I thought that some of you might be interested in this.
Linda Florence Callahan, Ph.D.
Professor
Journalism & Mass Communication
NC A&T State University
Greensboro, NC 27411
(336) 334-7221 X 3003
[log in to unmask]
The Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development
at
St. John’s University School of Law
Supported through a grant from the Ford Foundation’s Knowledge,
Creativity, and Freedom Program <outbind://16/#_ftn1> [1]
Call for Participation
Rethinking the Discourse on Race: A Symposium on How the Lack of Racial
Diversity in the Media Affects Social Justice and Policy
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2006
On April 28 and 29, 2006, the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights
and Economic Development (“The Ronald H. Brown Center”) will hold an
important conference to explore the lack of racial diversity, and
distorted representations, in the media. The mission of the Ronald H.
Brown Center is “to engage in legal studies, research and outreach
focusing on issues that affect the lives of underrepresented people
while simultaneously educating law students to be leaders on issues of
racial, economic and social justice.” One of The Ronald H. Brown
Center’s specific initiatives is to “educate the news media and the
public to promote understanding and focus political and community
efforts on the need to eradicate racism and social inequalities.”
“Rethinking the Discourse on Race: A Symposium on How the Lack of
Racial Diversity in the Media Affects Social Justice and Policy,”
sponsored by the Ronald H. Brown Center, will investigate the subject of
racial diversity in the media and in media policy. The conference is
being organized by Professor Leonard M. Baynes, the Director of The
Ronald H. Brown Center, who previously served as a scholar-in-residence
at the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) during the
administration of William Kennard. In this capacity, Professor Baynes
worked exclusively on media diversity issues. Since joining the St.
John’s law faculty in 2002, he has written several path-breaking law
review articles examining these critical issues and proposing innovative
and cutting-edge regulations to address under-representation in the
media.
The Ford Foundation is funding this dialogue aimed at generating new
thinking about racial diversity in the commercial and noncommercial
entertainment and news media and its effect on social justice and media
policy. In this dialogue, we seek to incorporate the input and opinions
of a diverse array of interested stakeholders, including scholars, legal
experts, journalists, and journalism critics. We would like the
conference participants to critique the misperceptions evident in the
media coverage of Hurricane Katrina (and in other news stories and
entertainment programming), to analyze and document the tremendous
influence that media have over the thinking, social policies and
directions of our democratic society, and to propose reforms that can
take place in academia, the media, and social policy to correct the lack
of diversity and media distortions.
We encourage participants to address seven important general areas:
(1) What examples of media coverage, including but not limited to the
coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, demonstrate the
absences and misrepresentations of people of color in the media?
(2) How do current policies or practices of the media industry in
casting, writing, directing, and producing affect the representation and
depiction of people of color in news, entertainment, and public
television. What reforms are needed to facilitate more socially
responsible coverage of people of color and to enact policies sensitive
to the value of racial diversity in all aspects of the media?
(3) Since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, how has media
coverage of people of color impacted social justice and public policy in
the U.S.? Give examples of how media misperceptions of people of color
misinform policy decisions or provide examples of how the media have
been helpful in transforming policies. What policies need to be in place
to facilitate more socially responsible coverage?
(4) What curricular policies or reforms in academic disciplines such
as communications studies, journalism, law, and other relevant social
science and literary disciplines are needed to address the lack of
racial diversity in the media and media policy.
(5) What is the status of proposed rules and regulations before the
Federal Communications Commission in regulating racially diverse
content, ensuring diverse media ownership, and diverse media employment?
What role should the Federal Communications Commission play, if any, in
these matters?
(6) Given that a media company’s audience size directly correlates to
the rates that advertisers charge, what methodologies would insure that
people of color are accurately and fairly measured in terms of their
media consumption?
(7) Are media absences and distorted depictions of people of color
discriminatory, indecent, or the equivalent of hate speech? How do we
counter regulatory paralysis at the FCC often caused by overly stringent
First Amendment ideology or an FCC de-regulatory agenda? Should the
broadcast television industry be re-conceptualized as a conduit
requiring equal access to all citizens?
Proposal Guidelines:
n Letters should not exceed 1500 words in length.
n Include a 250-word biographical sketch of research expertise.
n Include a bibliography of your writing and/or publications on
this topic to date.
n Submission deadline: January 15, 2006.
n Acceptance notification: February 15, 2006.
We invite scholars of all relevant disciplines, advocates, community
organizers, and media and social policy professionals engaged in
developing concepts, methods, or data relevant to media diversity and
policy to submit a short letter that lays out your interest in
participating in a conference addressing policies affecting media and
racial diversity. These letters should not exceed 1,500 words. Also
include a brief biographical sketch of research expertise (no more than
250 words please) and bibliography of your publications to date as
attachments. Authors of accepted letters will be invited to participate
in the Conference scheduled for April 28 and 29, 2006 at St. John’s
University School of Law in Queens, New York. In order to participate in
the conference, participants agree to also write a paper or produce a
videotape documentary, which needs to be submitted before the
conference. Viewpoints, videos, and papers presented at the meeting will
be included in a final report.
Proposals should be submitted electronically to the Conference homepage
at http://www.stjohns.edu/racemedia or via surface mail to:
Leonard M. Baynes
Professor of Law and Director
The Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development
St. John’s University School of Law
8000 Utopia Parkway
Queens, New York 11439
Attn: Media & Diversity
Background for Proposals
Unfortunately, negative perceptions of racial minorities are tightly
woven into the fabric of U.S. society. Popular support for policies,
such as affirmative action, rehabilitation of felons, or economic
assistance to the poor, has declined because of these negative
perceptions. See e.g. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare.
