Diversity awareness and the role of language in cultural representations in news stories

Abstract

Behind news stories are reporting, writing, and editing actions and decisions that constitute everyday practice within the news profession. As part of this, journalists are conscious of providing relevant coverage of the communities in which they work. A consequence is that news discourse reflects both profession-internal and societal values. To illustrate the relation of news reporting to values in the larger culture, I examine an aspect of US news coverage that is actively discussed within the profession: reporting on “diversity,” described as “issues of class, race, ethnicity, culture, abilities and sexual orientation” (Poynter Institute). Beyond prohibitions against pejorative labels, the role of language and its indexing of social identity is seldom included in diversity awareness discussions, despite its function in that regard. I argue that this is because of the monolingual language ideology that suffuses mainstream America and the absence of specialist linguistic insight that might provide a counter-perspective. Ethnolinguistic examination of profession-internal discourse concerning the industry's self-identified diversity reporting gaps can also lead to a more nuanced understanding of news practice, while looking at journalists’ outputs in topic-neutral contexts illustrates the larger sociocultural attitudes that the news community reflects when it engages in reporting about “diversity.”