The Claims of Multiculturalism and Journalism's

journal of

COMMUNICATION Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The Claims of Multiculturalism and Journalism’s Promise of Diversity Theodore L. Glasser1, Isabel Awad2 & John W. Kim3 1 Department of Communication, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 2 The Amsterdam School of Communications Research, University of Amsterdam, 1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands 3 Department of Media Studies, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94117

Mainstream American journalism rests on a pluralist model of democracy that conserves the status quo, essentializes culture, and trivializes diversity. A very different understanding of diversity emerges from a multiculturalist perspective that questions existing arrangements, posits a relational view of culture, and defines diversity in terms of patterns of discrimination and inequality. A case study of coverage of a local issue in the mainstream and minority press underpins a discussion of the importance of diversifying journalism by restructuring the American press. Journalism diversity matters most not only as it heightens sensitivity to cultural differences but as it strengthens the role of minority media in the struggle to achieve the social justice and political parity that a culturally diverse society demands. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.01404.x

Now as familiar as the perennial warning about the eroding credibility of the press— and at times justified by it—calls for a more open and inclusive journalism come from all corners of the American newsroom, especially, though not entirely, from groups with names that signal their members’ identity: Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, Native American Journalists Association. Louder and better orchestrated than ever before, the chorus of pleas for diversity in journalism includes as well the traditionally catholic voice of groups with historically broader agendas. The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), for example, promotes coverage of the ‘‘fullest possible range of people and issues’’ by encouraging journalists to seek out new and better sources (SPJ Diversity Committee, 2002). And the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) pushes for ‘‘full and accurate coverage of our nation’s diverse communities’’ by urging and monitoring ‘‘racial parity in newsrooms.’’ ASNE insists that ‘‘the

Corresponding author: Theodore L. Glasser; e-mail: [email protected] Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 57–78 ª 2009 International Communication Association

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Claims of Multiculturalism

T. L. Glasser et al.

nation’s newsrooms must reflect the racial diversity of American society by 2025 or sooner’’ (ASNE, 1998).1 American journalists today regard diversity as an inevitable and even desirable feature of modern American democracy, a view that began to emerge in the years following the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly known as the Kerner Report, which warned that the ‘‘press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective’’ and which called on American news media to begin the ‘‘painful process of readjustment’’ that will ‘‘make a reality of integration . . . in both their product and personnel’’ (1968, p. 389). Indeed, claims today about the importance of diversity in journalism usually coincide with—and often correspond to—claims about the vitality of journalism’s commitment to a democratic society. Thus SPJ recognizes that the ‘‘[c]omprehensive and fair news coverage’’ that diversity demands ‘‘is essential to an informed public and democracy itself.’’ Likewise, ASNE sees newsroom diversity as a means for newsrooms ‘‘to carry out their role in a democracy.’’ But, significantly, the role journalism envisions for itself, and the version of democracy its role implies, rests on a model of pluralism that leaves more or less unquestioned the basic values of free enterprise and consumer choice, and a ‘‘politics of consensus’’ that Daniel Bell celebrated in 1960 as ‘‘the end of ideology.’’ As a theory of democracy developed in detail in the decades following World War II, pluralism—sometimes called ‘‘liberal pluralism,’’ ‘‘interest-group democracy,’’ or ‘‘empirical democratic theory’’—offers a basically descriptive and thus an inherently conservative account of Western democracy; it prescribes what it describes by affirming the value and efficacy of existing arrangements and practices. Based largely on accounts of the success of democracy in the United States and elsewhere (e.g., Almond & Verba, 1963), pluralism presupposes a broad political consensus—‘‘a consensus on the rules of procedure; a consensus on the range of policy options; a consensus on the legitimate scope of political activity’’ (Held, 1987, p. 194)— within which individuals pursue their interests and goals. Pluralists view this consensus as a sign of the triumph of a system of self-government that fosters competition and ‘‘constructive conflict’’ over systems of self-government mired in deep and presumably dysfunctional ideological debates (ergo, Bell’s ‘‘end of ideology’’ claim), and they take it as evidence of the absence of any need for wholesale changes in the way democracy works. It follows, then, that given pluralism’s overall satisfaction with the status quo, improving a pluralist democracy requires only small fixes and minor repairs; as Robert Dahl (1967), one of pluralism’s chief theoreticians, once put it, democracies in the pluralist tradition envision a political culture ‘‘that brings about reform more through mutual adjustment and gradual accumulation of incremental changes than through sweeping programs of comprehensive and coordinated reconstruction’’ (p. 190). As one of pluralism’s existing and therefore ‘‘successful’’ institutions, the American press responds to calls for change in just the way Dahl describes: slowly, incrementally, and without attention to ‘‘sweeping programs of comprehensive and coordinated 58

Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 57–78 ª 2009 International Communication Association



reconstruction.’’ To be sure, mainstream American journalism confines its commitment to diversity to a set of narrowly conceived newsroom initiatives and consequently forfeits any role it might play in the resolution of the very issues the pluralist model accepts as unproblematic, namely, ‘‘issues of social and political power, of social structure and economic relations’’ (Hall, 1982, p. 59). That is, by defining diversity solely in terms of what newsrooms can do by themselves and for themselves—basically, improving coverage of minority communities by in large part hiring, training, and retaining minorities—journalists miss an opportunity to contribute to an answer to a core question for multicultural societies like the United States, and a question of obvious relevance to journalism: ‘‘What are the norms and conditions of inclusive democratic communication under circumstances of structural inequality and cultural difference?’’ (Young, 2000, p. 6). Specifically, no plans or programs under the banner of diversity in journalism respond to questions about the nature of the relationship between mainstream and minority journalism: Except for occasional and mostly ad hoc acts of cooperation, should ‘‘dominant’’ and ‘‘subordinate’’ media, to appropriate the harsh but accurate terms Nancy Fraser (1992, p. 125) uses to designate ‘‘unequal social groups in structural relations of dominance and subordination,’’ view themselves as competitors and therefore operate separately and independently, without regard for how one might diminish the viability of the other? Or should they work together to articulate and amplify the ‘‘provincial’’ issues and perspectives that ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ newsrooms neglect or find difficult to cover? We take up these questions in an effort to better understand the roles and responsibilities of the press in a multicultural society. We build on, but in some significant ways move beyond, the growing body of literature (e.g., Baker, 2002; Curran, 1996; Husband, 1998; Silverstone, 2007) that deals with the importance of transforming the 19th century ideal of a ‘‘public sphere’’ (Habermas, 1989) into something more akin to what Fraser (1992) describes as a ‘‘multiplicity of publics,’’ an arrangement that more closely approximates the conditions for ‘‘participatory parity’’ in societies, like the United States, where unequal social groups vie for power and resources. We begin, then, with a review of the basic differences between ‘‘pluralism’’ and ‘‘multiculturalism,’’ an intentionally overdrawn distinction we use to capture contrasting approaches to the relationship between democracy and diversity. We next look at how, normatively, a multicultural society conceives justice and what, in turn, this implies for a reconsideration of the scope and purpose of a culturally diverse press. To illustrate the nexus between justice and journalism, we examine recent coverage in the mainstream and minority press of an issue of particular interest to the Latina/o community in San Jose´, California. We conclude with suggestions for rethinking—and prescriptions for reconstituting—journalism’s promise of diversity. Pluralism versus multiculturalism

