Ray Suarez, host of National Public Radio's program Talk of the Nation, began to deepen the conversation by arguing that diversity was far more complicated than hiring.

"If the question is "Does diversity make a great newsroom?" the answer simply and apparently is no. Simply taking the Epcot Center, Small World, one from Column A, two from Column B approach to personnel matters will not give you a great newsroom. But if you turn the question around slightly and ask, "Can you have a great newsroom without it?" I would say at least for the largest metropolitan areas of the country where a sizeable chunk of Americans live, the answer, just as clearly and categorically is absolutely not.

"We have come a long way since the 1960's when urban riots had city editors looking into their newsrooms only to see a sea of white guys in white shirts....Things have changed, they have gotten better, and it has been shown to the people who run this business that not thinking about these things when putting together your team, puts you at a fatal, competitive weakness..."

However, "Communication means having the same set of meanings come out of people's mouths and enter people's ears and have everybody know that we're talking about the same thing...When we talk about diversity, that common understanding of what we're talking about is not always a part of the communicating process. Is it body count? Is it simply who you would list on an EEOC report? What do our listeners, what do our readers think diversity is? In television, in too many places, it's been understood just putting one of those faces up. That satisfies a very basic definition of diversity."

"Anybody who's been in this for awhile can tell you stories about particular new events, where either a strength or a weakness in this regard suddenly showed up at the morning meeting. .. The way that you tell how good your newsroom is is what you do the other 363 days a year when there is [no breaking news] no Monica Lewinsky around. There is no such thing as a Latino electric bill. There is no such thing as a black gas bill. And when you look at who speaks for the public when the issue is a utility rate hike, who do reporters go out and talk to?

"If your default person, go out and talk to a person, is always the same kind of person, then you've got a problem... Who speaks when the issue is real estate taxes? When you say the word homeowner is the immediate response, oh, yes, let's go out and find a 50 year old white person because apparently they are more upset than any other people in society when real estate taxes go up.

"Who's making the decisions about what to cover and how to cover it? And especially when we talk about life in the largest metros where there are, for instance, more black people in New York than there are people of any sort in most cities in America. .. Your orientation should point directly over there to East Flatbush in Brooklyn where the whole flavor of central Brooklyn has changed in the last 20 years, and somehow it has escaped the notice of the people who sit in midtown Manhattan and make news decisions.

"If the first time a minority reporter touches a story, gets a hand in on its planning or execution, is when his or her butt is being run out the door by an assignment editor, that's too late in the process. If there are people earlier in the discussion of how this coverage is being done who can talk about emphasis, who can talk about orientation, who can remind people that when you're doing something as banal as a hot weather story .. that all kinds of people get hot."

"I hope we talk about class, because class will continue to be a real part of this discussion that we have touched on but little."

Addie Rimmer, Deputy Managing Editor of News for the Detroit Free Press, argued that an important step in diversity is "seeing more people pursue careers in editing," and offered something of an exhortation to minority journalists to move in that direction.

"The last gatekeepers of what goes out either on the air, on the net, or what gets in the newspaper, what goes on the radio, is in fact an editor. And too often, I think people who have been attracted to the more glamorous side of our business -- that is the reporting side, and perhaps maybe even the photography side -- and neglected what was important in terms of being able to filter."

"One of the things that I'm most excited about is being able to sit at the table where the decisions are being made, asking questions that are not necessarily always asked. That is .. the context."

Amy Entelis, Vice President of Talent Recruitment and Development with ABC News in New York argued that the progress made, especially by women has helped change the definitions of news and led to better journalism.

"In 1982, I was a producer covering business and economics for the (ABC) evening news program. I was 31 years old and became pregnant with my first child. I was one of a very few women on the staff, and I happened to be the only one at the time who was married.

"When I went to tell my boss that I was pregnant and would need some time off after the birth of my baby he responded by asking if I were married. (Laughter) We then had a rather circular and inconclusive discussion about benefits, policies, what would happen to my job, and it was totally uncharted territory for both of us.

"Needless to say, we weren't doing very many stories at that time about two career families, the problem of finding affordable or high quality childcare, social changes in a society where more and more women were going back to work outside the home, discrimination in the workplace, sexual harassment, tension between working and non-working mothers. At that time basically the agenda for that program was set by a rather homogeneous group.

