go. I wanted to see the opening ceremonies of the Sydney Olympics and by the time I got back to the room I had missed all the aborigine history and the Parade of Nations-the highlight of my viewing-was all the way to the M's. Mozambique was walking in when I turned on the TV. I missed half the alphabet because of them. But okay, you all were worth it. Again, congratulations to you all. We're counting on you to do us proud.

Barbara Cochran called me at what I would call the last minute, to deliver this luncheon speech. I asked her who had cancelled. And she said nobody. She said she just thought I would have no trouble talking about diversity. It's so easy for you, Carole. I can't say no to her.

But let me tell you, it wasn't easy this year to tackle the topic.

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I do have this aside. On my way to the airport to come to Minneapolis, I was traveling down 14th Street in Washington and passed something called the "Diversity Bar". I thought what a coincidence. Then I imagined who might go to such a place and the first image I conjured was the bar from Star Wars. I broke out laughing. Now that was diversity. What if our newsrooms were populated with those odd looking creatures? Would we ever get anything done?

I was reluctant to talk about diversity because if I had Superman hearing or Bionic Woman ears, I would probably hear low groans from many in this audience. Oh no, not another speech about diversity. We're sick of hearing about diversity. What else is there to say about it? Blah, blah, blah.

The last time I gave a speech about diversity to the RTNDA was at the Denver Convention, in I believe 1991. Just pull out the old one, the thought went briefly through my mind. But that would be impossible. So much has happened in the past 9 years.

I began to wonder how we could diversify a workforce when we are witnessing a major assault on affirmative action in higher education. Colleges and universities which used to think it was educational for its students to come in contact with different races, economic groups, religions, are now under pressure to grant admission strictly on the basis of test scores and grade point averages.

Let me tell you something, I have a son who is a junior at Syracuse. I went through the admissions process with him. I think if I were applying to my alma mater, the University of Michigan today, I wouldn't get in. My math scores were nothing to brag about. My grades were respectable but I spent a lot of time in extracurricular activities, the newspaper, the drama group, the choir, and student government. Michigan might have lost a pretty good alumna if I my entrance was decided just on grades and test scores. As a student, I had much to offer to the university community and I did. And I think Michigan is proud of me, having awarded me a distinguished alumni award and naming me to the Alumni Board.

This current anti-affirmative action movement began five years ago in California with passage of Proposition 209. Race could no longer to be taken into account for admissions. And now minority enrollments are at their lowest levels in more than 25 years. The State of Washington, Texas, and Florida have all reversed affirmative action for admissions. My own University of Michigan is in court now trying to fight to save it there. This despite studies that show when minority students are admitted under affirmative action they graduated at virtually the same rate as their regularly admitted counterparts, performed equally well in their profession and were more likely to work in and for underserved communities.

Everybody predicts this issue will ultimately go before the United States Supreme Court. Clearly the next president we elect can end it forever by appointing justices opposed to it.

If we are not going to have minorities educated at some of the best universities in America, how can the labor force benefit from their unique talents, voices, and experiences? So diversity is threatened.

And you know one of the worst things, is what's happened to the word. You know how there have been perfectly good words which started off with positive connotations and then became negative. Words like "liberal". God forbid you call a politician a liberal these days. And if you're conservative, it's better to make yourself a "compassionate conservative". Feminist and women's liberation became anathema. I have had young women shrink in horror when I say I am a feminist. I tell them all it means is that I support equal rights for women, something the Constitution supposedly guarantees but hasn't always when it's come to women. When did the word "urban" come to mean black? Talk about an urban contemporary radio station and you know it's targeted to a black audience.

Diversity used to be a fine word. The University of Maryland has a great definition it is using. It says "diversity" means: "otherness or those human qualities that are different from our own and outside the groups to which we belong, yet are present in other individuals and groups.

Primary dimensions are age, ethnicity, gender, physical abilities and qualities, race and sexual orientation. Secondary dimensions are those things that can be changed like educational background, geographic location, income, marital status, military experience, parental status, religious beliefs and work experiences.

It's just a state of difference, variety. And I have always said "Vive la difference." Celebrate it, don't bemoan it.

One of my friends, Ellis Cose, a columnist for Newsweek, recently noted that although American society is supportive of diversity, numbers do not reflect that sentiment. Let me quote him: "It seems to me that diversity today is a lot like equality or democracy. Everyone's for it. But what the numbers clearly show is that we haven't changed all that much." He points out that the number of minority journalists has hovered around the same minimal numbers in the past several years.

I found the latest statistics and in television, 21% of all jobs in news are held by minorities, but only about 12% of jobs in print. On the surface you could say well that's progress, not too bad. But I think you need to go behind those numbers and see what jobs those minorities are holding. Many are concentrated in the lowest entry-level positions. They are not for the most part, decision-making.

A couple of years ago, ABC conducted daylong diversity workshops, which were actually quite valuable. They weren't about race; they were about appreciating other people's differences, which makes working relationships more harmonious and productive. But oh, you should have heard the complaints. Employees felt they were wasting their time, why did they have to go to these things. But I'm happy to say most left those sessions pleasantly surprised.

ABC like more and more corporations are realizing that to be competitive and successful in the new global marketplace, this country needs the contribution of all its citizens. And more and more multiethnic children are being born and people of color are becoming a larger segment of the population. Yet-and here's the crux of the argument-much of the news coverage in America does not fairly or accurately represent these realities.

I know I make you guys crazy every time I say it, but most of the people who decide what news gets covered, who covers it, how much time it gets, where it's placed in the broadcast, whether it's promoted and how, are still overwhelmingly white and male.