In their development and application here, the terms ‘‘pluralism’’ and ‘‘multiculturalism’’ represent rival perspectives on the relationship between diversity and Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 57–78 ª 2009 International Communication Association

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democracy. Pluralism denotes a set of claims, refined and revised over the years, about the virtues of interest-group politics and the importance of the role of a market economy in the resolution of differences and disagreements. Pluralists view politics as a more or less private contest between personal interests; they treasure the freedom of choice that individuals enjoy as they exercise their right, alone but usually in concert with others, to secure the resources and influence they need to get what they want. The version of multiculturalism we describe here, by contrast, rests on the proposition, developed in part as a counterpoint to the pluralist predisposition to accept market forces as inherently fair and impartial, that a just resolution of differences and disagreements requires a system of representation that makes adjustments for, rather than disregards, patterns of social inequality. Multiculturalists regard politics as a conspicuously public activity which depends on a commitment to an equitable distribution of resources; they understand political participation in terms of the opportunities for debate and deliberation, a political culture in which cooperation and mutuality facilitate the discovery of common goals and shared interests. Pluralism amounts to a kind of ‘‘polyarchy,’’ as Dahl (1956, p. 133) describes one of the key features of a pluralist democracy; it calls for the distribution of power across a broad range of individuals and groups. A pluralist democracy succeeds in the same way and for the same reasons a competitive market succeeds. Just as laissezfaire economists emphasize the importance of choice among competing products and services, with the expectation that what is good will prevail over time, pluralists emphasize the importance of ‘‘constant negotiation’’ among groups with competing interests, with the expectation that the ‘‘consent of all will be won in the long run’’ (Dahl, 1967, p. 24). As a means to unknown ends, politics in the tradition of pluralism, like economics in the tradition of capitalism, succeeds without regard for what it achieves. Multiculturalists question the wisdom of separating success from achievement; they look askance at any ‘‘framework for utopia’’ that ‘‘totally rejects planning’’ and which accepts uncritically whatever ‘‘grows spontaneously from the individual choices of many people over a long period of time,’’ to borrow from Robert Nozick’s (1974, p. 332) vision of a just society; and, most of all, they object to the notion of an equilibrium in nature—a natural equilibrium—sustained through ‘‘invisible-hand processes.’’ From the perspective of multiculturalism, politics exists in history, not nature; and history provides ample evidence, as Seyla Benhabib (1999, p. 404) points out, of what contravenes nature’s equilibrium and what contradicts, therefore, pluralism’s ascription of equality: the ‘‘existence of relations of oppression, domination, marginalization, exploitation, and denigration.’’ Multiculturalists, then, reject the pluralist conception of politics as a fiction that masks an enduring imbalance of power in society; they view as fanciful the pluralist ‘‘myth’’ that codifies ‘‘systematic inequalities’’ between existing ethnic groups while offering very little in the way of a substantive program to redress the domination of some ethnic groups by others (Steinberg, 1989). 60




Pluralism secures its celebrated consensus by discounting claims that might weaken it. By equating cultural groups with interest groups, pluralism accepts a utilitarian calibration of culture which robs groups, however disadvantaged they may be, of the grounds for whatever substantive claims they might have regarding their rights and opportunities to participate in the larger society. In other words, groups in a pluralist society compete—that is participate—on the basis of their ‘‘private’’ self-interest rather than on the basis of any collective or common ‘‘public’’ interest, which in principle precludes any critique of the quality of political participation beyond what individuals and groups of individuals can secure by and for themselves. Remarkably, citizens in a pluralist society either consent to the consensus that legitimizes a pluralist democracy or they forfeit their own legitimacy. In multiculturalism’s more open and more fluid account of culture and cultural diversity, however, groups do not exist ‘‘naturally’’ or ‘‘in nature,’’ as pluralists usually suppose, but as the product of social processes. Through these social processes, the centerpiece of Young’s (2000) ‘‘relational’’ view of culture, individuals discover and affirm the differences—different situations, different histories, different affinities – that make sense to them and that matter most to them. Mindful of—but not bound by—the past, individuals in a multiculturalist society recognize the need, as Putnam (2007, p. 161) recently put it, to ‘‘redraw social lines in ways that transcend history.’’ Still, the differences that matter in a multicultural society—the differences that individuals find salient—cannot exist in any politically meaningful sense until they get factored into a society’s values and goals, its plans and policies, a requirement that multiculturalists, unlike pluralists, understand in terms of the opportunities to translate the particular interests of groups and individuals into the generalizable interests of society. For these are the opportunities for deliberation, not competition, when political participation, as Habermas (1996, p. 23) describes the conditions for popular sovereignty in a multicultural democracy, ‘‘obeys not the structure of market processes but the obstinate structures of public communication oriented to mutual understanding.’’ To secure these opportunities, to insure that everyone enjoys an equal right of mutual influence, multiculturalists turn to a decidedly republican or communitarian conception of justice, one in which a just society invites everyone to consider the plight of everyone else. Justice and journalism

A multiculturalist conception of justice incorporates two related but conceptually distinct views of the principle of inclusion. First, it posits an inextricable link between a group’s social position and a group’s ability to assert its interests, such that all groups share an aversion to the conditions that silence or weaken any group’s voice. Second, it requires that the assertion of interests take into account the interests of others, such that no group’s interests trump another group’s interests. Following Young (2000), justice demands a recognition of the relationship between the multiplicity of ‘‘social perspectives’’ in society and the ‘‘basic social structures that Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 57–78 ª 2009 International Communication Association

