Let’s revisit some old stories: Earlier this month readers took The N&O to task for using only white girls in a story-photo display about back-to-school fashions. I, too, criticized the lack of diversity, in last Sunday’s column.
Now comes Savannah Pryfogle, one of said “un-diverse” students featured in the story, to apprise us of some late-breaking news: Her great-grandparents emigrated from Mexico, and she considers herself to be Latina. That’s the box she checks when she fills out identification forms for school and otherwise.
A rising freshman at Enloe High School, from Cary, Savannah also didn’t like being lumped in with the other teen models as “typically pretty.”
“I just can’t stand to be a stereotype, and I will not allow anyone to see me as one,” she wrote. “I am not a pretty rich white girl. I am my own person with my own ideas and image.”
That much was evident from the e-mail she sent, a portion of which was published Tuesday as a letter to the editor. So I apologize to Savannah for making assumptions that contribute to stereotyping.
This case points to the perils of a newspaper trying to cover an increasingly multi-ethnic society. Fred Black, a reader from Chapel Hill, noted just that when he wrote me about Sen. Barack Obama’s book, “Dreams from My Father.”
“As a true ‘African-American,’ ” Black said, “he felt that he had to decide ‘what’ he was, so he went with the visual as the answer. What if he had chosen white?”
“Clearly, the visual doesn’t work in every case, as this situation shows, so what are we going to do in the future as we have more and more biracial children?”
Excellent question. Keith Woods teaches about diversity issues for the Poynter Institute, a respected training center for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. He says newspapers deal with the diversity issue at varying levels. One, he said, is “true inclusion of perspective, voice and experience, inclusion that values people and that influences the journalism you’re doing.”
Another level is “the visual representation of diversity,” reflected in the images and stories in the paper. “It’s simply to say to your readers, we know you’re here. You are one of us. It’s almost public relations. What you’re trying to say is, visually, we’re one community.”
In that light, Woods said, the ethnicity of individual students in the back-to-school feature made little difference, if the readers perceived an absence of diversity. “Individual ethnicity doesn’t matter,” he said. “That’s an entirely different issue from whether you have diversity. That’s not the point of the complaint. The point of the complaint is ‘I don’t see myself.’ ”
Questionable claims
Back in June, The N&O ran a Life, etc., fitness feature that touted the benefits for summertime athletes of drinking lots of water. It included a sidebar with these claims: lack of water is the No. 1 cause of daytime fatigue, and drinking five glasses of water a day “has been shown to reduce the risk of colon cancer by 45 percent, breast cancer by 79 percent and bladder cancer by 50 percent.”
The story was reprinted in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and my counterpart at that paper, Public Editor Kate Parry, challenged it in a column July 14. She quoted two doctors as saying the claims were wrong and questioning the legitimacy of the alternative medicine, for-profit Web site from which they came, Diagnose-me.com.
The N&O has been slow to respond to Parry’s column. The reporter, Joe Miller, said he intends to address the questions in a forthcoming column on how to find reliable Web sites on health. He told me last week that he had not yet checked out the disputed information.
“I don’t know that it is disputable,” he said. “All I know is one doctor in Minnesota is complaining about it. But I haven’t heard any complaints from here.”
Thad Ogburn, The N&O’s features editor, said that if they had it to do over again, the editors and reporter would not have used that Web site. He added, “That was a very small sidebar to a much larger story that we certainly stand by and that proved very popular with readers. I think it was a very worthwhile story to do.”
No question about that. But I think the paper should not leave questionable information with readers without checking and, if necessary, correcting it sooner. I did check with Claudio Battaglini, exercise physiologist at UNC-Chapel Hill who specializes in exercise and cancer. There is research that water can help bladder cancer patients, he said, but he’s dubious about the claims for breast and colon cancer. “That’s the first I’ve heard that,” he said. “If it was true, that would be great. I’d be drinking jugs of water every day.”
What’s good for the goose
The N&O produced a survey on executive compensation in last Sunday’s Work & Money section that showed the 2006 pay of 110 executives at 24 publicly traded companies in the Triangle.
This was a thoroughly researched look at executive compensation, but I wondered why it did not include Gary Pruitt, the CEO of The McClatchy Co., which owns The N&O and The Charlotte Observer.
Because, says Business Editor Mary Cornatzer, the survey included just those companies with headquarters in the Triangle. It did have a small chart showing compensation at large companies headquartered elsewhere, with North Carolina operations. Cornatzer said those companies were much larger than McClatchy.
Still, I think the survey should have included McClatchy. It is a large employer, with 2,450 employees in North Carolina. If we’re peeking at other companies, we should give readers a peek at our own.
P.S.: Pruitt’s total 2006 compensation was $5.5 million, including salary, bonuses, stock and other compensation, according to the McClatchy proxy statement.
