A Tale of Two Newsrooms
CNN's Nicole Chavez in El Paso, her home town, after the shooting that claimed 22 lives.
It should have been a quiet Saturday morning in El Paso—as quiet as it can be when 3,000 people and young children pack into a Walmart on the last “Back to School” shopping weekend. For years the bustling store on Gateway Boulevard had been the meeting point of countries, cultures and families that straddle El Paso and its sister city, Ciudad Juarez on the south side of the U.S.- Mexico border. The biculturalism was evident even on shelves, stocked to the nines with Mexican chiles, not far from at least three different brands of microwavable Mac-n-Cheese. Parents walked down the aisles, filling up carts with colorful markers, composition notebooks and pencils.
But in a matter of minutes the store in the Cielo Vista branch, which loosely translates to “view of the sky,” would turn into a bleak horror scene. Security cameras captured Patrick Crusius walking in, guns blazing. The 21-year-old is alleged to have driven more than 11 hours through Texas to kill “Mexicans” in El Paso, a city whose population is 80 percent Latino.
“People were frozen in place,” 26-year-old survivor Army Spc. Alden Hall told CBS after the attack. Others attempted to flee in vain. “They were being taken out in the carts. It was back to back to back.”
Suddenly, news tickers nationwide went bright red. The words, “Breaking: Reports of a mass shooting in El Paso,” flooded TV screens and Twitter feeds. Within minutes, anchors were on air broadcasting initial reports—the same way they had with almost every other mass shooting: a bar in Thousand Oaks, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Some reporters started working to see if this might be a copycat attack. After all, it had been just a few days since two people were shot at killed in Mississippi Walmart and the same week three people were killed at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California.
Nicole Chavez, associate writer for CNN Digital in Atlanta, was getting ready to drive to work when her phone rang.
It was her boyfriend, calling to let her know what had just happened. Twenty people died and 26 were wounded in her hometown. She hung up in a panic and called her parents immediately. “My dad always stops in that Walmart to buy Coca-Cola for his business. And, my sister was going to go shopping,” Chavez recounted. Fortunately, they were nowhere near the Walmart. Chavez rushed into work and volunteered to report the story saying, “it was a my duty.”
She didn’t know it then, but covering this attack would be different than the other mass shootings she’s covered, not just because it happened in El Paso. While there have been many Latino victims in several mass shootings like the 2016 attack on the Pulse LGBTQIA+ nightclub in Orlando this one would send shockwaves across the country. Journalists like Chavez were getting ready to cover the deadliest overtly anti-Latino attack in modern American history.
It would become a story that many outlets would mishandle, at least initially missing the dangerous truth behind the killer’s motivation.
“I think there was just a massive failure to get this right,” explained Lulu Garcia-Navarro, anchor of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. “It wasn’t so much that the coverage wasn’t there. It’s not that you couldn’t find pieces about how the Latino community was feeling and beyond, or nuanced pieces about the repercussions and reverberations of a hate crime of this magnitude occurring. It was what newsrooms chose to prioritize and how these stories were framed.”
Garcia-Navarro says blind spots in coverage are “reflective of blind spots in newsrooms that actually fashion the coverage.” That’s because 77 percent of journalists in newsrooms are non-Hispanic whites, rendering it the least diverse workplace in the country, according to an analysis by Pew Research Center of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Notwithstanding, numerous corporate diversity programs, special fellowships and grants, experts say it’s not enough.
What’s missing, explains LaSharah Bunting, Director of Journalism at the Knight Foundation, is accountability in an industry that has not taken ownership of the institutional racism that, for decades, has existed in newsrooms. “All of this is crucial to the future of journalism, the future of the free press, the future of truth, the future of democracy. You cannot have any of this without an equitable, diverse journalism that you are putting out there.”
As a result, the truth, nuance and fairness and are compromised. And, it isn’t the first time.
“A Massive Failure to get it right.”
Kerner’s Shadow
Almost 53 years ago, during a hot Detroit summer in 1967, racial tension ran high.
William Walter Scott II, a tall, almost clean-shaven black man often photographed with a cigar in hand, was escorted past the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount. Police had raided his after-hours, blind pig and gambling joint. The crowd’s goading had escalated from heckling when his son threw a glass bottle at police that shattered on the sidewalk.
Within minutes, bricks and sticks flew. Police cars were trashed. What followed would become one of the deadliest riots in American history, lasting five days and culminating with President Lyndon B. Johnson sending in the United States Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions.
For many scholars and organizers, the uprising was more than a senseless riot. It was a turning point for a city where segregation and institutional racism had long been entrenched. Despite being one of the country’s booming manufacturing hubs, racial fault lines separated the city and local politics. Throughout the 1950s homeowners’ associations aided by city mayors fought against the integration of schools and neighborhoods. In subsequent decades, the aftermath of the riots would usher in an era of community engagement and transformed political representation, including the election of the city’s first black mayor.