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position many people in similar ways whether they like it or not’’ (p. 146). Careful to avoid the essentialist logic that reduces cultural groups to ‘‘a set of common attributes that all their members share and that constitute the identities of those members,’’ Young focuses on the ‘‘experience, history, and social knowledge’’ that provide ‘‘a general orientation on political issues’’ (pp. 136, 148). These social perspectives derive from shared positions in society, not from what might appear to be the ‘‘essential’’ features of the people who happen to inhabit those positions; they account for, but do not ‘‘cause,’’ the divergent, though seldom irreconcilable, interests in a multicultural society. To be exact, social perspectives do ‘‘not contain a determinate specific content,’’ but consist ‘‘in a set of questions, kinds of experiences, and assumptions with which reasoning begins, rather than the conclusions drawn’’ (Young, 2000, p. 137). Just as differences in social perspective point to differences in social position, differences in social position point to differences of opportunity and privilege— differences in quality of education, differences in occupation, differences in income and other material resources, differences in prestige and influence, even differences in status under the law. These structural inequalities figure prominently in the argument that, because differences in culture usually coincide with differences in social position, culturally diverse societies typically fail to live up to the democratic ideal, in Christiano’s (1996, p. 96) quick summary of it, of ‘‘giving citizens equal control over their social world.’’ Whatever the prospects for a genuinely egalitarian and culturally diverse society, actually existing democracies in today’s culturally diverse societies, the United States prominent among them, endure a wide and even widening gap between the interests of individuals and the capacity of individuals to participate in the process through which their interests can be made known and rendered acceptable to others. To comply with the principle of inclusion, the process through which individuals render their interests acceptable to others must be open, accessible, and hospitable to everyone. From their conviction that political equality, not personal liberty, is democracy’s bedrock value, multiculturalists regard as inherently undemocratic any approach to politics that views individual initiative as a realistic remedy for individuals who find themselves lodged in a disadvantaged social position. Multiculturalists insist instead on a process of political participation that insures ‘‘an equal distribution of power to determine the agenda, to make deals, to persuade, and in general to influence the outcome of the process’’ (Christiano, 1996, p. 97). Put explicitly in terms of justice, multiculturalism rejects the premise of what in the context of race is often called a ‘‘color-blind’’ society; it rejects, that is, pluralism’s plan to treat individuals fairly and impartially by bracketing their social and cultural differences. From the very different premise of what Habermas and others describe as a ‘‘politics of recognition,’’ when the rights of individuals require the protection of ‘‘the integrity of the individual in the life contexts in which his or her identity is formed’’ (Habermas, 1994, p. 113), multiculturalism defines justice as a public and collective effort to achieve political parity among all social perspectives (along with the interests associated with them), including, 62




especially, the perspectives (and interests) of systematically disenfranchised individuals and groups. To participate meaningfully in politically important discussions and decisions implies, however, not only full and equal access to discussions and an equally weighted vote in decisions but dedication to a process that facilitates, discursively, the equal consideration of the interests of everyone. In this process, individuals engage each other in public for the purpose of presenting their particular interests as generalizable interests, which means, at a minimum, inviting others to ‘‘recognize those interests as legitimate without denying their own legitimate claims to self-determination and self-recognition’’ (Young, 2000, p. 30, note 23). Under conditions commensurate with the norms of multiculturalism, individuals do not simply express or register their interests but transform them: ‘‘Through the process of public discussion.people often gain new information, learn of different experiences of their collective problems, or find that their own initial opinions are founded on prejudice or ignorance, or that they have misunderstood the relation of their own interests to others’’ (p. 26). Bound by what Young describes as a requirement of reciprocity, which holds that ‘‘each acknowledges that the interests of the others must be taken into account in order to reach a judgment’’ (p. 30), individuals do not merely tolerate different interests but work together to find mutually agreeable interpretations of them. Through dialogue and deliberation—through what Young views as a form of ‘‘discursive interaction’’—individuals, motivated by the regulative ideal of reciprocity, come to value the right to be heard as an opportunity to be understood. Opportunities to be understood flourish in large, dispersed, and culturally diverse societies only under the conditions of a ‘‘decentered’’ democracy (Young, 2006, p. 43), which includes a communication infrastructure capable of sustaining multiple levels of robust public expression. Thus, rather than conceptualizing journalism in relation to a unitary public sphere, segmented and targeted by newsrooms vying for their share of a lucrative market (Garmer, 2006; cf Gandy, 2001), a multicultural conception of journalism posits a range of publics whose discursive needs define the division of labor among newsrooms. Justice and journalism coalesce, then, in the conviction that the press, understood as a loose confederation of institutions, needs to provide for people who need it ‘‘spaces of withdrawal and regroupment,’’ which, in Fraser’s (1992, p. 124) intentionally subversive language, become ‘‘bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics.’’ Apart from its other roles, journalism’s ‘‘emancipatory potential,’’ to extrapolate from Fraser’s work and the work of others (e.g., Shah, 1996), resides in its ability to offset ‘‘the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies’’ (Fraser, 1992, p. 124). Journalism and diversity: The case of coverage of a redevelopment plan in a latina/o community

Few cities offer a better opportunity to study the differences between mainstream and minority journalism than San Jose´, California. The largest city in Northern Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 57–78 ª 2009 International Communication Association

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California and one of the most diverse in the country, San Jose´, the ‘‘capital of Silicon Valley,’’ includes no majority population. English is the primary language in less than half of the households and only 31.8 percent of its residents are, to use the federal government’s designation, ‘‘non-Hispanic White.’’ Asians, including the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam, account for nearly 30.3 percent of the city’s population. And Latinas/os, mostly of Mexican descent, add up to just over 31.5 percent. Marked by more than a century of ethnic discrimination and poverty (Pitti, 2003), San Jose´’s Latina/o community, the geopolitical site of our case study, recently rallied against what it viewed as a heavy-handed and wrongheaded plan for the redevelopment of a local strip mall called Tropicana. Located in the city’s Eastside, an area with a predominantly Latina/o population, Tropicana serves as an important public space for Latina/o social life (Rosaldo & Flores, 1997, p. 76). Although for decades everyone, from shop owners and shopkeepers to city officials and neighbors, agreed that the aging mall needed to be renovated, the city council, frustrated by years of inaction, acted unilaterally in 2001 when it invited a private developer to formulate plans for a new Tropicana. A year later, using its power of eminent domain, the council approved a $50 million ‘‘takeover plan’’ to replace Tropicana with a modern ‘‘plaza’’ that would retain its Latina/o ‘‘ambience’’ but include mainstream stores. A ‘‘grassroots band of merchants’’ ultimately prevailed when, toward the end of 2003, a local court ruled that the proposed transfer of the Tropicana property to a private developer failed to meet the legal standard for eminent domain claims, which required the city to show that its plan would ‘‘achieve the greatest public good with the least private injury’’ (Foo, 2003). Coverage of the Tropicana controversy, spanning a period of 30 months, occupied considerable space in the local press, which for our purposes includes the Knight Ridder’s San Jose Mercury News, the monopoly daily in the San Jose´ area;2 Nuevo Mundo, a Spanish-language weekly owned and operated by the Mercury News; and La Oferta, created in 1978, and El Observador, first published in 1980, both locally owned weeklies. In different ways and for different reasons, each of these publications defines its role in terms of service to San Jose´’s Latina/o community. Through its public pronouncements as well as its support for a variety of initiatives, projects, and organizations, Knight Ridder stood out as one of the industry’s leaders in recognizing the importance of diversifying mainstream journalism (Lehrman, 2005). The Mercury News has often been cited as an exemplar of Knight Ridder’s commitment to diversity. Although the Mercury News, like many other newspapers, falls short of ASNE’s goal of parity between the diversity of its newsroom and the diversity of the community it serves, its staff is more diverse than most, its managers and staffers participate in diversity training programs, and it created a ‘‘race and demographics’’ team dedicated to coverage of minority issues.3 Additionally, the Mercury News launched two foreign language weeklies to speak directly to presumably underserved readers: Viet Mercury in 1999, and, 3 years earlier, in 1996, Nuevo Mundo. 64




