Corporate Culture, Minority Hiring, and Newspaper Coverage of Affirmative Action

Abstract

This article examines how a publicly reporting newspaper corporation's culture affects whether its newspapers hire minorities and how its newspapers cover affirmative action stories. Companies were operationalized as either more socially responsible or more profit-oriented. More socially responsible corporations were more likely to hire minority newsroom employees than more profit-oriented corporations. More profit-oriented corporations, in contrast, were more likely to publish news stories about affirmative action than more socially responsible corporations. In addition, hiring minority newsroom employees seems to have little influence on the number of affirmative action stories published by daily newspapers.