While liberal media outlets cheer on the "Diversity Equity and Inclusion" organizing that spreads woke ideology through corporations, it seems "diversity" in racial hiring is tougher than their rhetoric. Groups pushing the media to the Left are now demanding that the Pulitzer Prize organization requires newsrooms to participate in the News Leader Association's annual diversity survey by 2024 in order to be considered for the Pulitzers.
Sarah Scire at the Nieman Lab reports a new open letter cites reporting in Nieman Lab that though NLA sought responses from 2,500 news organizations for this year’s survey, but just 303 newsrooms responded.
The letter was signed by dozens of professional journalism organizations, nonprofits, and labor unions. The signees include professional minority lobbies like the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the Native American Journalists Association. It also included the Columbia Journalism Review, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, and Vox Media.
As usual, "diversity" in newsrooms never requires the hiring of conservatives. The Left demands steps to "reduce bias" against minorities in hiring, but it's usually adding bias by hiring crusading leftist reporters and editors. If they hired a minority conservative, the Left would consider them White.
The letter concludes:
Journalists have an ethical duty to be accountable and transparent. We must be accountable to our readers and our workers by making sure our newsrooms reflect the demographics of our readers. And we must be transparent with that data to improve the diversity of our newsrooms so they can operate at their full potential.
The open letter, sent on Friday morning, was organized by Sisi Wei, co-executive director of OpenNews, and Jon Schleuss, president of The NewsGuild. Someone is not feeling the Spirit of George Floyd!
“The most incredible feedback we got was that other groups had thought of this idea as well, and they were excited that someone was finally taking action,” Wei said. “While we came upon the idea to start with the Pulitzers, so have many others....
“There’s been overwhelming support for this, which has been so inspiring. Newsrooms were supposed to have a ‘reckoning’ after the murder of George Floyd, and yet, here we are in 2022 seeing that so few organizations want to even be transparent about their own newsroom diversity,” Wei said. “This small step would be a big push towards helping our newsrooms serve the communities they cover.”
The activists are still seeking signatures for the letter and will release a second version soon.
