There was a news story about 10 days ago about a 16-year-old aspiring journalist, Emily Smith, who was accepted to the Urban Journalism Workshop at Virginia Commonwealth University and then was booted out when the program organizers found out she was White. Her family sued and there was a settlement in which the news groups agreed not to use race as a factor in their programs. Here’s the link to the Henderson Daily Dispatch editorial on the controversy:

http://www.hendersondispatch.com/articles/2007/02/16/news/opinion/opin01.txt

The editorial concluded: “If professional newsroom diversity is the goal, then a homogenous journalism workshop isn’t the right path, even if that homogeny was the result of trying just a little too hard to help the students you most want to include and encourage.”

What interests me is the above conclusion. The emphasis is correct in describing most diversity efforts as seeking to help specific students “you most want to include.” Change that to specific “minorities” and specific racial groups. In otherwords, “specific” is about exclusion. It doesn’t just mean seeking to bring in students who are non-White, but seeking to bring in non-White students who are Black, Hispanic and Asian. And that means to me “Not the others.”

I like being one of “The Others.” It happens I am Arab. I didn’t choose it. I also didn’t choose the fact that the Arab World happens to consume a large majority of our journalism time as a profession. It’s one of the biggest news stories we face and yet, do we properly cover it.

Here’s a little tidbit. I’ll go on a limb here.

The fact is there are terror cells operating in the Chicago area. And one reason we can’t identify them is because:

the criminal investigators AND the journalists whoc over the topic are non-Arab with no experience in what the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington described as the “lack of Hood experience.” Washington, in 1983, told the all-White gaggle of reporters who covered his new administration that they couldn’t possibly cover him properly, completely or accurately because none of them understand his community nor the experience of “the hood.” When he did something, his actions were interpreted by hood-deprived reporters who couldn’t possibly recognize what was or wasn’t important about his decision process, only the results skewered from their limited experience perspective.

The journalists have no idea how to distinguish between one Arab and another Arab. We’re all the same. Shi’ite and Sunni. God. If President Bush had only understood the divisions that did exist between Sunni and Shi’ite prior to invading Iraq, maybe things would be different. (Shi’ite are mainly a Muslim sect focused on religion as a way of life. They see the Palestine-Israel conflict as one battle over their religious beliefs. Sunnis, on the other hand, view the Palestine-Israel conflict as an issue of justice, not religious ideology for the most part. Sunnis are generally considered the “Arab” Muslims while Shi’ites are considered the Muslim Muslims. Generally. I don’t want to stereotype. )

So, investigators and journalists can’t really see the terrorists because they can’t distinguish between the people they are looking at. Jabha, Hamas, Fatah and Jihadists all look the same. That benefits the terrorists because they end up hiding in that “vanilla” — well, how about an Arab term for “vanilla” called “tahini” perspective. We all look the same. You can’t see the trees for the forrest!

Meanwhile, terrorists are raising money in Chicago, targeting innocent civilians, building a network and the only thing the US Government can do is arrest anyone who says something that challenges the mainstream political views, and the media doesn’t report on anything until it rises above the “Tahini” Line — the arbitrary radar screen demarcation between what is and isn’t news in the Arab American community.

This sin’t about politics. It’s about seeing how diversity is failing in professional journalism because we have defined it too narrowly.

Ray Hanania

rayhanania@comcast.net

www.hanania.com

It’s true that America’s news rooms need more diversity. But I thinkt he challenge is even bigger than that. The entire journalism system needs a “diversity reality check.” One of my favorite journalism sites where I check in often to check the journalism pulse is Poynter.org. One think I notice, of course being a part of an ethnic group that is way on the fringes of mainstream media, is that the faculty and staff there reflect “popular” diversity (hispanics, African Americans, Asians, Jews, etc). But it doesn’t seem to reflect the area I am most concerned about, the issue of “unpopular diversity.” There are no Arabs. No Muslims stood out. (I don’t mean to pick on them, just using them as an example). I think I find the same problemw hen I look at the boards of journalism organizations, journalism watchdog groups, journalist support institutions, and journalism university faculty.