Unlike Nuevo Mundo, which had access to the resources of the Mercury News, which, in turn, had access to the resources of Knight Ridder, La Oferta and El Observador operate locally and independently. They are, to quote from their mastheads, ‘‘Hispanic owned publications,’’ which in both cases means a newspaper owned and managed by a local husband-and-wife team. All three publications, printed as broadsheets and distributed free in newsstands, community centers, restaurants, and other retail outlets, derive a good portion of their content from syndicated material, including items from the Associated Press. For local content beyond what its staff produces, Nuevo Mundo reprints or adapts stories from the Mercury News; La Oferta and El Observador rely on contributors, paid per story. In contrast to Nuevo Mundo, created as a Spanish-language publication, La Oferta and El Observador, both bilingual, offer an unpredictable mix of stories, some in English and some in Spanish, depending in part on the language a writer prefers to use; occasionally, a story appears twice on the same page, once in English and again in Spanish. To compare the four newspapers’ treatment of the Tropicana controversy, we conducted a textual analysis of all coverage published between June 17, 2001 and November 7, 2003, that is, between the first story about the city’s redevelopment plan and the last story on the court’s decision against the plan. In total, we examined 108 news stories, editorials, and opinion columns: 59 from the San Jose Mercury News, 23 from Nuevo Mundo, 15 from La Oferta, and 11 from El Observador.4 Our analysis focuses on the journalistic conventions this coverage reveals and pays special attention to the similarities and dissimilarities across the four media outlets. Specifically, we ask: How are Tropicana stories justified in each newspaper (i.e., their newsworthiness), and what do these justifications tell us about the reporter’s and/or newsroom’s understanding of the political, cultural, and social significance of Tropicana? How do reporters use their sources, and what roles do sources play in crafting a narrative about Tropicana? How do journalists relate the Tropicana story to San Jose´’s Latina/o community more generally? Given our theoretical framework, we look at how differences in journalistic norms and conventions implicate different conceptions of the relationship between journalism and justice. Coverage and convention Coverage across the four newspapers illustrates markedly different conventions of news and journalism. Without discounting some important differences between the Mercury News and Nuevo Mundo and between La Oferta and El Observador, the two Knight Ridder newspapers share norms and standards quite unlike the roughly analogous norms and standards the two Latina/o weeklies share. These dissimilar ‘‘local ground rules,’’ as Howard Ziff (1986, p. 153) once described the competing assumptions of what he called ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ and ‘‘provincial’’ journalism, manifest themselves most strikingly in a story’s theme or motif and in the relationship between writers and their sources. Journalists at the Mercury News approached the Tropicana story as ‘‘hard news,’’ a classification—more accurately, a typification (Tuchman, 1978, p. 50)—that ties Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 57–78 ª 2009 International Communication Association

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news to occurrences over which journalists have no control. The vast majority (a little more than 80 percent, by our conservative count) of the 50 Tropicana news stories in the Mercury News appeared there by virtue of some associated event— a meeting, an announcement, a lawsuit, a protest. In almost all of these stories, conflict framed the event. Significantly, as a professional judgment that enjoys a strong and enduring consensus among journalists, this motif—events-asconflict—seldom puts reporters on the defensive. Journalists routinely identify events, ordinarily understood within newsrooms as self-evidently ‘‘factual,’’ as the ‘‘stuff and substance of hard news’’ (Tuchman, 1978, p. 139); in the tradition of mainstream American journalism, certain events, especially ones involving political authorities or other officials, more or less compel coverage. Likewise, conflict thrives as a popular and uncontested news value, especially when journalists locate it as an attribute, rather than assessment, of an event. Accordingly, events framed as conflict constitutes a very conventional understanding of news, a widely shared judgment which usually reinforces a journalist’s sense of professionalism and only rarely leads to charges of bias. Still, even the hardest of news must succumb to the choices journalists make; not every newsworthy event, framed as conflict or not, gets covered. Individuals, then, do make a difference, as one did for Knight Ridder. Underscoring the value of newsroom diversity, a city hall reporter for the Mercury News, the son of a Mexican and a Costa Rican and a journalist who describes himself as ‘‘especially attentive to stories with a Latino angle,’’ broke the Tropicana story in mid-June 2001 (E. Garcia, personal communication, December 13, 2005). Listening to the San Jose´ City Council discussing the involvement of an outside developer in the renovation of a predominantly Latina/o shopping center, and recalling earlier Mercury News coverage of renovation plans by one of the center’s owners, he spotted a story—and wrote one that ended up on the front page of the local news section. This first story, typical of much of the Mercury News’s subsequent coverage of the fate of Tropicana, pits the position of city officials and the redevelopment firm against the position of shopkeepers and shop owners. The story mentions that the redeveloper plans to solicit feedback from residents through community meetings, but nothing in the story explains how readers might participate in the meetings or whether their participation would be worth the effort. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with San Jose´’s Eastside, the reporter makes a point of locating Tropicana, culturally and physically. He describes Tropicana as a mall with a ‘‘unique Latino identity.’’ The mall is ‘‘a magnet for Latino immigrants shopping for fresh tortillas, cowboy boots, vitamins, crucifixes, and imported music at mom-and-pop stores, some of which extend credit with just a handshake and a signature’’ (Garcia, 2001). The story carries a small location map of Tropicana, which would reappear in an additional 17 Tropicana stories published in the Mercury News between August 2001 and October 2003. Nuevo Mundo, understandably, omitted the locator map, which signals news of a distant or ‘‘foreign’’ place (Monmonier, 1989, p. 3), as well as references to 66




