Media Racism History 101: Conclusion

In 2020 most U.S. Establishment newspapers and newspaper websites now claim to be opposed to institutional racism and systemic racism in the United States and elsewhere.

Yet in the late 20th-century, historically, most U.S. Establishment newspapers apparently still were operating in an institutionally racist way. As Media Studies Journal Editor Ted Peace noted, for example, in an essay, titled "Philosophical and Economic Arguments for Media Diversity," which appeared in Pluralizing Journalism Education in the early 1990's:

"At the end of 1990, 8.7 percent of newsroom professionals--reporters, copy editors, desk editors, photographers, graphic artists, and so on--were minorities. The country, however, is more than 24 percent non-White...

"...People of color still are largely excluded from both newsrooms and news content, or are included only as second-class citizens...A variety of scholarly studies, of news media performance show that coverage of minorities by those large metropolitan newspapers tends to account for only about 3 percent of their total news coverage. Further, more than half of White journalists and more than 70 percent of minority journalists, responding to a national 1991 study, said that their own newspaper covered minority communities only marginally or poorly.

"From these examples, it is apparent that the news industry, whether intentionally or not, still excludes people from the media mainstream because of their race or cultural perspective. The news industry is not keeping up with demographic change in this country, either in terms of employing people of diverse backgrounds as information-gatherers, or in terms of providing content and coverage of people who are not White..."