What Jonathan Kay Has Wrong About Diversity in Journalism – New Canadian Media

2016/06/13 Leave a comment

Dan Rowe takes issue with Jon Kay’s explanation of the lack of diversity among journalists:

Canada’s journalism schools, not to mention independent campus newspapers and radio stations, are filled with people from almost every imaginable background—people trying to enter a field where job opportunities seem to be dwindling and salaries are stagnating. This is not because they don’t understand the situation but because they are passionate about what journalism, at its best, can and should do.

There is no reliable data specific to Canada that I’m aware of to support or refute this—there doesn’t seem to be much after former Ryerson professor John Miller’s Diversity Watch project which hasn’t been updated in 10 years—but a perception exists that there is a disparity in who gets jobs. “Journalism schools are pumping out so many visible minorities and plenty of women, and they do not get jobs the way white kids do,” Hazlitt managing editor Scaachi Koul was quoted by J-Source as saying at a recent Massey College Press Club event in Toronto on the generational gap in Canadian journalism.

Meanwhile, Amber Gero, a radio reporter who was laid off from her job at CFRB 1010 last year, effectively made the same point in a mid-March interview on the Toronto Mike podcast. “I’d also like to see more Asian people, more native people, more Hispanic people. Where are they? They’re graduating every year from the media schools so don’t tell me they’re not there and ready to work,” Gero said. “It has to change from the top down.”

Koul and Gero are right. Change will require action on many levels, including journalism schools. Journalism educators need to spend more time ensuring that all students are better prepared for success with a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges they face when they enter the field. Journalism departments need to offer a more diverse faculty, guest speakers and even examples of good works of journalism discussed in class.

Faculty also need to continue to use our resources and job security to agitate for change and highlight the problem—particularly with empirical data and not just anecdotal accounts, such as this one. For decades, journalism professors in the U.S., led by David Weaver at Indiana University, have done extensive surveys of American journalists. Without anything comparable in scope in Canadian journalism, legitimate concerns about diversity in the workplace can be brushed aside with greater ease.

Increasing diversity in workplaces will require leadership, risk-taking and time. It will require creating opportunities for younger, less proven journalists to take on assignments more challenging than what they’ve done before.

There needs to be more stories in this country like the one Ta-Nehisi Coates tells of David Carr. “In the February of 1996, I sent David Carr two poorly conceived college-newspaper articles and a chapbook of black-nationalist poetry,” Coates wrote of his time at the Washington City Paper in The Atlantic after Carr’s death earlier this year. “And David Carr hired me. I can’t even tell you what he saw.”

People in the position to hire and develop journalists need a more proactive approach than the one Kay exhibited in his interview with Brown, where he regretted the lack of diversity, but ultimately threw his hands up in the air. It was as though he—now the editor of a magazine and a longtime managing editor of the comment pages at a national newspaper prior to that—could not have played any greater role in opening up more opportunities for voices that are more reflective of Canada’s demographic makeup.

If Kay’s assertion that there are very few good essayists in the country is true, then why not use his position, resources and experience to develop new voices? Instead, when Brown asked Kay to name some people he would like to add to the Walrus’s roster, two of the three people he mentioned were Conrad Black and Rex Murphy—both of whom are exemplars of the status quo. (Not to mention bad writers.)

Kay’s comments are a perfect example of what Don Heider was writing about: someone who is not necessarily opposed to change but has no good reason, personally, professionally or politically, to act.

Source: What Jonathan Kay Has Wrong About Diversity in Journalism – New Canadian Media

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Jonathan Kay: Don’t blame the media for Islamophobia | National Post

2016/04/23 Leave a comment

Jon Kay’s balanced assessment in response to Haroon Siddiqui’s column (Canada’s news media are contributing to mistrust of Muslims | Toronto Star), including his dismissal of B’nai Brith’s annual antisemitism report (I always find the police reported hate crimes to be more objective, although imperfect and likely understated).

However, Elke Winter has done some interesting parliamentary and media analysis related to citizenship revocation in cases of terror or treason, presented at Metropolis 2016, that showed that despite balanced coverage, the net effect of the examples used, understandably largely Muslim, did contribute to distrust of Canadian Muslims:

Jews and Muslims have more in common than most people think. And not just on the superficial level of pork avoidance, a love of shawarma and (male) circumcision. In Canada, both the Jewish and Muslim communities are periodically riled up with claims that they are being victimized by epidemics of acute anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. These claims are baseless in both cases.

I flipped a coin. Let’s start with the Jews.

Every year, B’nai Brith Canada releases its Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents. And every year, B’nai Brith assures us that its numbers prove that Jews are besieged by a “rising tide of anti-Semitism.”

“All one needs to do is look to the comment section of any major news site on a story examining the Israel-Hamas conflict,” declared B’Nai Brith CEO Michael Mostyn when the most recent report was published. “Almost without exception, legitimate debate and dialogue devolves to accusations of the murder of children, Zionist plots and the use of anti-Semitic language blaming the ‘Jews.’ ”

But when you examine B’nai Brith’s catalogue of supposedly horrifying anti-Semitic episodes, what you find is a menagerie of demented Internet crackpots and teenage graffiti artists spray-painting backward swastikas on fences. There is no “rising tide of anti-Semitism” in Canada. It only feels that way because whenever some loon in a strip-mall mosque does express a hate-on for Jews, the incident becomes a sensation on social media.