Tropicana’s ‘‘unique Latino identity,’’ but it relied on the Mercury News for a considerable portion of its content and, more importantly, for a sense of the prevailing norms and standards of professional journalism. During the 30-month period of our study, Nuevo Mundo both supplemented and duplicated the Mercury News’s Tropicana coverage. Of the 23 Tropicana news stories that appeared in Nuevo Mundo, 11 appeared first in the Mercury News. Of these 11, four amounted to little more than news briefs (between 40 and 135 words), basically boiled-down versions of material that appeared first, sometimes prominently, in the Mercury News. Of the remaining seven stories adapted from the Mercury News, most were a little shorter but with some added material, like additional quotes or a fresh lead; only one was longer than the version that appeared in the Mercury News. That leaves 12 stories produced by and for Nuevo Mundo. Of these, four were news briefs. Thus, over a period of 30 months, Nuevo Mundo contributed only eight fully developed and original stories to the mix of coverage available to San Jose´’s Latina/o community. Unlike the two Knight Ridder newspapers, where a reporter’s ethnicity might aid in a story’s development but would nonetheless remain unapparent in the story itself, El Observador and La Oferta positioned their reporters as compatriots whose ties to the community strengthened, rather than weakened, their credibility as journalists. Unburdened by the norms of detachment and disinterestedness, journalists at El Observador and La Oferta wrote about the plight of their community and the struggle of their people. In El Observador, for example, the 2003 court decision in favor of Tropicana merchants, which in effect ended the city’s efforts to transfer Tropicana property to a private developer, became not only a ‘‘victory for the people’’ but a victory tempered by the hard history of San Jose´’s Latina/o community: ‘‘Until when will we have to fight for our rights, until when will the discrimination against Hispanics persist?’’ (Vital, 2003*).5 And in La Oferta, where an interview with a Tropicana merchant appeared in a section called ‘‘The Profile of Our People’’ (Bellavance, May 2002,* emphasis added), the reporter made clear the broader political context in which the Tropicana controversy needed to be understood: ‘‘Although we have four Latino representatives in the City Council, [we] Hispanics continue to be orphans in political power’’ (Drumond, December 2001*). Beyond their use of the first-person plural, which signals an alliance with readers’ views and interests and which therefore contravenes the conventional disdain for partisanship, reporters from the two Latina/o publications pursued their stories with little or no attention to the events that anchored almost all of the Tropicana coverage in Nuevo Mundo and the Mercury News. Indeed, Tropicana news often appeared in El Observador and La Oferta without any apparent connection to meetings, protests, votes, decisions, and other occurrences. Stories appeared in El Observador, for example, as ‘‘an effort to clarify the matter’’ (Quintero & Willard, 2001) or to ‘‘bring forth the opinion of one of the involved merchants’’ (Willard & Quintero, 2001). In La Oferta, when a reporter began her story with a reminder that Christmas was approaching while the Tropicana dispute remained unresolved (Drumond, December 2001),


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the absence of events, rather than their occurrence, became the justification for a front page Tropicana story. While the reporter’s voice and judgment figure prominently in Tropicana coverage in La Oferta and in El Observador, coverage there also reveals a relative passivity among reporters of the kind that mainstream American journalism abandoned decades ago. As Hallin (1994) characterizes the shift toward ‘‘a more active, mediated, journalist-centered form of journalism’’ (p. 173), journalists began to jettison their role of providing an unmediated platform for public officials and other sources. Relying less on long, unedited quotes and more on the juxtaposition of shorter quotes, journalists began to believe, Hallin writes, ‘‘that adequate reporting required them to provide their own synthesis and interpretation’’ (p. 141); journalists, not their sources, had become ‘‘the primary communicator’’ (p. 138). In comparison to coverage in the Mercury News and Nuevo Mundo, La Oferta and El Observador treated their sources, even those whose views ran counter to what the newspapers regarded as the needs and interests of the Latina/o community, with greater deference and gave them more of an opportunity to say what they wanted to say. Table 1 provides a crude but useful index of the differences between the two Latina/o newspapers and the two Knight Ridder newspapers in their treatment of quoted material. On average, though with considerable variation within and across their articles, La Oferta and El Observador provided more than twice as much space to what sources had to say than the Mercury News and Nuevo Mundo. Consistent with these findings, the use of quoted material in La Oferta and El Observador varies more and appears to be less formulaic than in the Mercury News and Nuevo Mundo. But the data in Table 1 only hint at the most striking difference between the two pairs of newspapers, which is their diametrically opposed understanding of the proper relationship between journalism and politics. La Oferta and El Observador engaged in what Habermas (1989) once called a ‘‘journalism of conviction’’; they covered the Tropicana dispute not so much to inform readers but to alert them to—and mobilize them against—yet another instance of discrimination and indifference. While editorial writers and columnists at the Mercury News wrote in support of the Latina/o community,6 reporters at the Mercury News, like reporters at Nuevo Mundo, honored mainstream journalism’s division of labor by writing in ways that distanced themselves from any position or

Table 1 Average length of quotations (in number of words) by type of source

Mercury News Nuevo Mundo El Observador La Oferta 68

Merchants

Neighbors

Public Officials

Experts & others

All

M

SD

M

SD

M

SD

M

SD

M

SD

18.8 19 37.4 45.7

12.2 10.8 24.8 32.4

20.9 18.8 21.5 59.2

17.6 17.7 2.1 38

17.3 20 58.8 36.4

12.3 10.5 42.3 22.8

21.9 21.1 0 75.9

8.95 8.2 n/a 54.2

18.4 19.4 42.5 48.9

12.5 10.8 31.4 35.6




perspective; for reporting of this kind, Hallin reminds us, with ‘‘its substitution of technical for moral or political judgements, is largely designed to conceal the voice of the reporter’’ (1994, p. 176). Hallin fairly describes journalism at Nuevo Mundo and the Mercury News when he observes that journalists today ‘‘are committed more strongly to the norms of professionalism than to political ideals’’ (p. 171). Justice and perspective Well aware of the importance of being disengaged and dispassionate, reporters for Nuevo Mundo and the Mercury News approached the Tropicana story from the vantage point of a disinterested bystander. Unbound by this norm, but not without their own sense of professionalism, reporters for El Observador and La Oferta approached the Tropicana story from the (social) perspective of the Latina/o community. All four newspapers highlighted the conflict between merchants and city officials, but only El Observador and La Oferta presented the conflict as a struggle for equality and justice. In its first Tropicana story, La Oferta made clear the stakes by locating the controversy among other indignities the Latina/o community endured, including, 2 decades earlier, the modernization of downtown San Jose´, which displaced a significant number of Latina/o merchants; and a proposed but defeated plan in the late 1980s to place in the downtown area a statue of San Jose´ pioneer Thomas Fallon, raising the U.S. flag, a monument commemorating the annexation of the city from Mexico in 1846. The story in La Oferta summed it up this way: ‘‘First it was the infamous Fallon statue; then the ethnic cleansing of downtown and now it is the turn of San Jose´’s Eastside’’ (Drummond, 2001a). Nuevo Mundo and the Mercury News dealt with questions of justice in a very different way: mostly through claims and counterclaims. Thus Jose´ Mendoza, celebrated in the Latina/o press for his courage and leadership in the fight against Tropicana’s expropriation (e.g., Bellavance, May 2002; Morales, 2001), appeared in the pages of the Mercury News not as someone who experienced injustice but as someone who claimed he did:

