In the Listening Post column, I try to share some of what Post readers think about what they see in the paper, as well as what Post staffers think and even what I think. Today, I’ll share what some members of the nation’s largest group of journalists think on broader media issues.
I long have wished more “news consumers,” not to mention more of my professional colleagues, could attend the Unity conferences as I did last weekend in Washington. This was the third joint meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association and the Native American Journalists Association.
The 8,158 journalists who registered far exceeded the 7,000 expected. That makes Unity, which last took place in 1999 in Seattle, the largest meeting of American journalists pushing for more fair and accurate journalism. Unity, however, is the only truly diverse meeting.
“Unity has become one of the few venues in the journalism profession where so many members at all levels get together to discuss these issues,” said Juan Gonzalez, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and a columnist for the New York Daily News. That’s unlike the meetings of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he said, where “there are only editors on the panels, and they talk to one another.”
In contrast, Unity “is where reporters and photographers, editors and anchors meet in the most democratic forum for hashing out some of those issues,” he said, “even though it is seen as a gathering of minority journalists.”
Indeed, Unity “should be called ‘the best-practices convention,’ ” said Michel Martin, a correspondent for ABC News’ Nightline. The consistently broad representation on the conference panels illustrated the point. For example, the first workshop on my list a discussion on “Ethics in Today’s Media: Is the Public Right to Distrust Their News?” included Mr. Gonzalez and one of my heroines, Ms. Martin, whose reporting on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas furor brought her used condoms in the mail.
Bill Kovach, the panel’s moderator, is chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, a former editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and former reporter and editor at The New York Times. The organizers also tapped Michael Dimock, research director at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press; Tim Giago, a founder of NAJA as well as editor and publisher of the Lakota Journal (in Rapid City, S.D.); and Terry Tang, deputy editor of the technology desk of the Times.
The panelists noted that the proliferation of media organizations is increasing market pressures and raising questions of how much profitability is enough. “There are no 24-hour news channels,” one said, “there are only four-hour news channels that spend the day regurgitating because they don’t want to spend the money” on the reporters to get more stories. “We’re being compared to amusement parks,” Ms. Martin said of her news division, in noting that the parent Disney company “makes more in a month than we make in a year.”
In an interesting twist, someone volunteered that newspapers spend too much time worrying about younger readers and not enough about the 40-year-olds who will be reading newspapers for the next 20-30 years. An interesting question: How likely that journalism will be enriched by people from nontraditional backgrounds? Ms. Martin observed that ABC newsman Peter Jennings is a 10th-grade dropout, and Brian Williams and Matt Lauer didn’t graduate from college. “But I don’t know any persons of color who can get those positions without that piece of paper.”
The heavy endorsement-interview schedule of The Post’s editorial board prevented me from arriving for the speeches by Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry and President Bush that underscored Unity’s clout. I’ve since chuckled at some of the self-righteous indignation that many journalists present were much more receptive to Sen. Kerry’s comments than Mr. Bush’s. Their honest reactions worry me a lot less than the blatant daily bias in what still, too often, are whites-only news meetings, where with what I’m sure they believe is the utmost objectivity, people choose in their image what is to be covered, about whom and how.
So I like what Mr. Gonzalez said was the organizers’ plan to “increasingly encourage more white journalists to come to Unity.” I just wish more everyday people could attend, too. Last month, the biggest of the Unity groups, NABJ, said its membership roster had grown by 43 percent, to 4,695, from last year. The more than 10,000 attendees expected at the next Unity will limit even the number of sites that can host it.
One observer said that he “missed white journalists in D.C.” I and others were pleased that whites were more numerous than ever in the Unity mix. The only difference was that, as in the rest of reality, they were not in the majority.
