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S’thembiso Msomi from
the 'Sunday Times', Catherine Kim from NBC and Dean Baquet from
the 'New York Times'.
Race and leadership in the news media 2021: evidence
from five markets
Key
Findings
In this Reuters Institute factsheet
we analyze the percentage of non-white top editors in a strategic sample of 100
major online and offline news outlets in five different markets across four
continents: Brazil, Germany, South Africa, the United Kingdom (UK), and the
United States (US).
Looking at a sample of ten top
online news outlets and ten top offline news outlets in each of these markets,
we find:
Overall, 15% of the 80 top editors
across the 100 brands covered are non-white, despite the fact that, on average,
42% of the general population across all five countries are non-white. If we
set aside South Africa and look at the four other countries covered, 5% of the
top editors are non-white, compared to, on average, 30% of the general
population. There has been no significant overall increase in the number of
non-white top editors over the last year across the markets covered.
In Brazil, Germany, and the UK, none
of the outlets in our sample have a non-white top editor. In the US, there are
three non-white top editors in our sample (18%) and in South Africa a majority
(60%) are non-white.
In every single country covered, even South Africa, which
far outperforms the other four in terms of the racial diversity of top editors,
the percentage of non-white people in the general population is much higher
than it is among top editors.
In the four countries where data are
available on the number of non-white journalists, there is no simple
relationship between the percentage of non-white journalists and the percentage
of non-white top editors. In Brazil and the UK, there are fewer non-white top
editors than there are non-white journalists. In South Africa and the US, there
are more non-white top editors than non-white journalists.
The share of internet news users who
say that they read news from at least one major outlet with a non-white top
editor range from 0% in Brazil, Germany, and the UK to 86% in South
Africa.
General
overview
Top editorial positions in major
news outlets matter both practically and symbolically. They are important
because top editors are key figures in the leadership and direction of
newsrooms. Moreover, who editors are matters for how news outlets, and the news
media more broadly, are seen by the public (Duffy 2021). These premises are
central to our ongoing work studying diversity in leadership in the news media,
both from the perspective of gender (Robertson et al. 2021) and race (Nielsen
et al. 2020).
We continue that work on race and
leadership here, documenting the profile of top editors after a year marked by
ongoing conversations about racial justice, equity, and diversity in many
countries. The year 2020 only further underscored how the news media are an
important part of these conversations, whether they are about the issues raised
by social movements like Black Lives Matter, structural inequalities in
employment and healthcare access made further evident by the coronavirus
pandemic, or the ongoing legacy of colonialism and imperialism and how we
engage with our collective histories. There are concerns that the media can
sometimes miss relevant stories or perspectives related to these issues, in
part because top editors experience and see the underlying concerns very
differently from the people and communities most directly affected by them
(Arboine 2020; Borzi 2020). This is why it is important to look at who top
editors are.
This short factsheet adds to
important research by others working on race in the news media, including the
studies we highlighted last year by professional groups – for example: the
American Society of News Editors diversity survey, led most recently by
Meredith Clark (Clark 2019); the Journalists in the UK report from
Britain (Thurman et al. 2016); work on diversity in British newsrooms by Women
in Journalism (Darrah and Haddou 2020); and the ‘Diversity in deutschen
Journalismus’ study by Neue deutschen Medienmacher*innen in Germany (Boytchev
et al. 2020) – as well as work by a range of academics (e.g. Merrill 2021; Lück
et al. 2020; Somani and Tyree 2020).
Methods
and data
Continuing our work from 2020
(Nielsen et al. 2020), we focus on top editorial leadership positions in a
strategic sample of five markets. These countries have different demographics
and histories of white imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. To get an
overview of similarities and differences across markets, as well as any changes
in leadership, we examine the same countries in 2021 as we did last year,
namely South Africa; Germany and the United Kingdom from Europe; the United
States from North America; and Brazil from South America. To be able to
leverage available data on the journalistic profession and on news and media
use, we include five markets from those covered in Worlds of Journalism
(Hanitzsch et al. 2019) and in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report
2020 (Newman et al. 2020). Where it is possible, we compare our findings to
data on diversity in the journalistic profession (using Worlds of Journalism
data) and in the wider population (using census data). However, data are not always
available and comparisons not always possible because of limited research, but
also because of legal restrictions on collecting and retaining certain
statistics on race (for instance in Germany).