"By 1988, a mere six years later, we had begun a beat focused on the family as part of a series we call The American Agenda. It was a regular feature on World News Tonight with two full time reporters, two full time producers -- all happened to be women, two were minority women. Over the next six years this team produced hundreds of in-depth stories running about four minutes on the evening newscast, which is still for us a large chunk of time. These stories were centered on issues of the family, the workplace, parenting, women's health, welfare reform, and childcare.

"I think it's safe to say that even if we had been brilliantly receptive in 1982 to begin such a segment, we really would not have had the ability to pull it off without women on our staff. By 1987, 1988, ABC News had greatly increased the number of women both on and off the air. That gave us the tools to begin the kind of coverage of these stories that would address concerns critical to a huge portion of our audience.

"By the late 1990's, a snapshot of our staff would reveal that about half of our executive producers are female; many of our senior producers; and about one-quarter of our senior management. We no longer do that featured segment on children and the family, and I don't think we really need to. The balance of the genders in our newsroom has really informed the daily flow of news, and stories about children and family are routine and they're done by women, they're done by men, and it's just sort of a normal part of our editorial process.

Desiree Cooper, Editor at Large of the Metro Times in Detroit, argued that increased diversity translated into "increased credibility" and therefore has at base an economic rationale. For Cooper this often means insulated news organizations talk to the wrong people and look foolish to the public.

"I can't tell you how many times as a member of an under-represented community, both as women and as an African American, I've watched news or read an article and I said, "Oh, my God, they quoted Joe Schmo again. That guy's a jerk. Nobody in our community respects this person."....The sourcing is just a huge problem, and I think that goes back to what Ray was also pointing out....Then you wonder why when a publication's on the ropes, when readership, viewership are plummeting, people aren't really rallying around a newspaper. Because it doesn't represent them and it has no credibility within those communities."

"I think the liberal media especially has been really, really negligent in bringing in diverse voices within that community."

"We're afraid to talk about religion in the liberal media because we feel like somehow it stymies the political process or it's too hard to get our arms around or whatever. You cannot talk to the Caldian community in Detroit if you're not going to talk about religion. You cannot talk to the African American community in Detroit if you're not going to talk about religion. Religion is politics. Religion is social networking. Religion is employment. It's everything.

"You don't really have the confidence to go out and get a story if you don't have the people there that can kind of help inform you along the way, to give you some support if you're going to come under attack."

Tom Minnery, a former journalist and Vice President of Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian organization, called for diversity to be expanded to diversity of opinion. For the devout, there often seems a profound cultural gulf from journalism.

"I wish you could sit with me in my office as we talk to reporters who have absolutely no clue about an evangelical Christian approach to these issues and what it is we do and how we do it.

"...Diversity in newsrooms entails diversity of opinion, as well. Desiree got to the issue well when she talked about the need to have reporters in newsrooms who understand religion and who understand the force that it is in the country, and the numbers of people who are adherents to religious views."

"I think the funniest incident was the time that 60 Minutes came out to .. do what they said was a feature on Focus on the Family.

"60 Minutes doesn't do much by way of features, if you've ever seen the program you'll know that. So we said thanks, but no thanks. They said well could we just at least come out and talk to you. Well, okay.

"...The two producers that came out, I guess they tried to dress and act like people who we would relate to, and they both dressed and acted like the church lady--for an entire day. We thought, are we that dumb? It was hilarious. We still declined after a day, so they went back, and so we've never had the fortune to have a feature done about us on 60 Minutes.

"Typical of the situations we see is the coverage of the huge Promise Keepers event in Washington ... Leading up to the event, the stories were chock full of dark prospects of -- are these people political? The idea being that people from a conservative, religious point of view have no business being political. I don't care if the Promise Keepers got political or not, but...that seemed to be the only issue at stake.

Sue Burzynski, Assistant Managing Editor at the Detroit News, agreed with Minnery that now the question of diversity must expand, and that one impediment was the limited 'comfort zone' within which journalists operate. The arena in which journalists feel safe needs to expand.

