A different sort of reckoning

When I look toward 2024 through the prism of diversity, I see two futures in journalism. Neither is rosy, but one is decidedly bleaker than the other. I’m hoping for better days and bracing for bleak.

Journalism took another economic and spiritual beating in the year behind us. More than 2,600 news jobs were cut, and that’s never been good for diversifying staffs, expanding content offerings, or growing the audience to include people we’ve chronically left out. The News Leaders Association, the merged and emaciated shells of two once-venerable news leadership groups, announced it was folding, taking with it a history of measuring the grudging progress of inclusion through annual surveys. And one of the longstanding leaders of that progress, Gannett, now faces a proposed class-action lawsuit contending that so-called “non-minorities” were the victims of the chain’s diversity efforts.

That chill you might have felt just now is a gust of a foul breeze driven by a violent pendulum swing: We’ve gone from forced confrontation with our legacy of discrimination in the summer of 2020 (some naively called it a reckoning) to the full-on demonization of DEI. In either of the scenarios I imagine for journalism in 2024, that pendulum rushes in the wrong direction. How our industry responds will determine how far and fast the thing swings.

We head into the new year aswim in a context older than all of us. Since Reconstruction, every major advancement this country has made toward justice, equality or equity has been met by virulent efforts to slow, reverse, or obliterate them. Women’s rights, same-sex marriage, voting rights, trans rights. “Reckoning” one year. “Reverse discrimination” the next. Choose your advances and history will show you a retreat.

In 2023, legislators filed no fewer than 40 bills in 22 states aimed at limiting or eliminating diversity efforts in colleges and universities, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Book banning campaigns have surged anew, aligned squarely with those who would solve the problems of bigotry, discrimination, and inequity by making it practically illegal to talk about them.

It’s never easy in the middle of such a sociopolitical shift to know what part of this is the conjuring of mindless political opportunism masquerading as the voice of the people and which part is the systemic and intractable bigotry that has never been fully exorcized from America’s everlasting soul.

Whichever, I expect we’ll see one of two responses from journalism in the year ahead. News organizations will either soften and mute whatever drive they ever had to include, cover, and serve the public, or they will stand tall and try to weather the potentially devastating force of that pendulum swing. I don’t know which to expect.

Here’s what I do know: In the days after George Floyd was murdered and this country’s protesting youth ripped away the veil concealing from so many the truth of our troubles, there was a rush across the country to hire people with titles like mine, including in news organizations. I know that corporate America’s retreat from that “commitment” began in earnest in 2022. And I know that I have already fielded suggestions from people around the industry who would preemptively change job titles or otherwise obfuscate so that the words and intentions behind DEI are safely hidden away from the coming mobs.

News media organizations have too often contented themselves with covering these stories and laying the pro and con opinions at the feet of their audiences. But as anti-DEI efforts get ever closer to erasing basic free-speech rights in the year ahead, our industry will be forced to do something more than merely report on those putting a torch to the First Amendment. We will be called to take a position.

That will be a different sort of reckoning.