On a recent afternoon, Mendoza, 65, pulled a pile of documents from the safe in his San Jose´ Men’s Wear shop and recounted the times he says his business was wronged by city government, starting in the mid-1980s, when light rail moved into downtown . Angered at the apparent lack of help from city officials, Mendoza moved to the Tropicana center in 1987. ‘Downtown they forced me out; they kicked everybody out on purpose, oh, sure,’ Mendoza said, squarely charging that the city is now doing the same. (Garcia, 2002) If, as some of the language in this excerpt suggests, the reporter—the same reporter who broke the Tropicana story a year earlier—had doubts about the legitimacy of Mendoza’s claims, these doubts did not reflect a political or moral judgment. Rather, as the reporter’s analysis of the situation made clear, and as Hallin’s critique of this genre of journalism suggests, the reporter made a technical judgment, which in this


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case involved understanding the ‘‘Tropicana debacle’’ as an unfortunate instance of intercultural ‘‘miscommunication’’: In many ways the Tropicana debacle, in which some merchants still believe the agency’s real aim is to oust Latino stores, offers a glimpse at the cultural traits that can lead to the miscommunication, failed expectations and confusion that many politicians and institutions face when dealing with Latinos, and vice versa. (Garcia, 2002) Whether Mendoza ‘‘left’’ downtown ‘‘during the downtown redevelopment efforts’’ and now faces ‘‘uncertainty’’ at Tropicana, as the Mercury News (Folmar, 2003) reported, or he is ‘‘rightly concerned about being forced to leave again,’’ as El Observador (Morales, 2001) reported, is not just a shift in emphasis. These different accounts of the same situation represent different interests, different experiences, even different ways of knowing the world. Because the disinterested journalism of Nuevo Mundo and the Mercury News rests on the pluralist premise of a generally acceptable social and political order, it treats competing interests as a conflict within, not as a challenge to, the status quo. The journalism of El Observador and La Oferta, on the other hand, serves as an act of resistance, a direct challenge to the very perspective that Nuevo Mundo and the Mercury News quietly accepted as the premise of their reporting. For the owners and staff of El Observador and La Oferta, the point of Tropicana coverage was not simply to get their readers added to the roster of players in the game of politics, though that was important; they also wanted to change the rules of the game. La Oferta twice described the Tropicana dispute as ‘‘a battle between David and Goliath’’ (Drumond, June 2001;* December 2001*), which underscored the newspaper’s conviction, shared with El Observador, that the real issue concerned domination, coercion, and an overall imbalance of power. For La Oferta and El Observador, but not for Nuevo Mundo and the Mercury News, Tropicana stood as a symbol of neglect and discrimination. A plea for a victory for Tropicana was not, then, a claim about why the merchants must win but why, as El Observador put it, ‘‘for once in this city, the Latino businesses and the Latino community must not be displaced nor replaced’’ (Morales, 2001). This larger issue implicates a broader, collective sense of justice—an issue defined less in terms of the interests of shopkeepers and more in terms of the interests of one of San Jose´’s most neglected communities. To make the case that the future of Tropicana should concern everyone, not just the Latina/o community, La Oferta’s account of the meeting in which the city council approved the takeover plan cited in detail the opposing arguments of several people whose names do not have a traditional Latina/o origin (i.e., George West, Beth Mukai, Ken Davis), suggesting that citizens of San Jose´ did not need to be immigrants, speak Spanish, and eat tortillas to defend Tropicana (Bellavance, June 2002). Likewise, in an article describing the shopping center and its history, the La Oferta reporter wrote that one of Tropicana’s ‘‘many treasures to be found’’ was that Asian 70




people ran some of the businesses. In fact, one of the lessons that El Observador’s publisher drew from covering the Tropicana was that the collaboration between Asian owners and Latina/o merchants had to continue (Morales, 2003). Journalism’s promise of diversity

For at least the last quarter of a century, the mainstream American press made good on its commitment to diversify journalism through policies and initiatives aimed at employing more minorities, encouraging journalists to seek out and use a broader range of sources, pursuing stories that would bring greater visibility to marginalized groups, and introducing new publications in local markets. True to the spirit of pluralism, which celebrates individual initiative and private enterprise, these important measures, tied to what newsrooms could and would do on their own, rely on benevolent managers and depend on a favorable economic forecast: Journalism becomes more diverse as goodwill spreads within and across newsrooms, and when market conditions permit. In the case of both Nuevo Mundo and Viet Mercury, goodwill met the realities of free enterprise when in late 2005, the Mercury News closed its two foreign language weeklies. Both publications, publisher George Riggs explained, were a source of editorial pride but not of revenues (Sandoval, 2005). In a move that seemed to please no one, the Mercury News replaced Nuevo Mundo with Fronteras de la Noticia, a weekly publication produced in Mexico for news corporations in the United States.7 Among others disheartened by the demise of Nuevo Mundo and alarmed by a substitute newspaper with no ties to the local community, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists objected to Knight Ridder’s decision ‘‘to outsource newsroom jobs and abandon its commitment to have locally based journalists cover the Latino community’’ (Roman, 2005). But, in fact, the departure of Nuevo Mundo did little to diminish the diversity of journalism in the San Jose´ area. As the Tropicana case study illustrates, Nuevo Mundo seldom offered a version of local news that differed qualitatively from what appeared— or could have appeared—in the Mercury News. Although it added incrementally to the news available to San Jose´’s Latina/o community, and arguably appealed to readers in ways the Mercury News did not, the journalism produced by Nuevo Mundo failed as a meaningful alternative to the journalism produced by the Mercury News. It was, of course, by design that Nuevo Mundo failed as an alternative to the Mercury News. Nuevo Mundo came into existence as an extension of—not as a departure from—its parent paper. Nuevo Mundo existed to augment—not supplant— coverage by the Mercury News; it served as a platform for—not as a challenge to— Knight Ridder’s plans for growth in Northern California. To be sure, marketing, not journalism, defined Nuevo Mundo’s mandate. Nothing in the record suggests any motivation for the creation of Nuevo Mundo beyond an interest in benefiting from a widely recognized opportunity for new readers and new advertisers: ‘‘The ethnic media sector,’’ as a recent Aspen Institute report summed up the situation in many Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 57–78 ª 2009 International Communication Association

