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By Charlie Ericksen
Washington, D.C., the nation’s most important news center, is off-limits to Hispanics and other journalists of color.
A first-ever survey of Washington, D.C., news bureaus serving hundreds of daily papers throughout the country has found that nine out of ten correspondents reporting for them are white. So -- most surveyed non-white correspondents contend -- is the color of what’s covered.
Only 2.4 percent of the capital-based bureaus’ reporters and editors are Hispanic, found the survey, which was released Aug. 3 at a gathering of 7,000 journalists attending the third convention of UNITY: Journalists of Color at the D.C. Convention Center.
The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Chicago Tribune, with capital news staffs of 46, 39, 26 and 17 respectively, count no Hispanics at all. The zeroes recorded by other influential major print media such as the Dallas Morning News, Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, Newsday, Washington Times, and such chains as Copley and Scripps Howard – with staffs ranging from 10 to 27 -- brings the total brownout among those 11 entities to nearly 250.
Conducted by the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, the survey reported that 6.1 percent of the capital newspersons were black and 1.9 percent Asian. Not a single Native American was recorded.
“There is no justification for any media company to staff its bureau in Washington, D.C., without people of color,” reacted UNITY President Ernest Sotomayor, an editor with Newsday based on Long Island, N.Y. “It’s dishonest journalism because it’s a willful decision made to deliberately exclude diverse staff, and that means the media company is satisfied with providing its readers or audience a skewed view of the news.”
The New York Times, with a bureau of 63, has a single Hispanic aboard. The Los Angeles Time has just two on its staff of 43.
Who gets the plum capital assignments “isn’t based on merit,” California Chicano News Media Association executive director Julio Morán told Hispanic Link. “It’s who’s friendly with whom.”
Results of a detailed companion questionnaire filled out by 75 non-white correspondents in the capital showed not a single one giving the Washington press corps an “excellent” or “very good” grade on coverage of race-related issues. “Fair” grades were marked by 79 percent and “poor” by 8 percent.
Seventy-four percent said their white press corps colleagues “seldom”
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