NAHJ Dismayed with RTNDA Newsroom Survey Findings.

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists is dismayed and alarmed by an apparent reversal in minority employment progress within the news departments of our nation’s television and radio stations, as revealed by the latest Radio-Television News Directors Association annual survey of employment.

The RTNDA survey, released this week, found that the percentage of people of color working in television newsrooms dropped from an all-time high of 24.6 percent in 2000 to 20.6 percent last year. African American, Asian American and Native American journalists all experienced declines, but the most dramatic slide occurred among Latinos, who plummeted from 10.1 percent to 7.7 percent of newsroom employees — a drop of more than 20 percent in just one year.

“It’s deeply troubling to see this kind of backsliding after years of talk from industry leaders about the importance of diversity and the changing face of America,” said Juan Gonzalez, newly-elected president of NAHJ and a columnist with New York’s Daily News. “I call on the television and radio industry executives to match their actions to their words, to demonstrate that the gains they made in minority hiring during the past decades were not merely a result of those EEO mandates that the Federal Communications Commission has now eliminated.”

The RTNDA survey also noted that a sharp decline in the percentage of journalists of color working at radio stations started with the elimination of the Federal Communications Commission’s Equal Employment Opportunity Regulations.

But according to Bob Papper, the Ball State University professor who conducts the survey for RTNDA, even with sharp reductions in newsroom staffs that occurred throughout the industry last year, the real employment picture for minorities may not be as bad as these statistics suggest. In an interview this week, Papper noted that the 24.6 percent figure from the 2000 survey may have been a “statistical anomaly” and that this year’s data are more in line with those of previous years. Moreover, there was an unusually low response rate from Spanish-language stations to this latest survey, which may have led to an undercount of the employment figures for Latino journalists, Papper said.

Among other findings from the survey:

— Overall newsroom employment for people of color working at English-language television stations (that is, factoring out Spanish-language stations) dropped from 21.8 percent to 19 percent.

— Latinos made up 7.3 percent of all newsroom employees working at English-language stations in 2000 and 6.1 percent in 2001.

— Latinos working at Spanish-language stations accounted for 2.8 percent of the overall newsroom work force in 2000, but dropped sharply to 1.6 percent in 2001.

— Newsroom employment for Latinos at radio stations dropped from 5.5 percent to 2.4 percent and from 10.7 percent to 8 percent for people of color.

— In one of the few bright spots, the percentage of Latino news directors at English-language stations increased from 3 percent in 2000 to 3.3 percent in 2001.

Even these troubling results, Gonzalez noted, do not convey the full picture of how far the broadcast industry must still go to achieve a diverse workforce, since the RTNDA survey includes employment data only from local television and radio stations, not from the news divisions of the national television networks. For years, the networks have refused to participate in the RTNDA survey.

“There are approximately 6,000 newsroom jobs at the networks and the cable news stations,” Gonzalez said. “They are among the most important and coveted jobs in television, yet we have no regular public survey similar to those from RTNDA or from the American Society of Newspaper Editors that monitors how well the networks are doing when it comes to diversity. I urge the network news chiefs to change their policies and adopt the same openness about their employment record that the majority of local television and radio stations have been practicing for years.”

The NAHJ is the nation’s largest organization for Latino journalists. Founded in 1984, it has more than 1,600 members who work for English-language and Spanish-language print, television and radio news organizations.