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major markets in the United States, ‘‘is one of the few media sectors experiencing a growth in audience’’ (Garmer, 2006, p. 14). Eager to position Nuevo Mundo as a newspaper committed to the same journalistic ideals as the Mercury News, and consistent with a marketing plan designed to expand the Mercury News’s advertising base by securing Spanish-speaking readers, the managers of the Mercury News insisted that the standards of performance at Nuevo Mundo more or less mirror the standards of performance at the Mercury News. To that end, the Mercury News publisher who created Nuevo Mundo and Viet Mercury, Jay Harris, made it a point to hire journalists who were Latinas/os (or Vietnamese) and ‘‘seeped in an American journalism tradition.’’ When the Mercury News created its foreign language newspapers, Harris explained, ‘‘one of our fundamental decisions was that the values and standards of those papers would be in no way different from that of the Mercury News’’ (Harris, 2001). Thus, instead of creating a newsroom environment in which their ‘‘ethnic identity becomes a routinely salient facet of their professional practice,’’ which is what Husband (2005, p. 473) identifies as one of the basic attributes of an ethnic publication that expects to play a culturally distinctive role in the community, Harris demanded from minority journalists a pledge of professionalism that in effect standardized the practice of journalism and homogenized the production of news. Understood as a set of transcendent norms, which as a matter of principle eclipses any individual’s social position and social perspective, professionalism in journalism, like professionalism elsewhere, domesticates diversity by discounting or denying a role for cultural differences in the reconstruction of practice (Glasser, 1992; Glasser & Marken, 2005). The uniformity of practice that characterized the relationship between Nuevo Mundo and the Mercury News, highlighted by an abundant duplication of content, weakened any role Nuevo Mundo might have played as a new and independent voice in San Jose´’s Latina/o community. More interested in professionalism than political change, more intent on covering conflict than campaigning for justice, and more concerned with informing readers than empowering them, Nuevo Mundo shared with the Mercury News a tacit acceptance of San Jose´’s political order as a legitimate and viable framework for resolving differences and disagreements. More than that, and more to the point that pluralism makes about the general success of the status quo, neither Nuevo Mundo nor the Mercury News exhibited any institutional interest in associating the persistence of poverty and discrimination in San Jose´ with the prevailing patterns of power in San Jose´. From the perspective of pluralism’s overall satisfaction with current arrangements, journalism’s promise of diversity amounts to a little more than tinkering, one of a variety of small fixes and minor repairs that over time add up to whatever reform journalism needs to undertake. This differs markedly from journalism’s promise of diversity under the banner of multiculturalism, where reform implies a fundamental reconsideration of the relationship between journalism and culture, which at a minimum involves a response to two key questions: 72


T. L. Glasser et al. l

l


What can be done to create and sustain news media operated by and for minorities whose social perspectives lack an adequate opportunity for public expression? What can be done to facilitate a system of journalism which promotes not only debate and discussion within culturally different groups but across them as well?

The first question deals with the requirements for politically inclusive communication in a decentered democracy. Rather than presupposing a single, overarching public sphere, segmented into whatever markets make economic sense, multiculturalism posits ‘‘multiple forums and sites,’’ many with separate and even unique discursive needs (Young, 2006, p. 43). Analogous to Fraser’s (1992) notion of a ‘‘multiplicity of publics,’’ these forums and sites, especially ones devoted to interests unlikely to find expression in any configuration of markets, can provide a sanctuary for unpopular ideas and/or unusual modes of discourse. As they allow individuals to express themselves on topics and in ways that might not be welcome elsewhere, these smaller publics, even when they do not (yet) serve as entry points to successively larger discussions and debates, can exist for the useful purpose of building confidence in the processes of public expression. To accommodate a diversity of perspectives as well as what Young (2006, p. 50) calls ‘‘diverse communication styles,’’ journalism in the tradition of multiculturalism accepts a broader conception of professionalism than the approach taken at the Mercury News’s two foreign language newspapers. The logic of journalism diversity in a decentered democracy neither denies nor denigrates professional standards, but it does leave room for their local interpretation and application. In deference to the ‘‘meaning and vitality’’ journalists bring to their work, and in recognition of the ‘‘subjective fabric’’ of the enterprise of news reporting and writing (Husband, 2005, p. 466), journalism in a multicultural society rejects the dichotomy between professional interests and cultural interests, which is precisely Husband’s point when he suggests that minority ethnic media needs to be a place where practitioners can ‘‘negotiate a committed professional identity and a salient ethnic identity’’ (p. 472). The second question focuses on the dilemma multicultural societies face as they promote multiple sites for discussion and debate: How to keep these discussions and debates from becoming mutually unintelligible. As Gitlin (1998) points out, the dissolution of the public sphere into a multiplicity of disconnected publics may end up deepening social inequalities. This is the risk that Young (2006) has in mind when she identifies ‘‘linkage’’ as a ‘‘necessary condition for political communication’’ (p. 53). These linkages, in whatever form they take, imply a planned and therefore intentional relationship among newsrooms, a relationship that modifies the meaning of media independence and autonomy by striking a balance between competition and coordination. Linked in a cooperative effort to cultivate and amplify minority voices, minority and mainstream media work together in recognition of their shared responsibility to honor not only every group’s right to be heard but also every group’s right to be understood. Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 57–78 ª 2009 International Communication Association

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The right to be understood, Husband (1998) explains, builds on but qualifies the right to be heard by ‘‘rejecting and condemning egocentric and ethnocentric routines of engaging with the communicative acts of others’’; it ‘‘affirms the relevance of the values of solidarity in conceptualizing communication policy in a multiethnic society’’ (p. 139). As a guiding principle for journalism, the right to be understood reminds journalists of the importance of integrating different perspectives and interests into successively larger political arenas while at the same time recognizing the different histories and experiences from which these perspectives and interests emerge. Journalism can bring cultures together, then, but not by diminishing the significance of the differences in their social position. A civic nationalism which transcends culture can and at times should exist in multicultural societies—and the press can appropriately contribute to it—but only when, as Hollinger (1995, p. 134) suggests, it focuses on plans for a common future and not on platitudes about a common past. Taken together, our two key questions sketch the contours of an approach to minority journalism in which minority media exist in contradistinction to—and yet on coordination with—mainstream media, which is to say, following Silverstone (2007), that ‘‘we can only grasp the meaning of a particular minority media initiative, and assess its significance, in its relationship to the presence of other media and other media texts which it either addresses, contradicts, or seeks to bypass’’ (p. 99). Rooted in the proposition that minority journalism often provides ‘‘a worldview that is significantly different from the general circulation press,’’ as Shah and Thornton (2004, p. 236) found in their study of the ethnic press in several cities in the United States, this approach anticipates an adequate mix of minority and mainstream media; and this, in turn, anticipates a structurally mixed system of public communication able to accommodate forms of journalism beyond what markets sustain. Created through changes in law and policy, a mix of structures presupposes an acceptance of certain institutional arrangements that, on their face, challenge many Western, and especially American, conceptions of a free and independent press. To begin with, structural diversity in journalism implies alternatives to prevailing patterns of ownership and control, and these alternatives threaten the hegemony of the journalism-as-a-business model, which has, at least since the early 1800s, equated a free press with free enterprise. Alternative patterns of ownership and control typically implicate legislatures, administrative bodies, and occasionally the courts, which raises the question, to use Own Fiss’s (1996, p. 51) version of it, that American journalists seldom ask and to which they hardly ever respond in the affirmative: ‘‘Might the state have a role in furthering the democratic mission of the press?’’ Additionally, a diversely structured press works to the advantage of a culturally diverse society only when the institutions of journalism view themselves as partners in the processes of public deliberation, and this, alas, calls for a commitment from journalists, especially mainstream journalists, to temper their zeal for competition by working together to achieve broader and deeper news coverage of the day’s issues. 74




