Latino Reporters' Ethnic Identification with Sources Affects Newspaper Content

Abstract

Scholars and professional organizations repeatedly have called on newsrooms to increase their diversity. A more varied staff, goes the argument, would counteract the white-male order of newsrooms, helping to create a more comprehensive and fair representation of society.1 But does newsroom diversity make a difference? Studies that tested the impact of reporters' demographics on media content are inconclusive. Some scholars argue that such an influence exists; they posit that people from diverse backgrounds bring different experiences and social networks, which ultimately affect their job performance.2 Other academics, however, assert that the effects of having minorities and women are minor because of organizational and ideological constraints.3This study explores whether the presence of racial minorities in newsrooms plays a role in the production of content. Many of these investigations4 mostly explored the impact on newsgathering practices in general- coverage of positive stories in general or use of a wider variety of sources. It is argued that the news media's tendency to under- and misrepresent minorities is due, in part, to a weak identification with them.5 This study explores whether Latino journalists' ethnic identification with their own group affects newspaper content.Using the hierarchies-of-influences model6 and the social identity theory7 as theoretical frameworks, this study investigates whether Latino journalists use more Latino sources than do their non-Latino counterparts and whether stories citing Latinos as sources are more positive when they are written by Latino reporters.Theoretical FrameworkThe hierarchies-of-influence model states that the individual level- journalists' background, experiences, attitudes and training-influences news content only if reporters have enough power to overcome the other factors impacting media outcomes, like routines, organizations, extramedia influences and embedded ideologies.8 In the case of Latino reporters, the socialization within their own community would influence source selection because they are exposed to more members of the Latino community. Also, they would be more sensitive to issues affecting their ethnic group. However, reporters in general have been trained to follow neutrality and objectivity as news values, which tend to standardize journalists' individual background and work.9Social identity theory, derived from social psychology, proposes that people tend to have greater identification with members of their own social group.10 It has been found that social identification with in-group members affects journalists' decision-making processes.11 Because race and ethnicity in the United States are powerful social categories,12 one might expect Latino journalists to rely more on members of their own ethnic group as sources, and to write more positive stories involving Latinos. Investigations about ethnicgroup relations have found, however, that minority group members may actually downgrade the in-group and exhibit more positive attitudes toward the dominant group.13 Thus, the fact that Latino journalists are minority members may lessen their ability to shape the news content.Literature ReviewStudies examining the relationship between reporters' race and ethnicity on news content are scarce. In a content analysis of a presidential campaign, Zeldes and Fico14 found that minority reporters use minority sources in a greater percentage of their stories than were white journalists. Later, in a similar study of local television coverage of a gubernatorial race, they15 found that minority journalists were only slightly more likely to use minority sources than do white reporters. These studies collapsed all the minority groups-African Americans, Hispanics, Asians-into one category. They also examined the number of stories that had a minority source rather than the number of minority sources in each news story. The present study takes the second approach because the impact of one source on the perspective of a news article may be weaker than an article that cites various minority sources. …