Disproportionate To What?

For some, the now-ubiquitous word “disproportionate” has inexplicably morphed into majority, as in the police disproportionately kill black men when the reality is that the majority of people killed by police are white men, but the percentage of black men killed is greater than the percentage of black men in the general population.

The concept, but not the word, popped up again in an interesting New York Times column by Bret Stephens about an op-ed by Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, arguing that objectivity in media needs to die.

In a guest essay last week for The Post, Downie made the case that newsrooms must set aside journalistic objectivity because a new generation of journalists “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘both-sides-ism.’” He added, “they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.” He even claims that objectivity was never a standard he upheld, even though the principles he says were the goals he pursued as editor — “accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth” — are the same as those upheld by most objective journalists and little different from what he elsewhere says is the dictionary definition of objectivity — “using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice.”

Further down, Stephens gets to some of Downie’s collateral points, which include diversity in the newsroom.

The report also urges newsrooms to become ever more diverse, but omits any reference to viewpoint diversity, which today is the most glaring deficit in most of the American news media landscape. In our conversation, Downie acknowledged that this was an unfortunate oversight. Unfortunate — but telling.

Stephens later concludes “If newsrooms were previously insufficiently diverse, then surely the answer is to make them more diverse, not throw away their standards.” In the not too distant past, newsrooms were almost entirely white, and any black or Hispanic reporter was assigned stories about their communities, relegated to tokenism. Don’t point to WABC’s Geraldo Rivera to disprove this, as he was just former Legal Aid lawyer Gerry Rivers after he changed his name.

But this offers an opportunity to raise a question in an area not so fraught with controversy about whether, and how diverse, a newsroom ought to be. Should they reflect the racial percentages of the general population, or of the universe of reporters, a somewhat amorphous group since not every reporter went to Columbia J-School before getting a byline. Nor are all people who seek positions as reporters of equal equitable quality. Some are far better writers and reporters than others. Some are pretty poor. Doesn’t that count for something if you want a job in a big league media outlet?

Assuming that the percentage of Americans who are black is about 13.6%, should there be 13.6% of black reporters working at WaPo? Of course, that number tells us nothing of the available universe of people with the requisite skillset seeking employment in journalism.

This disconnect was more flagrant in a recent WaPo news article about on-air meteorologists.

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) found that Black and African American meteorologists made up 2 percent of the entire membership in 2020, the last year it collected data. The ratio of Black men to women is 60 percent to 40 percent — indicating that Black women make up less than 1 percent of members. That data also includes the news industry. The National Association of Black Journalists says there are about 138 Black meteorologists in journalism across the United States. Of Black meteorologists, about 46 percent are women, according to Jason Frazer, NABJ’s weather and climate task force chair.

“While African Americans make up about 13.6% of the US population, they represent only about 5.5% of the Meteorologists you see on television,” Frazer, a meteorologist and co-host for Fox Weather First, wrote in an email. “That is significantly less than the number of Black TV Anchors and Reporters.”

Is the relevant universe of black women who are qualified to be on-air meteorologists less than 1%, based on their percentage in the American Meteorological Society, or 13.6%, based upon the general population? Not everyone has the qualifications to be a meteorologist. Should that not matter when figuring whether they are under or over represented?

Ed Whelan made this point with regard to black women judges, but since both Whelan and black women judges are inherently controversial, the point was overladen with outrage rather than understood to be a pretty valid point.

According to the American Bar Association’s 2021 Profile of the Legal Profession, 4.7% of American lawyers are black and 37% are female. On the ballpark assumption that the male-female divide among black lawyers reflects the broad 63%-37% divide among all lawyers, that would indicate that roughly 1.7% of American lawyers are black females. That would mean that Biden has nominated black women to federal appellate seats at more than 22 times their numbers among American lawyers.

This does not mean that any judge isn’t exceptionally well qualified. Indeed, proportionate or not, qualifications are unrelated to the race of the any individual, which some might argue is the more salient point here. In my experience, no defendant ever felt better about getting a sentence of life plus cancer from a black women judge than a white male judge.

That people were historically denied opportunity based on their race and sex is certainly beyond dispute, and efforts to right this wrong by attempting to increase or decrease the proportionate impact is one way to compensate for past racism and sexism. But the virtue of change depends on recognizing what the proper proportions should be, and very few people seem to be willing to put in the effort, or willing to take the risk, of questioning whether the general population is the right percentage for journalists, meteorologists or judges.