Our approach is identical to last
year. In each market, we focused on the top ten offline (TV, print, and radio)
and online news brands in terms of weekly usage, as measured in the 2020
Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al. 2020). Our focus on
the most widely used offline and online brands means that some important
outlets with non-white editors are not included in the sample (in the US, for
example, the Miami Herald, which has Monica Richardson, a Black woman,
as executive editor is not in the sample). Because of changes in what the most
widely used brands are, and our focus on the top ten offline and online brands,
there has been some turnover in the specific brands included in the analysis:
89 of the 100 brands covered in 2020 are included in the analysis again this
year, with 11 new brands included.
For each brand, we identified the
top editor by checking their official webpages. The data were collected in
February 2021. We looked for editor-in-chief or the nearest equivalent; for
example, executive editor, or head of news for TV. The exact terminology varies
from country to country and organization to organization, but in most cases it
is possible to identify a single person. We refer to the individuals identified
collectively as the top editors. It is important to note, of course, that this
does not mean the top editor is the only person who matters or, in fact, the
most important person in terms of day-to-day editorial decision-making. We
coded observations as missing in cases where both online and offline versions
of the same brand share a top editor, so the analysis covers a total of 80
individuals across the 100 brands included in 2021, compared to 88 individuals
last year. Some top editors, such as Martin Baron, Executive Editor of the Washington
Post, were stepping down at or around the time of data collection. We
include here the top editor as of late February.
The individuals identified were
double-checked by journalists from the market in question, as well as by
academic partners and our researchers. We also contacted the brands or their
press offices to confirm who their top editor was. Where organizations
responded, we always deferred to their judgement. In some cases, where an
organization has not responded to our query and where there is no single
clearly designated editor-in-chief, or roles and responsibilities across online
and offline parts of the same outlet are unclear, we have made a judgement call
as to who to code as the top editor of the outlet in question.
Following work on the representation
of race in editorial positions in communications research (Chakravartty et al.
2018), we operationalized race by adopting a conceptualization that contrasts
institutionally dominant white populations and dominated non-white populations.
Race and racial discrimination work in complex ways not always tied to skin
color, for example where it has a religious dimension. There are also
dimensions of ethnicity that are not always related to race. However, a
white/non-white conceptualization captures some important aspects of this in
the countries we cover. We therefore deploy a simple and reductionist, but
hopefully still illuminating and relevant, binary, and code each top editor as
white or non-white. Non-white is in no way meant to suggest an identity, let
alone a homogenous group, given the great diversity and complexity of people’s
identities, but it provides a way to categories otherwise very different people
who come from dominated ethnic and racial groups. It helps us point to a
dimension of inequality in representation at a macro level.
All individuals in the dataset were
coded independently by the authors and, after discussion, all codes were the
same (the initial inter-coder reliability score was 0.99). Race and ethnicity
are complicated phenomena and so are statistics on race and ethnicity. What we
present here is based on our coding of the individuals covered. Top editors may
not in every instance see themselves in the same way, or always be seen by
everyone else in the same way. All the numbers presented here, both from our
own data collection and from secondary sources we rely on, should be seen with
this in mind.
Findings
Based on this dataset, we find that
15% of the top 80 editors across the 100 brands covered are non-white. This
compares to 18% in 2020. It is, again, substantially below the, on average, 42%
of people in the general population across all five markets who identify as
non-white (based on census data and other official estimates).1 It is also below the average percentage
of non-white journalists (21%) in the four countries where we have available
data (Hanitzsch et al. 2019). Setting aside South Africa, 5% of top editors
across Brazil, Germany, the UK, and the US are non-white, compared to, on
average, 30% of the general population across these markets.
Looking exclusively at the 89 brands
we covered last year and again this year, 17% of the top editors are non-white
in 2021, compared to 16% in 2020. This reflects that there has been some
turnover among the top editors. Among the 11 new top editors identified and
coded among these brands, five are non-white. However, four of these are from
South Africa alone. Across brands included in both 2020 and 2021 in the four
other markets covered, one of seven individuals included for the first time in
2021 is non-white.
Combined with the new editors from
the 11 new brands added to our list this year, there are 20 new top editors in
total and, of these, 25% are non-white (the decline in the top-line figure
reflects the fact that there were 30% non-white top editors among the brands
included in 2020 but no longer on our list in 2021).
Looking at Figure 1, the percentage
of non-white editors varies considerably across the five markets we cover. In
Germany and the UK, as was the case last year, none of the outlets we cover has
a non-white top editor. In Brazil, we find no non-white top editors among the
brands included in 2021 (in 2020, there was one). South Africa still has a
majority of non-white top editors, though the percentage has dropped from 68%
in 2020 to 60% in 2021. In the US, there is one more non-white top editor in
our sample this year.
