Journalism as Kerner Turns 40: Its Multiculticultural Problems and Possibilities

Abstract

In the years since the Kerner Report was released, a combination of technological shifts in the newspaper business and the continued migration of newspapers toward their preferred White and middle class readers in the suburbs and exurbs of America have contributed to the plight of today’s newspaper industry in the United States. The strategy of many daily newspapers to pursue that declining base through the costly creation of satellite or outlying ‘‘zone’’ bureaus and editions has left other media to fill the news void in racially diverse inner cities. Yet, one might argue that the plight of the news business—be it newspaper or electronic—cannot be fully understood today unless factors beyond technological and populations shifts are brought into view. As the American society has evolved demographically over the last decades, the news industry does not appear to have evolved with it. From our vantage point in Washington, DC, where the White House welcomed its first non-White president and first family in the nation’s history earlier this year, the American society looks particularly Brown, Black, and international. The nation’s capital and its nearby suburbs in Maryland and Virginia form a large metropolitan area with an historically large African American population, and recent demographic shifts through immigration have also expanded Latino= Hispanic, African, Caribbean, South Asian, Asian and other racial and ethnic groups. New census data show that between the years 2000 and 2005, five out of every six of the half-million new residents to the Washington metro area were people of color. Hispanics and Asians were in the largest numbers, and most of the growth was in the suburbs of northern Virginia and suburban Maryland (Layton & Keating, 2006). Moreover, what is happening in this global city of our nation’s capital also happens elsewhere. The U.S. census