"Diversity has to have a broader definition than just what's obvious. Newspapers need to look at diversity beyond race, beyond gender, and look toward cultural, religious, economic, age, lifestyle, and ethnic diversities of their communities.

"Newspapers should be inclusive so that readers and potential readers, whether they're bowling buffs or opera addicts, can find themselves in the paper. People who are overlooked in the newspaper stop reading. ...More newspapers will die.

"I think reporters and editors, like most people, find it fairly easily to operate in their own comfort zones. It's easier for a Catholic reporter to relate to Catholicism. It's probably easier for white reporters to relate to other whites. But smart newspapers are pushing their staffs to expand those comfort zones. ..

"Being inclusive simply is good journalism. It adds context and background to stories. If we're doing a story on diabetes and we quote an African American doctor, we're going to get a perspective that we might not get that may be important to African American readers."

Charles Eisendrath: "Your comments seemed to indicate to me that despite that, we're making a mockery of using the word diversity in terms of religion in most of the reporters that you come in contact with in a very, very large broadcasting outfit. Is that true."

Tom Minnery: ".. I think the opinions here today are very helpful. .. But I think that to the extent that journalism is an enterprise of ideas, of philosophies, then diversity of philosophy, diversity of ideas becomes essential to a fair understanding and a fair reporting of the ideas and philosophies that are at stake today."

Tom Rosenstiel: "That would suggest, Tom, that in job interviews editors should not just look at the color of a person's skin, but ask them something about what their opinions of the world are, what their philosophies are, perhaps even what their ideologies are. .. Should [we] in hiring extend our definitions of diversity to be kind of internal diversity?"

Tom Minnery: "Frequently the people assigned to come and interview us at Focus on the Family are religion writers, but in getting to know these reporters we find frequently that they're people who are on the assignment because something else didn't work out, or they themselves don't believe in God, don't believe in religion, because if they did, how could they be fair in covering that subject?

"I've got to tell you, most of the sportswriters in Colorado believe in the Denver Broncos, and it's not seen to be a hindrance to their work. (Laughter) And while we would not expect religion reporters to be cheerleaders for a particular religions view, we would expect them at least to know the difference between an epistle and an apostle, and many don't."

Amy Entelis: "We're very acutely aware that we should not hire everybody from the Northeast, we try to stretch across the country and bring people together who have grown up in different places and had vastly different experiences. We don't seek out specific political beliefs, we don't search out specific religious beliefs. But I think we have an awareness that journalism, and especially at a place like a network news division, tends to attract a certain kind of person. If you don't really work hard at reaching out .. Everybody would kind of feel like everybody else."

"I think the best way that we go about it is to look in unusual places and operate on the notion that a really large collection of people from very different backgrounds and places in the world is really going to provide the ingredient to the newsroom where hopefully there is a broad spectrum of ideas and the resulting exchange of ideas will improve what we're trying to do."

Sue Burzynski: "I don't think that when we're hiring we can say oh, we need two Catholics this week and a Muslim next week.

"And I don't agree with Tom that you have to necessarily believe in religion or in a particular kind of religion to cover it well. I think there's a training factor that comes into play there too, though. If you've got a religion writer who doesn't know the difference between epistle and apostle, to me that may be more of a training issue than a hiring issue."

Tom Rosenstiel: "Do you feel like the conversation that we're having this morning is flying in the face of some economic trends that you see in your news organizations. [It is] getting harder to move in the direction of diversity because, frankly, the nature of your news organization is moving more towards simply operating as a kind of business which can't afford some of these social notions?"

Desiree Cooper: "I just reject that notion that, first of all, diversity has to be expensive. I think it's expensive when you're not covering communities."

Ray Suarez: "The direction of coverage in the news business is a distortion and misstatement of the way life is lived in the United States by a vast, broad middle of the country's population."

"In the United States, one percent of the population owns 35 percent of all the commonly traded stock in the United States. You would think from watching the evening news and from reading the newspapers that we are all sitting at home watching the streaming market ticker across the bottom of CNBC and counting our resulting profits. That is not the case."

"You can watch the three morning news programs of all the networks and see extensive, loving, highly detailed coverage of the latest gizmos and googaws available at the ComDex show, the electronics show in Las Vegas, when in fact only 12.5 percent of all households in the United States own a computer equipped with a modem. Again, watching the coverage on our mass media you would think that it's 98 percent, not 12.5 percent.

