Let us be diverse and without prejudice

There has been a bit of commentary about the Diversity Forum held by MSD last week. I've obviously heard a fair amount about it as one of the NewsWire babies who listened to Arlene Morgan speak about diversity in the newsroom, and I have to admit to being somewhat pleased by Deb Coddington's column in the HoS today. Her back-handed contrition, however (some objectors are better than others), continues to play into the same old divisive stereotypes that compel the need for forums like the diversity one and for offices like the Race Relations Conciliator.

Karl du Fresne admirably defends his distaste for meddling in the affairs of "free speech" - yet the crux of his argument is market driven and summed up nicely with:

The main thing about the controversy over the Clydesdale paper, however, was
that it demonstrated that a free and open society, if left to function properly,
tends to be self-correcting.

Self-correcting implies that every citizen, nay, every reader, is equal in intelligence and experience and able to disseminate a piece of information with the same veracity as the next one. That's the kind of idealistic twaddle you'd expect from a socialist like meself, not a curmudgeon like Mr du Fresne.

Which leads me on to prejudice (I know - this is a long one). The inimitable Jim Tucker plugged our push for diversity here, here, and here, but it was his latest post on his reading prejudices that ties in nicely with my fear for the fragmentation of voices in the media. One of the winners of the Excellence in Reporting Diversity Awards was Justin Latif, a chap who doesn't think his stories are diverse - they just are. This is all well and good, but as Jim points out:

We all, I suspect, choose our information sources according to deep-seated
biases created over lifetimes.

Which leads me to believe that as our media sources converge under the umbrellas of the major players, minority voices will be ignored in favour of the mainstream market (a continuation of a current theme), and our minorities will create their own media (much like we're already seeing in our local Asian communities).

While this isn't new, the growth of Asian media is a worrying trend - if we (read white, middle-class males) can't reach out and gather news like Justin, we're going to be holding the shortest straw when the interweb finally destroys flagship news outlets and the fragmentation of news sources is so diverse as to make it impossible to have any kind of "authoritative news".

This might not necessarily be a bad thing, but it does play to Jim's prejudices - we'll only read news and commentary that re-affirms our own experiences and ideologies. I don't see me being the token whitey in a newsroom as a bad thing, but I do see the creation of niche media that doesn't challenge its own assertions as one step closer to endgame. Here's hoping someone can allay my fears - as yet, no-one's managed the task.

The Outsiders

Well, the kids on bFM are always fun to listen to. I suppose I'm young enough to be part of their demographic. Shame I'm in Wellington. Good that we have the magical interweb.

For the students of Auckland University, the most important thing was the Press Council's condemnation of journo Deborah Coddington in respect to her article in North and South. Go here and here, or even just here if you want the good ol' liberal approach to the story. Obviously, Ms. Coddington's former status as an ACT Party MP doesn't stand her in good stead as she chatted to Jose Barbosa. It's always fun listening to people get indignant when their integrity is questioned.

And as the ideological 20-something that you are, listening away to podcasts of bFM, you loved every second of it. Not that anyone else cares. When you think about it. Even those of us who have suffered from Deb's columns, sound-bites, and rantings with Larry Williams, have to admit that the Press Council is a fairly toothless organisation. I don't know, maybe you're a fourth-year student and are thinking about your future, and have maybe thought that being a conservative isn't that bad, because, hell, you know, it's a material world and all of that.
Anyway, kids like us say money's bad (because we don't have it), so remember Deb's just avoiding paying her bill, and accepting she was wrong to unfairly criticise Asian crime.

(To be honest, while Deb's interview was somewhat intriguing for someone like m'self who enjoys self-flagellation, the rest of the issue bores me sick. Deb made some valid points about the use of emotive language in feature articles, and, much as I hate to admit it, she is a reasonably good journo who tends to do her homework. At least she's not one of the journo school clones that seem to be polluting our airways these days. Those kids struggle to string a sentence together, and man, they can't pull off broadcast segment without sounding like a kid from the sticks putting on a bad impression of Warwick Burke. Sorry guys. The story just wasn't worth the effort. Hate speech is hate speech is hate speech is hate speech is not some article in North and South by Deborah Coddington. Not that anything interesting's happening today. Sorry about inconsistent ramble. Won't happen again today.)

Update: Yeah, big story. Go to scoop, scroll down, and compare the Editor's Picks with the Sitewide Most Read stories. First versus third.