The 2012 election cycle is heating up and the media has already started its nonstop coverage of the political horserace. The NCLR communications team can certainly attest to this; we receive numerous requests each week from members of the press interested in hearing what our leaders have to say about a number of issues as they relate to the election. The volume of those requests will surely intensify as Election Day draws near. Yet while news outlets scramble to deliver news about the Latino community, it is rare that those delivering the news are Latino or people of color.
CNN has all but admitted that it lacks diversity. Recently, the cable news giant made a conscious decision to look for more qualified people of color to fill their daily lineup of anchors and sent one of its newest executives, Mark Whitaker, to talk to the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) about finding qualified candidates. NABJ President Kathy Times was especially critical of the news network for announcing a new primetime lineup that was completely devoid of any people of color.
In an effort to highlight this inequity, NCLR—together with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the LIBRE Initiative, Being Latino and the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts (NHFA)—has launched the Art of Politics campaign.
From the NHFA website:
“This initiative is designed to address the absence of Latino voices in leading news and public affairs television programming, beginning with the Sunday morning news talk shows on ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC. As part of this initiative, we are collecting quarterly information on the race, ethnicity and gender of guests and commentators on these shows and asking the networks to partner with us to correct a situation that amounts to segregation by omission in the digital age.”
The graph below also highlight the lack of diversity found on the Sunday morning talk shows every week.
(Graph courtesy of NHFA)
You can certainly expect to see more from Art of Politics as it begins to collect this data in earnest and develops an advocacy strategy for promoting Hispanic participation and issues in leading news and public affairs programming.