Nonetheless these negative perceptions are continuously reinforced by
media absences and misrepresentations in news and entertainment
programming. What the media choose to support and report on, however,
may be determined by policies that are often obscured from the public’s
scrutiny.
This symposium is designed to explore the individual strands of how
media and media policy combine to create negative perceptions among the
public, the impact of these perceptions on social policies, and the role
of higher education curriculum/programs in developing awareness in
journalism, media studies, and communications education at undergraduate
and graduate levels. The symposium will bring together an
interdisciplinary group of scholars who have conducted research on the
media and media policies from the perspectives of the law, cultural
studies, the social sciences, journalism, and communications studies.
Our concern is to unravel these strands to create a critical body of
knowledge aimed at generating solutions to the problem. An expected
outcome would also be more support by the general public, scholars, and
the media community for racial justice and media democracy in the United
States.
The commercial news and entertainment media have historically
misrepresented or failed to cover members of minority groups.
<outbind://16/#_ftn2> [2] People of color also have been woefully
unrepresented both behind and in front of the camera. In the 1960s, the
Kerner Commission and the Civil Rights Commission called the media to
task for such failures. These failures and misrepresentations become
increasing problematic, given that the percentage of minority groups in
the United States will reach 50 percent of the population in 2050.
Recently, Americans expressed surprise at the tragic scenes broadcast in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Many viewers saw for the first time
(or at least for the first time in a long time) many poor people, who
were disproportionately African Americans. The disparities in poverty
coincided with distortions in media coverage. For example, during the
Hurricane’s aftermath, two pictures initially appeared on Yahoo’s
website that were telling of the racial divide in media coverage. One
picture caption described black survivors as “looting,” whereas
similarly-situated white survivors were described as “finding”
provisions. The media initially described the Superdome, where
mostly-black hurricane survivors huddled until they were rescued, as
unsafe and a place where murders, rapes, and robberies were rampant. In
fact, one of CNN’s headlines read: “Relief Workers Confront Urban
Warfare.” This biased coverage may have affected policy and hampered
relief efforts. In fact, this negative coverage was directly responsible
for the National Guard being ordered to “shoot to kill” those whom they
perceived as breaking the law during the hurricane. Later, the New
Orleans Times Picayune investigated the public safety issues in the
Superdome and the looting and found that the crime that took place was
overstated. <outbind://16/#_ftn3> [3]
Hard-core news is not the only area where the media have
been remiss. The entertainment media have historically had few minority
actors, writers, and directors and little minority-focused content. In
the fall of 1999, the television schedule was announced, and none of the
twenty-six, then-new shows starred an African American or any other
minority in a leading role, and few featured minorities in secondary
roles. Civil rights and advocacy organizations such as the NAACP and the
National Council of La Raza decried this lack of diversity and
ultimately prompted the major networks to establish an infrastructure to
address diversity issues. In 2005, the television schedule includes
considerable more diversity among new scripted shows. In fact, of
forty-three new shows, thirty-two regularly feature Latino/a, African
American, or Asian American actors. <outbind://16/#_ftn4> [4] This
increase in representation raises further questions about the complexity
of the minority characters, whether the minority characters are in lead
or supporting roles, and whether the television narratives are minority
focused. In addition, a recent study by The Ralph Bunche Center for
African American Studies at UCLA suggests that much more work needs to
be done behind the television camera. The Bunche Study found that less
than 10 percent of the television writers are members of racially
diverse groups. Moreover, the writers of racially diverse backgrounds
often work exclusively on minority-themed sitcoms. As a consequence,
when these shows are cancelled, employment opportunities disappear. The
lack of diversity among writers of non-minority-centered television
shows may preclude cultural themes from being woven into the fabric of
those shows. The media images presented by news and entertainment media
affect how people of color (and the public, and media policies
associated with them) are viewed; it is imperative that we continue to
explore the impact of these patterns in representation and employment
and to encourage policy reforms that will ameliorate these long-standing
conditions.
_____
<outbind://16/#_ftnref1> [1] The Ford Foundation has funded several
projects to examine the diversity of the media. In 2002, The Ford
Foundation supported “The TeleVisions Project: An Exploratory Project on
U.S. Entertainment Television and ‘Race.’” Through this project, several
scholars explored “the interplay between the entertainment industry,
minority-ethnic-oriented advocacy groups, and academic researchers to
improve the employment and representation of people of color in the
entertainment industry.” In 2003, the Foundation sponsored a conference
at the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center entitled “Media
Diversity and Localism: Meaning, Metrics, and the Public Interest,”
which inaugurated an important debate over methodologies in assessing
and measuring media diversity. The Foundation has also supported the
development of ethnic media in the U.S.
<outbind://16/#_ftnref2> [2] See Leonard M. Baynes, WHITEOUT: The
Absence and Stereotyping of People of Color by the Broadcast Networks in
Prime time Entertainment Programming, 45 Ariz. L. Rev. 293 (2003).
<outbind://16/#_ftnref3> [3] See Brian Thevenot & Gordon Russell, Rape.
Murder. Gunfights., New Orleans. Times Picayune, Sept. 26, 2005 at A1.
<outbind://16/#_ftnref4> [4] See Suzanne C. Ryan, It’s Prime Time for
Improved Racial Diversity, Boston Globe, Sept. 15, 2005, at E1.
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