When
we look at the relationship between the percentage of non-white people working
in journalism, relying on data from Worlds of Journalism (Hanitzsch et al.
2019), and the percentage of non-white top editors across our five markets,
shown in Figure 2, we find a mixed picture (as was the case in 2020). The UK
has a small number of non-white journalists (6%) and, again, no non-white top
editors in our sample. The US also has a small number of non-white journalists
(9%), but a larger percentage of non-white top editors (18%). In Brazil,
despite a third of journalists being non-white (34%), there are no non-white
top editors in our sample this year. South Africa stands out as an exception,
with a third of journalists being non-white (34%) but 60% of top editors being
non-white. (Data on the racial identity of journalists in Germany is not
available).
Comparing
data on the demographics of the population as a whole with the percentage of
non-white top editors in each market (Figure 3), we find marked disparities, as
we did last year. Despite well over half of the population in Brazil
identifying as non-white (57%), there are no non-white top editors in our
sample. In markets with smaller percentages of non-white people in the general
population, namely Germany and the UK, there are also no non-white top editors.
In the US, the percentage of non-white top editors (18%) is below half of the
percentage of non-white (including Hispanic/Latinx) people in the general
population (40%). And even South Africa, where the percentage of non-white
people in the general population is 92%, has a disparity in representation
among top editors (60% are non-white). Thus, in all markets we cover there are
disparities in representation among top editors and, notably, in three markets
with millions of non-white people, there are no non-white top editors at all.
Finally, by combining the data
collected for this Reuters Institute factsheet with data from the 2020 Reuters
Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al. 2020), we can identify the
proportion of people in each market who access news from at least one major
news outlet with a non-white top editor. As shown in Figure 4, the share of
online news consumers who say that they got news from at least one major outlet
(online or offline) with a non-white top editor varies considerably, with
little change between 2020 and 2021. Audiences in Germany and the UK still
accessed no news from a major outlet edited by a non-white person in the past week,
while audiences in Brazil now report getting no news overseen by a non-white
top editor in the past week. In the US, in 2021, 42% of online news users used
at least one source with a non-white top editor, up from 30% last year, and in
South Africa, the figure remains 86%.
Conclusion
In this Reuters Institute fact
sheet, we have analyzed the racial breakdown of top editors at a strategic
sample of 100 major online and offline news outlets in five different markets
across four continents. After a year of increasingly critical scrutiny of the
frequent lack of diversity in news media, especially in top leadership, we find
no significant increase in the number of non-white top editors across the
markets and sample of brands covered.
The overall findings are the same as
last year: relative to their share of the general population, white people are
significantly over-represented among top editors in all five countries, and
non-white people significantly under-represented. All, or nearly all, top
editors in our sample in most of these countries are white. South Africa is the
only country where this is not the case, and even here there is a more than 30
percentage point gap between the percentage of non-white top editors (60%) and
the percentage of non-white population (92%). In Brazil, Germany, and the UK,
we find no non-white top editors in our sample, though all these countries are
home to millions of people of color (a majority of the population in the case
of Brazil).
Public criticism, professional and
industry self-reflection, and surveys of news media leaders suggest there is a
recognition in some quarters that the news media need to reckon with ‘who
journalism isn’t serving’ (Callison and Young 2019), and that part of that
reckoning is about the frequent lack of diversity in the industry and
profession itself, especially at the top. In 2020, the Reuters Institute
surveyed a strategic sample of 136 news industry leaders, and a majority
recognized that their news organization needed to address problems of ethnic
diversity and named one or more initiatives already underway in their
organization to help do so (Cherubini et al. 2020). When asked to identify the
biggest priority in terms of newsroom diversity in the year ahead, a plurality
identified ethnic diversity as the top priority, ahead of diversity in terms
of, for example, gender or social class by a large margin (Cherubini et al.
2020). A clear majority of the respondents recognized that their organizations
were not doing a good job with diversity at a senior level.
This realization is not new. Take
the UK, where the Society of Editors in 2004 wrote that ‘changing the
complexion of the newsroom is a fundamental challenge that will require
commitment and a structured approach, driven consistently from the top’.
Seventeen years later, it is not clear that the profile of top editors is
significantly more diverse in terms of race than it was then. Change and
turnover at the top is often slow, and even when it happens it does not always
result in greater diversity.
So the conversation – and the
criticism – will continue. Will the pace of change increase? We will know more
when we repeat this analysis in 2022 to track developments in race and equality
among top editors across the world.
Source: Dr Craig T. Robertson; Prof.
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen; Data collected by the Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism on the ethnicity of top editors at 100 news outlets.
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