The question of support for alternative forms of journalism and alternative versions of the day’s news, along with the cooperation and coordination needed to sustain them as viable alternatives, highlights the importance of not confusing diversity in journalism, which newsrooms large and small can bring about on their own, with diversity of journalism, which no newsroom, whatever its size or stature, can achieve alone.8 Only the latter, with its focus on issues of infrastructure, signals a seriousness about broadening the base of journalism; for only the latter, as Thompson (1995) describes the benefits of a structurally mixed system of public communication, ‘‘would help to disperse power outward and downward, creating multiple centres of power and diversified networks of communication and information’’ (p. 258). Thus, as it comports with the normative ideal of multiculturalism, the diversification of journalism promises more than a heightened sensitivity to cultural differences. A structurally diverse press succeeds in a culturally diverse society when it opens up journalism by putting new, more, and different people in control of it. Ultimately, journalism diversity matters most as it strengthens the role of minority media in the struggle to achieve the social justice and political parity that a multicultural society demands. Notes 1

2 3 4

5 6 7

8

In 1978, ASNE set as its goal racial and ethnic parity by the year 2000. That was later pushed back to 2025. In ASNE’s ‘‘diversity index,’’ used to measure newsroom diversity in relation to the population, a score of 100 means perfect parity between the two (Dedman & Doig, 2003). For a discussion of the diversification of mainstream American journalism, see Lehrman (2005). In mid-2006, Knight Ridder was sold to McClatchy Newspapers, which in turn sold the Mercury News to MediaNews, a Denver-based newspaper chain. The Mercury News trumpets its pledge to diversity in a mission statement, published on page 2A everyday, which recognizes diversity as a ‘‘core component of accuracy.’’ The Mercury News’s and Nuevo Mundo’s archives are available in digital form and in microfilm. However, there is no exhaustive collection of La Oferta and El Observador, so we may have missed a few stories about Tropicana published in those two papers. An asterisk accompanying a citation indicates that it was originally written in Spanish and has been translated by the authors. Three editorials and six columns appeared in the Mercury News. Fronteras de la Noticia was created in November 2004. It is produced in Mexico by the Danilo Black Company and sold in the United States by Universal Press Syndicate. Apart from the Mercury News, it is currently being published by 32 mainstream U.S. dailies. While the weekly is basically the same in all markets, each daily can customize a couple pages and sell local ads. See Hallin and Mancini’s (2004, pp. 29-30) discussion of the differences between internal and external pluralism, which in many ways parallels our distinction between diversity in and of journalism. Consistent with our findings, Hallin and Mancini find


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that the dominant media system in the United States privileges internal pluralism over external pluralism.

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Author Note

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Critical and Cultural Studies Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, San Francisco, August 2006. 1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

78


Las Afirmaciones sobre el Multiculturalismo y la Promesa de Diversidad del Periodismo

Theodore L. Glasser Stanford University Isabel Awad University of Amsterdam John W. Kim University of San Francisco

Resumen El periodismo Estadounidense dominante descansa en un modelo de democracia pluralista que conserva el status quo, esencializa a la cultura y trivializa la diversidad. Un entendimiento mejor y diferente de la diversidad emerge de la perspectiva multicultural que cuestiona las disposiciones existentes, propone una visión relacional de la cultura, y define la diversidad en términos de pautas de discriminación y desigualdad. Un estudio de caso de la cobertura de un asunto local en la prensa dominante y la minoritaria apuntala una discusión sobre la importancia de diversificar el periodismo mediante la restructuración de la prensa Estadounidense. La diversidad del periodismo importa más no solo porque realza la sensibilidad cultural a las diferencias culturales pero porque aumenta el rol de los medios minoritarios en su lucha para alcanzar justicia social y paridad política que una sociedad cultural diversa demanda.

声称多元文化和承诺新闻多样性 Theodore L. Glasser 斯坦福大学 Isabel Awad 阿姆斯特丹大学 John W. Kim 旧金山大学

摘要

美国主流新闻业有赖于一个多元化的民主模式，该模式维护现状，将文化实质化，并将多样性边缘化。有关多样性的一个迥异的理解源自多元文化主义的理论，该理论质疑现行的安排、提出了一个有关文化的相关性观点、并从歧视和不平等模式的角度来定义多样性。我们对主流媒体及少数族裔媒体有关一个当地性议题的报道进行案例式研究，以此为基础我们讨论了通过重组美国新闻业来促进新闻业多样性的重要性。新闻业多样性最重要的不单是提高我们对文化差异的敏感性，而是巩固少数族裔媒体在促进社会正义和政治平等方面所扮演的角色，而社会正义和政治平等是文化多元化社会所需要的。

다문화주의의 주장과 저널리즘의 다원성의 약속

Theodore L. Glasser Stanford University Isabel Awad University of Amsterdam John W. Kim University of San Francisco 요약 주요한 흐름의 미국 저널리즘은 현재상태를 유지하고, 문화를 핵심화하고, 다양성을 하챦은 것으로 만들려는 다원적 민주주의 모델에 의존하고 있다. 다양성에 대한 매우 다른 이해들은 다문화주의적 관점으로부터 나오는데, 이는 현존하는 배열에 대하여 의문을 제기하며, 문화의 상대적 관점을 지지하며, 그리고 다양성을 차별과 비평등성의 형태들로서 정의한다. 주요언론과 소수신문에서의 지역 이슈 보도형태에 관한 사례 연구는 미국 언론의 재구성에 의한 저널리즘의 다양화가 중요하다는 것을 뒷받침하고 있다.

저널리즘 다양성은 이것이 문화적 차이들에 대한 민감성을

강조할뿐만 아니라 문화적으로 다른 사회가 요구하는 사회적 정의와 정치적 동등을 성취하려고 노력하는 소수계 미디어의 역할을 강조하는 것에 관한 문제들이다.

The Claims of Multiculturalism and Journalism's

The Claims of Multiculturalism and Journalism's

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