The Gannett Co., America’s largest newspaper chain, recently lost its moral compass, a victim of the miasma of intimidation emanating from the White House.
Gannett, once the nation’s loudest voice for racial and ethnic diversity in news operations and content, “will no longer publish demographic and diversity data about its workforce,” Harvard’s Nieman journalism thinktank reported.
In the mid-1980s, as a junior faculty member in my 30s, I became involved in the national effort by the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ASNE) to diversify its workforce. The goal was to staff newspaper newsrooms with more people of different races, cultures and backgrounds to help newspapers report more fully and accurately on America. All of America.
The rationale was both ethical and pragmatic, David Lawrence Jr., then-publisher of Gannett’s Miami Herald and president of ASNE, said in 1991. “Moral in the sense that [a diverse workforce] . . . is simply a matter of being fair,” he said. “Practical in the sense that it is absolutely crucial to the future of our business.”
It was not a new concept. Back in the mid-1960s during the Civil Rights era, when race riots spread across the country, the violence caught the news business napping. One reason, editors and publishers said, was that their newsrooms were almost 100 percent White. “We can’t find qualified” Black reporters, editors said in 1968.
Newspapers began concerted efforts to recruit more people of color to report on the communities that white journalists didn’t know. The goal was not just to cover different kinds of stories for Black people, but to inform the larger society about itself.
In 1988, as a graduate student at Ohio University, with financial support from my university and corporate sponsors, I founded and directed an intensive training program, the Midwest Newspaper Workshop for Minorities. We reckoned that if newspapers couldn’t find qualified journalists of color, we’d train some. Similar training programs were created at other universities.
The most enthusiastic backer of these efforts was the Gannett Foundation, which provided funding, and Gannett newspapers in our area, which sent their journalists to help with training and — importantly — committed to hire workshop graduates for at least a year.
It saddens me beyond words to learn that Gannett has abandoned its commitment to helping its readers and communities learn about all of the American experience. Diversity, equity and inclusion is part of the American soul, part of what brought so many different people here yearning to be free to live, work and prosper. The Trump administration’s assault on diversity and inclusion is evidence of its determination to dismantle essential parts of the American experience.
In 1946, Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago and chairman of the presidential Commission on Freedom of the Press, explained the societal importance of diversity of thought and perspective in the press.
“The tremendous influence of the modern press makes it imperative that the great agencies of mass communication show hospitality to ideas which their owners do not share,” Hutchins said. “Otherwise, these ideas will not have a fair chance.”
Likewise, without a workforce that reflects variety and diversity, the press cannot reflect all of America. In 1991, nearly 50 years later, the Miami Herald‘s David Lawrence reflected Hutchins’s philosophy: “My own life experiences do not provide a complete and unabridged perspective on what is important to others in this world. That is why I must ‘people’ my newspaper with folks who know something more about many things than I.”
But at the new Gannett, instead of “We lead with inclusion,” the new corporate line is, “At Gannett, everyone can thrive.” That’s good, but not the same.
Edward C. Pease, Ph.D., is a journalist and emeritus professor of journalism.
This article appears in Humboldt Crabs Baseball.