I have seen improvements in the number of women involved in the process and that's a good thing since we are more than half the population, but the numbers of minorities in news still is not close to representing the reality of their numbers in our society.

Maybe some of you saw an article in USA Today this week. Headline: "Newsman's Survey uncovers TV racism". This is not a headline from September 12, 1970, but from September 12, 2000. 4 days ago. I give credence to it because a man I worked with for several years at ABC News, and had a great deal of respect for, Av Westin did the survey. He's been around a long time and done a lot of things. He worked with Edward R. Murrow, was executive producer of the ABC evening news and was executive producer of 20/20 from 1980 to 1987. He's now a fellow at the Freedom Forum where he conducted his survey.

Among a finding that dismayed him, he says, was, quote, "the closet racism that is still alive and well" in TV newsrooms across the country. He said TV journalists told him that given a choice of profiling a black or white family, producers invariably pick white because they feel whites appeal more to their viewers. In one quote he says one reporter told him, "My bosses have essentially made it clear: We do not feature black people, I mean it is said. Actually they whisper it: Is she white?"

Now as a black reporter, you know what I do? I do everything I can to find minority families to represent your typical American story. Why should a story on high gasoline prices suggest it only affects white families? I will search for that middle class Hispanic, black, Asian or Native American family to illustrate the story. And when I have to cover a story about poverty, drug addicts, welfare, gangs, I will not just go into Washington D.C.'s inner city, which is real easy to be sure. I'll travel south into central Virginia or to the Maryland suburbs where you can find white people living in poverty and on welfare and addicted to drugs. That's why a reporter of color like myself is valuable in the newsroom. I want to mix it up. I don't want to perpetuate negative stereotypes of just one group. I want to reflect all of our people.

I remember the unday I was preparing for our weekend newscast and a bulletin came across the wire that 24-year-old Tejano-music star Selena had been shot to death by a fan in Texas. Sitting around our rim, the producers, writers and I all read it and asked, who is Selena? What is Tejano-music? Sitting in New York, there was no one in the newsroom that had any idea.

So we continued with other work and throughout the afternoon, the story kept getting bigger and bigger. There were young Latinas openly crying on the streets of San Antonio. 20-thousand fans of Selena gathered at the LA Coliseum to mourn her death. We were still mystified. We called our LA bureau and said is there anybody there Hispanic who can tell us why this story is so important. Nobody was there.

That night I think we did a voice over of the crowds mourning in LA, but had we had someone of Spanish descent on our news team, we might have gotten the jump on what became a huge story. That really drove it home to me why we needed more diversity.

Incidents like that have happened time and time again. It was a Haitian on our staff that suggested I do a story during the Elian saga about all the Haitian children who were being sent back to Haiti despite similar circumstances to Elian. They never got the attention Elian did. Nobody was fighting to keep them here, or raising a fuss when they were sent back to the poorest country in the western hemisphere where political oppression is as strong or even more so than in Cuba.

And while that may be in the interest of the bottom line it is not, I believe, in the public
interest.

There's one more thing I want you to consider in this discussion of diversity. And that is the results published a couple of months ago by the Federal Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics Corporation in their "Book of Life". They have created for the first time, a working draft of the instructional manual for making and growing a human being. They discovered in mapping the human genetic code that we share a single blueprint. We all evolved in the last 100-thousand years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world. We are genetically descendants of the same people. And lo and behold, they were African. Regardless of race, color or creed, we really are all kin beneath the skin.

Every human being on this earth is 99 percent the same. Only 10 percent of genes control our external appearance…the basis on which we talk about race. That tiny percentage makes us black skinned, or pale, or with almond shaped eyes, or with curly or straight hair, broad noses or thin lips. The scientists say that citizens of any given village in the world, whether in Scotland or Tanzania hold 90 percent of the same genetic variability that humanity has to offer. Hello, they are the same. We are basically all the same. We might like different music and food and mode of dress, and life style. And we look different, but not as different as those in the Star Wars Bar.

We didn't know before but now we do. We cannot let that 10 percent continue to propel us into wars, tribal hatreds, racism, prejudice, and discrimination.

I have traveled to almost 40 countries around the world and there's one profound thing you learn when you travel overseas. Nobody sees black American, Asian American, and Jewish American. They see American. There are no distinctions. It's the way we talk, dress, and carry ourselves, no matter what color and physical characteristics we have. We in America keep making separating and labeling and to the rest of the world, we are American. When the US Olympic team walked into that stadium last night dressed in their red, white and blue, they were a microcosm of the world. We are every people. And that is what's so wonderful about us. We are diversity personified.

Everyone has something to contribute in the newsroom, but not if they have no place at the table, or no place at the rim. To have a real democracy we need a multitude of voices. If the news historically and currently is exclusively held by a select group of people, the discussion is exclusive.

If the news does not reflect this nation's diversity in on air staff, in story selection, in management, in employment, we are doomed. All you have to do is look at the success of Telemundo and Univision in cities with large Spanish speaking populations. The news did not meet their needs, so they created their own.

If you don't buy the argument that diversity is important because it's the right and just and American thing to do…then buy it on the economic argument. Audience is numbers, high numbers are ratings, high ratings bring advertising dollars, lots of advertising dollars mean profit and profit translates into success and survival. How can we afford to leave out segments of the audience? It's economic suicide.

When you leave here, think about whether you are meeting the needs of your audience in all its diversity, and if not, why not...

As Langston Hughes said, "Let us work for the nation that has yet to be, but yet must be."

Thank you.