Recently, a group of editorial staffers met to discuss diversity in this paper’s coverage.
Defining how diversity should be reflected in news coverage is difficult. But the group concurred, threading the city’s diverse voices through all the paper’s coverage and not just events specific to an ethnic, religious or minority community is the toughest challenge a newspaper faces.
The Freedom Forum, a U.S.-based group that reviews fairness and diversity in press coverage, suggests staff and community members audit parts of a newspaper over defined time-periods to rate how well they reflect diversity. I reviewed the Greater Toronto and Business sections from March 21 to 27, excluding the Sunday paper, due to its unique format.
Any business section faces significant challenges in reflecting diversity. Its stories often focus on the hubs of corporate and financial power. Though they are beginning to be more and more inclusive of society’s diverse makeup, they still are largely white, male bastions.
The audit of the Business section found it is struggling with this challenge. There were two stories on female executives ( ReMax chief Pamela Anderson and financier Heather Reisman). But most stories reflected the establishment corporate culture. A story picturing and quoting local financier, AIC’s Michael Lee-Chin and a shot of Nintendo promoter ,Tokyo’s Tomoyo Tohei, stood out as two members of minorities that week. Even generic shots of workers facing layoffs and models showing new technology reflected a white world, though both sectors have many visible minorities.
The Greater Toronto section fared better. Some of this was, no doubt, due to the timing of the review, which coincided with a racism conference and the Harry Jerome and Agnes Macphail awards.
But the play given the conference and the awards, in both photos and text, showed a commitment to diversity.
Stories during the audit showed a young Highland dancer, a visit from a Maronite patriarch, a profile of a Holocaust heroine, one school’s effort to send earthquake relief to India and a march in the Greek community to honour Greece’s independence.
A weekend feature and centre-spread on the diversity of religious worship across the Greater Toronto Area was an excellent example of how we can inform our readers about our changing community.
Business editor Kenneth Kidd says the mandate of a business section, unlike the GT section, is to reflect the world of business, finance and economics, which, he says, is lamentably much less diverse than the city at large. He says he wishes it were otherwise.
Perhaps. But what about the small business sector which is full of visible minorities?
City editor Jonathan Ferguson says Toronto is distinguished throughout the world for its diversity and multiculturalism and the paper must reflect that reality. It its 1995 report, a Toronto Star diversity committee said hiring more minorities would improve the paper’s diversity coverage, but stressed a person of any colour or gender is capable of reflecting diversity.
The Freedom Forum estimates nearly 12 per cent of American news staff represents minorities.
There are no figures for the percentage of minorities working in the news staff at The Star. A fair estimate would put the paper a few percentage points higher than the American counterparts. But that’s not good enough, since 53 per cent of Torontonians are members of visible minorities.