In other cases, the examples of anti-Semitism are padded out with hateful statements that aren’t really about Jews at all — but quite specifically about the Israeli government. The idea that criticizing Israel automatically qualifies as a form of disguised anti-Semitism has become a lazy debating trick.

Based on the scattered anecdotal reports I hear, I’d say that Islamophobia is somewhat more common in Canadian society than anti-Semitism. You rarely hear of some kid named Avi or Mordechai getting mistakenly put on a no-fly list, for instance. And this month, well-heeled spectators came out to a debate in downtown Toronto where the star performer promoted the thesis that Muslim refugees just can’t be trusted not to rape our Judeo-Christian babies. That’s bad. As was last week’s debunked and retracted Halifax newspaper story about little Muslim children plotting global Islamic conquest from the merry-go-round.

Nevertheless, hate-speech watchdogs take things too far when they suggest that the mainstream media are somehow cheerleading Canada’s fringe Muslim-haters.

This month, former Toronto Star columnist and editorial-page editor Haroon Siddiqui told an audience at the city’s Aga Khan Museum that — according to the Star’s summary — “the media have contributed to widespread Islamophobia by conflating Muslim terrorists with all Muslims.”

In his speech, excerpted in the Star, Siddiqui declared: “The biggest culprits have been the National Post and the Postmedia group of newspapers across the country, which now include the Sun chain. Hardly a week goes by without these publications finding something or other wrong with Muslims and Islam. These publications are forever looking for terrorists under every Canadian minaret. They are hunting for any imam or any Muslim who might make some outrageous statement that can be splashed as proof of rampant Muslim militancy or malevolence.”

Siddiqui and I have appeared on media panels together. I like the guy, and have found him to be quite moderate on most issues. But what he’s written here is unfair.

Yes, the media are fascinated with terrorism — because our readers are fascinated by terrorism. Just as they are fascinated with all forms of horrifying violence — including the kind caused by street gangs, natural disasters and Karla Homolka. It’s human nature. We pay attention when things go bang and boom and all bloody-like.

We also pay attention to questions of motive. And since Islamist terrorists from Islamic state of Iraq and the Levant, Boko Haram, al-Shabab and al-Qaida insistently, repeatedly and explicitly tell us that they are committing their slaughter in the name of Islam, we report that, too. When terrorists in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia stop praising Allah as they self-detonate — or, better yet, stop self-detonating altogether — we media types will be the first to report on that phenomenon, as well.

Moreover, it would be nice if Siddiqui might acknowledge that in the last two years, not one but two Canadian governments — Stephen Harper’s Tories and Pauline Marois’ Parti Québécois — have been booted out of office in large part because media commentators were disgusted by their Islamophobic fearmongering on the niqab issue. I myself was working at the National Post during the 2014 Quebec election campaign, and personally authored several articles denouncing the xenophobic messaging from PQ hardliners. In both cases, it wasn’t media Islamophobia that held sway at the polls, it was media anti-Islamophobia.

Canadians should be proud that they live in a tolerant country where both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are marginalized and discredited sentiments. Haroon Siddiqui is correct to advocate vigilance against these forms of hatred, but he greatly exaggerates the scope of the problem.

Source: Jonathan Kay: Don’t blame the media for Islamophobia | National Post

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

What Jonathan Kay Has Wrong About Diversity in Journalism

2015/04/14 Leave a comment

On diversity (lack thereof) within the media:

In a recent appearance on Jesse Brown’s Canadaland podcast, newly installed Walrus editor Jonathan Kay discussed with Brown the homogeneity of the people writing for that magazine (and other mainstream outlets) in the country. Most of the young writers he meets, Kay said, are “people who grew up in privileged households.” The typical pattern, he added, is that writing is something young people do on their way to law school.

Increasing diversity in workplaces will require leadership, risk-taking and time. It will require creating opportunities for younger, less proven journalists to take on assignments more challenging than what they’ve done before.

Kay or anyone else in a management position who just throws up his hands when confronted with the diversity conundrum should come visit the Etobicoke college campus where I teach—or just about any other journalism school in the country.

Canada’s journalism schools, not to mention independent campus newspapers and radio stations, are filled with people from almost every imaginable background—people trying to enter a field where job opportunities seem to be dwindling and salaries are stagnating. This is not because they don’t understand the situation but because they are passionate about what journalism, at its best, can and should do.

There is no reliable data specific to Canada that I’m aware of to support or refute this—there doesn’t seem to be much after former Ryerson professor John Miller’s Diversity Watch project which hasn’t been updated in 10 years—but a perception exists that there is a disparity in who gets jobs. “Journalism schools are pumping out so many visible minorities and plenty of women, and they do not get jobs the way white kids do,” Hazlitt managing editor Scaachi Koul was quoted by J-Source as saying at a recent Massey College Press Club event in Toronto on the generational gap in Canadian journalism.

…If Kay’s assertion that there are very few good essayists in the country is true, then why not use his position, resources and experience to develop new voices? Instead, when Brown asked Kay to name some people he would like to add to the Walrus’s roster, two of the three people he mentioned were Conrad Black and Rex Murphy—both of whom are exemplars of the status quo. (Not to mention bad writers.)

Kay’s comments are a perfect example of what Don Heider was writing about: someone who is not necessarily opposed to change but has no good reason, personally, professionally or politically, to act.

To give credit where credit is due, The Walrus, with Jon Kay’s support, has been particularly helpful in providing advice to New Canadian Media.

What Jonathan Kay Has Wrong About Diversity in Journalism – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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