Yet, in their reporting, national news outlets covered Detroit’s ordeal like a domestic war zone. For days, clips from local ABC affiliate WXYZ-TV repeatedly showed brick buildings on fire, with piles of trash and furniture outside. White police officers and doctors are portrayed as stoic and calm, trying to quell panic. African Americans were shown looting stores. Background footage of protest, shown across the country, zoomed in on graffitied walls with the words “Black Power,” against a score of dramatic instrumental music reminiscent of Henry Fonda’s “The Longest Day.”
The only voices of black Detroit residents are those answering reporters’ leading questions. Consider the following clip of an interview of a wounded man at a local hospital:
Reporter: What was your first reaction?
Injured man: Well when I was shot I just fell right to the pavement because I didn’t know how many shots were coming off after that.
Reporter: Are you angry or what?
Injured man: I don’t think it’s right for my people to act the way that they are acting. This is all I can say about this. We are fighting one war in Vietnam; we are losing as it is. So why should we come back here and fight a war among ‘em I mean among ourselves? I mean this fighting over here. We should be trying to get ourselves together over there so people won’t be fighting a war in our backyard.
The same reporter, Ken Thomas, stood outside of the illegal bar where the conflict had started and filed a piece saying that many newsmen wonder how it would be to cover a riot. Thomas posits an “us vs. them” reasoning, “When you are the target that’s a very strange feeling. Because no matter how liberal you may think you are, or how conservative you may be, no matter what your personal views are; all of a sudden you find that there are folks, that live in the same town that you do, who in the same year, who hate you enough—at least in given occasions—to attack you…”
It was against this backdrop that President Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly known as the Kerner Commission. The committee heavily relied on social scientists and in-depth studies of the nation’s impoverished black urban areas. Among the 1968 report’s broader findings, based on field surveys and analysis of 3,779 articles, “made it clear that there was an imbalance between actual events and the portrayal of those events in the press and on air [that] cannot be attributed solely to sensationalism.” Key sections of the report criticized coverage of race relations and the lack of African Americans in newsrooms adding, “by and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions. The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world.”
What’s changed in 50 years?
“Fifty years later, a lack of diversity is still a foundational feature of American journalism,” writes Tristan Ahtone, president of the Native American Journalists Association.
This is particularly true when it comes to Latinx representation. In spite of being 58.9 million of the total US population, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) annual newsroom diversity shows that Latino and non-whites make up 22.6 percent of editorial staff of respondents. The most recent census data indicates that the United States population is currently 38 percent non-white but representation in newsrooms is still lagging.
The survey found the newsrooms with the highest diversity rate included The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald and Vox.
The same report found that in online-only news organizations, people of color employed as managers and full-time journalists comprised 25.6 percent of the workforce among respondents, compared to last year’s 24.3 percent.
However, what’s alarming is that only 293 newsrooms of the 1,700 queried—roughly 17 percent—submitted their diversity data. This means that findings cannot be generalized for the entire marketplace.
"We need stronger survey participation and support from editors to accurately reflect the industry and implement improvements,” said ASNE Diversity Committee Co-Chair Karen Magnuson, executive editor of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle in a statement when the findings were published.
“How do we counter the narrative propagated by all those far-right spaces?”
- Read Claudia Meléndez’s article Confronting White Terror
Diverse Approaches
In 1996, Robin Ely and David Thomas produced a landmark paper at Harvard Business School that sought to measure organizational effectiveness in its approach to diversity. It found that companies generally manage diversity in hiring practices in one of two ways:
The first is the “Discrimination and Fairness Paradigm,” where the focus is placed on attracting talent that increases racial, national, gender or class representation. There are also mentoring programs and trainings. The commonly held belief is that once the person is inside the organization, differences disappear and “they encourage (and expect) women and people of color to blend in.” This approach is most closely aligned to Equal Opportunity legislation.
The problem in this paradigm, however, is that the marker of success is tied to how well a company increases and retains diverse talent, rather than how employees are allowed to draw on their unique perspectives to increase equity. Applied to the newsroom, it means that a reporter isn’t recognized for having additional cultural knowledge or nuance as it applies to the story.
“I know many people prescribe to a certain colorblindness in the 21 Century,” says Edgar Navarro, senior producer at Telemundo News. “But I think that sometimes that is a misguided approach because we are all equal, but we are all different.”