"The confluence of commerce and news coverage is now so deep and profound that we can't even see the edges of it anymore."

Tom Grant: "If we can accept that "political correctness" is one of the weaknesses of mainstream media, how much has the push for diversity in the newsroom contributed to that weakness?

Tom Rosenstiel: "We sent everybody three questions. .. Most of the [panelists] said that diversity can become counterproductive if management does not institute diversity programs in such a way that they're sincere about it, and that that can kind of devolve into balkanization in the newsroom, and that can lead to a kind of political correctness in which, rather than things being discussed, people feel that things can't be discussed."

Tom Minnery: "I do think that political correctness has caused great problems in the newsroom, again, particularly for people who have a social conservative outlook.

"Most of the evidence that I have is anecdotal. We get a steady stream of reporters coming to our organization looking for work, and these are people who tend to be social conservatives. Just last week I had an African American woman, a reporter, in the office, really downcast ... Her problem was, she's Christian. She says I get tired of people ragging on my faith; I get tired of people making jokes about the religious right, fanatical fringe. Most of them don't know that's me they're making jokes about."

Tom Grant: I'm Tom Grant. I'm one of the Michigan journalism fellows. .. It seems to me that you've ignored the need for a multiplicity of voices that comes from a lot of places that may not be diverse at all. That you need a black network that's going to have three black correspondents sitting down and discussing issues that are of interest .. you need a religious newspaper that's going to discuss religious issues in depth, and you need conservative outlets like we saw with Matt Drudge ...

"Isn't there plenty of room for newsrooms that aren't diverse at all?"

Ray Suarez: "One of the reasons we're talking diversity .. is that cities no longer can support multiplicity of individual voices. As those voices constrict, you need more and more people's ideas emanating through the same organ, and that is not what we have had in the past."

"The way we cover crime is just an extension .. of the way we cover everything else. Having a basically suburban, upper middle class to middle class, white set of lenses to look at the world, what becomes important? Protecting property and protecting lives from a dangerous class from which you must remove yourself. It's a rational act to remove yourself from a dangerous class. So we use quick visual language to express things about the world that both the expresser and the person watching or listening to a broadcast understands and agrees on -- that black schools are bad schools, that Latin neighborhoods are dangerous, that suburbs are better than cities, and that middle class people are better than poor people.

"I would ask you to count in your head from now on the number of times you see television stations come back and tell you the outcome of a trial after they violated someone's presumption of innocence by showing them on television in handcuffs being stuffed into a squad car. I already know in advance that your fingers are not going to get very busy." .. The visual language with which we presume to show ourselves the world is so loaded, so loaded with pigment and class and geography, that ... We should blast off. ..

"How could we call ourselves finders of fact and presenters of fact? Sometimes we're really just taking the path of least resistance and presenting that world."

Voice: "What I heard from Walt Swanston this morning was, numbers is not the goal. You have to change the climate of the newsroom. Once you've created some physical diversity in the newsroom then you have to create or take steps to create intellectual diversity, to let people of diverse backgrounds talk and air their opinions."

Emory Klein: "I went to work for NBC news in 1980 in Washington, D.C. At that time .. outside of Ed Bradley and Max Robinson at those two networks and no one at NBC, there were no African American males in front line network positions in 1980. I was one of very few African American correspondents at NBC."

"We can all agree that diversity, that it's wonderful to have this and come up with all of these broad definitions of diversity, but where does it go from here? Where does it go after discussions like this when in reality -- absent some kind of specific goal setting -- history has taught us that we aren't moving anywhere. We are not increasing numbers."

Amy Entelis: "One of the situations we face, which is just a practical reality, is that there are three network evening news anchors, and they've all been sitting where they've been sitting for quite awhile. .. These people sort of become owners of those chairs."

"So the pyramid gets very narrow at the top. .. And the best that I think we can do right now is to develop our talent and our people all around the world and make sure that we have people that are gaining the kinds of experiences and doing the kinds of reporting that we know make people eligible for those ultimate prizes."

