DIVERSITY ON TRIAL IN THE PRIMARY ELECTIONS

The primaries, with the loss of Hilary Clinton, has prompted harsher critiques about the fact that the political media in this country is strongly sexist and dominated by men and mainly white men. The overwhelming majority of observers of American media, despite efforts to include professionals of color or women by main television channels, argue that “the race was still refereed, scored and narrated by white male commentators, an influential constituency in presidential politics.”

One can notice that there were a lot of talks in the media about the progress made by the United States concerning gender and race embodied mainly by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Yet, “the media continues to employ, groom and promote a commentators corps that is disproportionately white and male.”

Deborah Howell has found that only 12% of the Washington Post guest pieces were from women. Representation of women in the New York Times shows there are a lot of efforts that need to be done to make diversity in the newsroom an actual fact. In fact, “Eight of the ten weekly columnists are men; one is black.”

The disparities are more visible in television. What is most striking is that most anchors during the campaign are women, but when it came to primetime commentators or hosts, they are most of the time men. CNN, FOX and MSNBC are good examples as featured above. Yet, some media have tried to recruit women or black people as commentators and contributors during the primary election season as it was obvious that women and black journalists’ perspectives were much more needed with Obama and Clinton being the main political actors.

As Mister Hight suggested the other day, diversity needs to be nurtured and made permanent in any newsroom. I do think major media outlets must not intermittently promote diversity because of some binding circumstances such as the presence of black and female candidates in the race. Diversity should be made permanent so that there would not be any circumstances that would prompt its reinforcement. Diversity should be the everyday creed of any media outlet that endeavors to promote balanced representation.