I'm the wheel chair guy. Now we have reached the diversity threshold. We are now totally diverse.

I want to pick on two of the issues that came out in this panel here, and not particularly talk about myself, because quite frankly, I am in a complete quandary as to what is the relevance or need for more disabled people in the newsroom, and it raises for me the issue of what is the connection editorially between a notion of equity in the newsroom where you hire the people in your community because you think that is an equitable thing to do as a community; versus the editorial component of having all kinds of people show up in the paper and being able to identify themselves and be able to point to columns and places in the paper that represent their experience.

I'm here today to say I don't think there's a natural relationship between the two, and I think it's for one reason. My predecessor noted that the media is becoming corporate. I would say that the media has been corporate almost since it began, after Gutenberg. Not only has the media been corporate since its beginnings, but the media has also attracted the trade unions. The guilds were the earliest unions in history. They grew up in Europe, and the earliest union in the United States was the typographers union. So the struggle between corporate media and trade unionism is an old one, and I don't think necessarily relates to this point that we're discussing today. That's not in any way to diminish the struggle that continues today.

As a writer and someone who cannot possibly forego an opportunity to note something that is ironic, I just thought it was a true classic that Tom Bray suggested that it is hard to fire people. (Laughter) But everyone has their opinion.

It is absolutely the case that the media is market driven because in the United States all entities are market driven in this era. Market driven means you evaluate your success on the basis of your individual achievements and your individual wealth, as Mr. Bell has suggested earlier. That in fact Mr. Bell's success is because of Mr. and Mrs. Bell and anything he might have done to collaborate with them. In fact, it is due not only to them, but also to Lyndon Johnson and also to the other people in the community that one has to rely on. (Applause)

A person's individual faith, what a person tells a pollster about his faith, in fact, I submit has no meaning whatsoever. What an individual does with his or her faith has a lot of meaning. (Applause) What an individual does and how an individual acts politically does have meaning.

In this society where we evaluate things on the basis of polls, where we determine our revenue in the media on the basis of demographics and mass audiences, we atomize the United States down to a collection of random, almost irrelevant, almost mutually exclusive sets of opinions and motives and agendas. To do so is to basically adopt a strategy that means you will end up doing what Ray Suarez pointed out earlier this morning, that we cover things that are irrelevant to most people because we are adding them up on the basis of a lot of characteristics that don't relate to how they live and how they depend on each other in their individual communities.

So I would say that far from hiring in the newsroom being an indicator of where diversity comes from, it's knowing your audience, and to be truly interested in your audience from the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, and from all economic levels. That's how you ensure diversity in the stories that you actually produce or publish. To simply say that as a matter of, and I'll quote someone earlier this morning, as a matter of corporate logo evolution that you're going to have an Asian and a black and a person in a wheel chair in your newsroom, and that somehow is going to give you some license to say that you're diverse, is to fall into the same category of simply determining your content on the basis of demographics.

You can determine revenue on the basis of demographics, but you can never determine content on that basis.

If you want total diversity, where everyone's voice sort of exists in a kind of a meaningless cacophony, you can look at the Internet. That is total diversity. But it is content free in the sense that it's just random shots of people walking down the street. Unless you're engaged in an interaction on the Internet does that content begin to have meaning.

Therefore, when we think of our newspapers and our institutions and our television networks, we have to understand that they are corporate, market driven entities, and to expect from them exclusively the kind of diversity and democratization that we expect from other levels of society is to be naive. The diversity in the American media will come from the bottom up, not from the top down. That's the way it's always worked in America. It may be a sad statement, and it may mean we're going to see a lot more frightening pictures like what happened at Howard University and what happened at Santa Monica Community College on the day of the O.J. verdict. But we have to understand that those pictures are stories, and they're part of the struggle to achieve diversity in the United States. The media is part of the agent for that change, but it can't be the whole thing.

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