Summer 2002
Civic TV: Diversifying Race, Gender
By David Kurpius
Assistant Professor of Journalism
Louisiana State University
Looking for different faces on your nightly newscasts? Consider some civic journalism.
A review of 184 television entries to the James K. Batten Awards found not only more ethnic and nontraditional faces and voices on the air – but significantly more.
Moreover, citizens were just as likely as officials to be used as prominent sources in stories.
A new Louisiana State University study analyzed 1,071 television sources in the award entries. It found that among the sources portrayed on civic journalism entry tapes, 35.5 percent were minorities. That is well above the level of minorities – 25 percent – in the U.S. population, as recorded in the 2000 Census.
Earlier studies of source diversity in television news found reporters used a disproportionately low number of minority sources compared to U.S. Census figures. A 1991 study of news in the San Francisco area, one of the most diverse in the country, found only 19 percent of sources in television stories were minorities.
The LSU study suggested that the use of civic journalism techniques helped white, non-Latino journalists use more minority sources than previously documented in research: About 30 percent of the sources used by these journalists were minorities.
The study also showed what many have long suspected: Reporters appear to be best at covering their own race. For example, more than 38 percent of the sources used by African-American reporters were African Americans and only 2 percent were Latino. About 34 percent of the sources selected by Latino reporters were Latinos, and 19 percent were African-American.
Gender sourcing also improved in civic journalism stories. Women accounted for more than 40 percent of the sources in the civic work. While that does not reach parity with U.S. Census figures, it is twice as high as the 20 percent measured in a 1997 study of network television news sources, the highest previous benchmark.
Here again, the reporter’s gender, like race, made a difference. Female civic journalists included about 7 percent more women in their stories than males did. And male civic journalists used about 10 percent more female sources than previously found in traditional television reporting.
It is no surprise that civic reporting practices lead to inclusion of more citizens, called “unaffiliated” sources.
Almost 50 percent of the sources used in these television civic journalism entries were not representing government, businesses or organizations. They represented people as individuals and reflected experiences in their communities. That’s about twice the 25 percent inclusion rate for unaffiliated sources previously documented in traditional journalism.
Civic journalists not only used more citizen sources, they also placed citizen sources more prominently as one of the first two sources in a story. And these citizen sources were given prominent placement at the same rate as government, business and organizational leaders.
So what does this mean in the field? First, it means that civic journalism significantly improves the diversity of voices in television work. Second, it does so in a variety of ways – race, gender, affiliation – making the resulting reporting richer in diversity. Third, the hard work of drawing sources from a multitude of civic layers in the community, as described in the Pew Center’s “Tapping Civic Life” book, is worth the effort.
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These findings are part of a larger report that will be presented soon in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.