Ray Suarez: "One of the things that is interesting since I started in the business is that minorities have been granted the privilege of mediocrity, too, which is a very subtle thing. But the idea that you have to be better than everybody in the room has, the edge has come off that a little bit, and in fact you just have to be as cute as everybody in the room. (Laughter) And preferably below 30."

Allen Forsythe: My question is, how is diversity being used as a smokescreen to build corporate image? How is it being used to sweep under the rug other corporate policies such as monopolization; increasingly scanty news coverage, which is called cost cutting; and hatred for labor unions? Isn't diversity being used, particularly by Knight Ridder and Gannett as a way to rebuild their battered images?"

Amy Entelis: "No, I don't think it is. Gannett's had diversity policy since the '70s, so clearly it pre-dated the Detroit strike. And if you want to talk about diversity at the News and at the Detroit newspapers anyway, and the strike, talk about some of the figures. Pre-strike, Detroit newspapers had a 19 percent minority staff; post-strike it's got a 44 percent minority staff."

"At the Detroit News in the newsroom, the numbers have stayed just about the same post-strike and pre-strike."

Charles Eisendrath: "On the broader issue of the smokescreen issue, is there anybody who wants to take a crack at answering that in fact it is very useful for corporations to use diversity and it might, in fact, deflect unpopular attention away from them. Anybody on our panel that wants to take that?"

Addie Rimmer: "The disappointing thing about that question is the notion that Knight Ridder or any other company cannot genuinely value diversity as a means if producing excellent journalism.

"I worked for the Miami Herald, and that was back in 1980; left Knight Ridder's employ for about 11 years; and came back to a very different company. When I left Knight Ridder, that is the Miami Herald, I thought I would never want to set foot in Miami -- not because of Knight Ridder, per se, but because of the problems I had going into a market that I thought was a pretty hostile market for anybody black who at the time didn't know all the ways around Miami.

"I did not come back to Knight Ridder as part of some effort at a smokescreen. I have been able to move around, I have been able to draw upon a large network of being in this business and seeing many people placed in entry positions, moving up, and starting to run newspapers. So I don't think that I need to start apologizing for efforts at number one, creating better newspapers."

Amy Entelis: "I do think that it should be acknowledged that diversity can be used as a smokescreen. That's not to say that anyone here is participating in that. But there are diverse people on the United States Supreme Court, and I happen to feel like my interests are not well represented there. Just because an African American sits on the Supreme Court, I don't necessarily feel like that person is bringing a diverse viewpoint, at least not from the majority of the Court.

"So I think we need to look at not only the numbers and sort of quantitative analysis, but qualitatively, how is the organization changing to accommodate diversity, including the very important issues of class? And that is especially, I think, prominent in the African American community where we are still very much not willing to talk about class, and want to keep the debate focused on race because that is a very prevalent problem. But there are a lot of class divides within racial contexts that we also do need to look at."

Ben Burns, Director of the Professional Communication Program at Wayne State University reacted to the morning discussion.

"Does diversity contribute to quality? I don't think there's any question that it does. I think we can debate how you go about diversity, but I think the debate about the need for diversity in the media should be about how we achieve it, and how we move forward, and not about necessarily the sins and failures of the past.

"We desperately need more money committed to diversity. Big corporations I do not believe necessarily are working smoke screens by adding to their diversity in their staffs, but one of our speakers said that 43 percent of daily newspapers have no diversity on their staffs at all. The question is what are we doing to convince those people to devote some money to training and development of diversity within their staffs? Because they are helping to educate generations of Americans who are not going to understand the importance of this multicultural society that we live in. We have to spend money on education, and the people that should be spending the money are the newspaper owners and the publishers.

"One of the people in the audience raised the question about profits. That was a very legitimate question because we are protected in the media under the Constitution. That protection gives us singular powers and singular responsibilities. The question is have we lived up to those responsibilities? Are 22 percent profit margins or 30 percent profit margins or 50 percent profit margins consistent with the responsibility we have in the media to represent many, many voices, to represent many, many ethnic and racial and cultural interests. The reality is, I don't think so. I think we need to put the pressure where it belongs on the corporations that own the media. Because the fact is, media corporations are getting larger, more and more outlets are being owned by fewer and fewer outlets. And the net result is the power is in the hands of a lot of very large money people."

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