Today's Laugher: Progressive News Orgs Need to Be More Progressive in Their Hiring Practices

5/13/2014

..Because even we conservatives need idiots like these to laugh at!  Enjoy your day.

No one expects the conservatives to be diverse. I’m not going to be disappointed to hear that studies reveal Republican Party leadership is overwhelmingly white because the other thing that would reveal that is a 30 second glance at CSPAN.

I’m pretty sure it’s in their motto: Xenophobia, It’s What’s For Dinner (At Our Party). But when you get wind that your friendly neighborhood liberal or even progressive or even radical organization is All White All The Time it makes a person mighty sad.

Over on the American Prospect, there’s one of those sad-making articles; down the right hand side of the page is a series of pie charts with the ethnic and racial break-down of a number of more or less progressive magazines including The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Salon, Slate, and Harpers.

Here’s the conclusion American Prospect staffer Gabriel Arana came to:

Nearly 40 percent of the country is non-white and/or Hispanic, but the number of minorities at the outlets included in this article’s tally—most of them self-identified as liberal or progressive—hovers around 10 percent. The Washington Monthly can boast 20 percent, but that’s because it only has nine staffers in total, two of whom belong to minority groups. Dissent, like the Prospect, has one. Given the broad commitment to diversity in our corner of the publishing world, why is the track record so poor?

Staffers and admin explained the reasons diversity was just Too Much To Ask:

Slate editor David Plotz: The recession made newsrooms very miserly thinking about issues [diversity] like that. The thinking was, ‘We are in survival mode, we are about saving our jobs. This is not an issue we care about.’”

Another editor rationalizes: “We practice fairly specialized form of journalism and the pool of people who do it isn’t terribly large to begin with, and then you look at the group of people who are practicing at a higher level and it’s just not a diverse pool.”

But Arana summarizes what they’re trying not to say:

The road that ends with a spot on staff at places like The New Republic, The Atlantic, or the Prospect is paved with privilege. It starts with unpaid internships, which serve both as training grounds and feeders to staff positions.

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