Makes it tough to hammer a newspaper for a lack of diversity when the definition of diversity is so marrow.

Does anyone even agree with me that we have so narrowly defined “diversity” to only address the “popular” diversity — is there a better term for this? — and that we have created a whole group of minorities who are outside of what satisfies mainstream “diversity” demands?

Just trying provoke some thoughts on what the real meaning of diversity is and should be by throwing these stones.

Ray Hanania

www.hanania.com

My first blog.

You know folks that as a Palestinian Arab American, I have a whole different take ont he issue of diversity. And I will do my best to convey it as a part of this blog in the hopes that helps others understand a perspective on diversity that I and other Arabs and Muslim Americans feel is very important when we discuss it in the context professional journalism.

So you will get a flurry of unconventional thoughts here that challenges the notion that diversity is being addressed when we focus on African Americans, Hispanics and Asians. I think that we are not properly addressing diversity when we “box it” into a focus on those three and maybe even four ethnic/racial groups (adding Native Americans, too). If we really want to diversity, we have to step out of the box and redefine it, not based on the majority minorities, but rather on the presence and/or absence of voices in the contact of major and mainstream news coverage.

Here is what I mean. diversity is related not only to race but also to context of media coverage. In otherwords, it is improper to cover a major news story without including the vast experience that journalists who might have a racial or religious or ethnic link to the news story focus. How can we cover racism without including African American voices. It’s impossible. The reason we seek diversity is to insure that we don’t exclude African American voices and therefore their valuable experiences in the public discussion and the media coverage of race and racism.

The same is true for the Middle East. It is one of the most important topics that the news media is today focused on covering. How is it that we can claim to present a complete picture of that topic without including voices from the Arab and Muslim community. I recall when Harold Washington was elected mayor of Chicago in1983, he made a very harsh criticism against the City Hall reporters, pointing out that the majority were White — in fact all White if you include Arabs as being White (not everyone does ) … and he argued that there needed to be more minority voices covering is administration because a Black reporter would understand many aspects of the African American experience that White reporters could never understand. How could a White reporter, alone, convey an accurate portrait of the Washington Administratioin without having at least someone there to interpret and relate the Black experience into the context of the news coverage? It’s not possible.

It’s also not possible to cover the Middle East without including Arab and Muslim journalists. And I intend to argue further than the mainstream American media intentionally excludes Arabs and Muslims from their news rooms, partly fearing the intense political debate that surrounds the Middle East conflict itself, and partly because the old traditional mainstream media power brokers have eased open the door to allow in Blacks, Hispanics and Asians, but do not feel the same pressure to also open the door as wide to Arab and Muslim American journalists.

I’ll conclude this by also arguing that had the news media included more Arab and Muslim journalists among their ranks — and there are many Arab and Muslim journalists out there who don’t have jobs — the media could have done a better job of educating the American public (our readership) of the depth and true nature of Middle East terrorism. I see the distinctions int he Arab and Muslim community that allows me to distinguish between those who advocate terrorism and those who are swept up in a public streotyping that is reflected int he news media.

Thanks and Shukran

Ray Hanania

rayhanania@comcast.net

Before I became Internet General Manager at Cox Ohio Publishing in Dayton, Ohio, I was deputy managing editor here at the Dayton Daily News. My duties included newsroom recruiting, and I went to job fairs in order to ensure we had a steady stream of diverse candidates in our newsrooms. Dayton has always been a leader in newsroom diversity.

I’m confident we’ll be a similar leader in online diversity. But online presents a different set of challenges to news owners. As of yet, there’s not a lot of focus on diversity in the online world. How many women or people of color run web businesses? (I think I”m one of the few, but don’t know for sure; not sure anyone has ever done a survey) This isn’t to say that newspapers don’t care about diversity — look at how far the business has come in the three decades (Boy am I getting old). But diversity doesn’t happen on its own. It takes focus. Is there anyone out there taking a look at this issue? How are we preparing women and people of color for this new and very exciting online journalism world?