The second way is the “Access-and-Legitimacy” paradigm. In this, the organization fully embraces diversity by creating business units and jobs that specifically match the demographics of an organization with the needs of a critical consumer or constituent group. In terms of journalism, this can apply to the creation of the plethora of Latino news sites by legacy media, or the creation of verticals like Latino issues, race and gender, and so on. Despite the fact that this creates opportunities and channels to bring in new talent into the organization, it can also pigeonhole journalists of color. Reporters are then only seen as being able to accurately report or perform at an excellent level when covering their own communities. They are not encouraged to apply to other roles.
“I feel like Latinos get discovered every 10 years with the census and then it’s like, ‘did you know there’s 50 million Latinos and we can reach them! And it becomes this business,” said political journalist Adrian Carrasquillo, who has been in on start-up sites for larger conglomerates like Fox News Latino and NBC Latino. “There has to be more than, ‘we did it for six months and that didn’t work’ or ‘we did it just through the election.’ You have to show respect not only to the community but to journalists too.”
This doesn’t even bring into the fold all the barriers to entry that exist for Latino journalists. Journalists are frequently recruited from private universities in the northeast or the coasts. They are more likely—more able—to accept offers of unpaid internships. For a large part of Latinos in the U.S. who are also disproportionately at the intersection of economic inequities, it is often impossible to take unpaid work, thus limiting their access to newsroom roles for young journalists.
As an alternative, Ely and Thomas sought to provide a different framework to create organizational transformation. They suggested that companies had to value the reality of cultural differences and use it to broaden how a company’s benefits—its culture and leadership, can work for everyone. In this case diverse perspectives and knowledge are shared and learned, hence they called it the “Learning-Effectiveness,” paradigm.
In an interview, Dr. Ely was asked how the research and the companies had evolved. “The short answer is that not much has changed,” she said. What’s worse, the companies have turned the case for diversity into a business one, “when people have their head around financial outcomes, they don’t care enough about quality. That’s just empirically true. It’s been shown… you are creating a psychological condition where people care less about equality.” She is unequivocal: it’s a choice companies make.
“They tried to save the lives of friends cut down by gunfire”
- Read Alfredo Corchado’s coverage of the El Paso shooting
“I guess from all the school training they get, they knew to hide.”
- Read Cassandra Jaramillo’s coverage of the El Paso shooting
Invisible Casualties
Crusius’ manifesto detailed plans to stop a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Those four words became a window to the underbelly of an attack that is still shaking Latinos across the country to their very core.
But that wasn’t immediately evident in the coverage of the El Paso tragedy by 24-hour news channels. It was a mass shooting, after all. So much of the coverage quickly became standard. Immediately, pundits started debates about gun control. Graphics of the continental United States flashed with yellow dots to denote recent gun casualties. At primetime, debates about mental illness, background checks and its relation to mass shootings began.
Then, the names of the dead finally came out: Flores, Mendez, Cerros, Velazquez…
It became impossible to escape the fact that the hate crime was directed at a specific group of people. Yet, “what overshadowed all the coverage, was President Trump’s rather formulaic and not terribly insightful, and not terribly empathic speech,” Garcia-Navarro said.
Reports filed by Latino reporters began to emerge, shedding light on the magnitude of what had transpired. It wasn’t a coincidence.
“He could have done this at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, but no, he chose to drive hundreds of miles to hunt Mexicans like me,” Ana Trujillo fought her tears as she told Alfredo Corchado, correspondent for The Dallas Morning News. “I’m sorry. This is very personal,” she said apologetically.
For almost four years now, the Trump administration has vilified Latinos and immigrants. Xenophobia and nationalism are on the rise. This mass shooting was anything but standard. Soon after the shooting, Latino reporters understood they were reporting on a horrific attack that signaled out an immigrant community. It was these voices on Twitter, and on some news outlets, that offered context to a larger audience.
A rapid survey of NAHJ members by palabra found that 94 percent of respondents believe Spanish language media outperformed English language reporting. Respondents also felt that newsrooms should have included more voices from local Latino communities, more analysis and more context as it related to Latinos in the immediate aftermath.
The El Paso tragedy presents the media more than a business case for diversity in the newsroom. And, just like Detroit two generations ago, it is making a case for diversity in media organizations as critical for adhering to the twin standards of accuracy and trust.
Natalia Martinez-Kalinina, is an organizational psychologist and the Miami-based General Manager of Cambridge Innovation Center, which weaves together innovation and economic development in cities. A global erosion of trust, she believes, has rippled into our society, affecting how everyday citizens make decisions. In order for organizations to garner trust, research shows companies—including media companies—have to lead with perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity.
Martinez-Kalinina said this means companies “actively lead with their values.” It’s not about “communicating these values when people ask or when there’s a crisis.” What’s more, you can’t have diversity without trust or vice versa, “you need trust to really foment true diversity and true diversity feeds back into a culture of trust.”