Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005 | 11:17 a.m.
A local television weatherman's on-air use of a racial slur is one indication that news organizations in the Las Vegas area need to address diversity issues, representatives from the National Association of Black Journalists said.
The incident has a regional director for the group looking at moving up his visit to Las Vegas and is expected to spark a discussion about whether to change the organization's plans to hold its national conference in Las Vegas in 2007, officials said.
On Saturday morning, Rob Blair, a weatherman for KTNV Channel 13, used the inserted "coon" in Martin Luther King Jr.'s name when he was giving the forecast for the holiday that honors the civil rights leader.
Blair later apologized on the air. He was fired for using the racial slur, the station's general manager announced in a prepared statement. The Sun was unable to reach either Blair or his agent for comment.
Blair might not be the only person held accountable for what happened. Because the slur was in a taped segment that was a delayed broadcast, an investigation in ongoing regarding how the taped segment made it to the air, Jim Thomas, a spokesman for Journal Broadcast Group, the station's parent company, said today. Typically a producer or a director would be responsible for making sure that a taped segment met all applicable standards for broadcast.
Barbara Ciara, a vice-president of broadcast for the black journalists' association and a managing editor and anchor at WTKR-TV in Norfolk, Va., said her group thinks "this incident speaks to a greater issue of the lack of diversity and racial sensitivity" in the Las Vegas Valley's media market.
"We have been getting feedback from people in the market that is not very flattering; diversity is an issue (in Las Vegas)," Ciara said.
Ciara and Victor Vaughan, a regional director for the organization and an assistant managing editor for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, said the under-representation of minorities in most U.S. newsrooms goes hand in hand with a general disregard among some members of the media for diversity issues.
The racial make-up of newsroom staffs does make a huge difference as to how organizations report on communities, Vaughan said. "And if someone makes these kinds of mistakes, he can't be a fair representative of the community," Vaughan said of Blair.
The association would like to see the percentage of minority reporters, photographers, copy editors, editors and managers in American newsrooms increase so that it more closely mirror the percentage of minority residents in their local markets, including the one in Las Vegas. It's a goal shared by many influential media organizations, among them the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
To help newspapers achieve racial parity, the newspaper editors society has conducted an annual survey to help executives assess the situation in their market and to develop target goals for hiring new employees. In its 2004 survey of U.S. daily newspapers' staff diversity, the newspaper editors society found that about 13 percent of employees of daily newspapers are minorities, compared with nearly 32 percent of the overall U.S. population.
Unfortunately, exact figures regarding the racial diversity of all Las Vegas newsrooms do not exist. In part, this is because the most complete survey on the topic counts only newspapers. And no such numbers exist for broadcasters. According to Vaughan, broadcasters typically have not been as forthcoming as newspapers have been with the numbers.
Nonetheless, the figures that do exist indicate that the numbers in the Las Vegas market fall considerably below the national standard, Vaughan said.
Only two newspapers in Nevada voluntarily reported the number of minorities on their staffs to the newspaper editors' 2004 survey. One was the Las Vegas Sun, which reported that minorities comprised 7.1 of its news staff. The other was the Reno Gazette-Journal, which reported that minorities accounted for 16.9 percent of it news staff.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, nearly 30 percent of Las Vegas' population was not white. Statewide, that figure stood in 2000 at nearly 25 percent.
Ciara and Vaughan said they would like to use this weekend's incident as an opportunity to examine how the Las Vegas media treat the issue of diversity.
How media organizations here respond to the association's calls for self-examination could determine whether the organization holds its 2007 convention here, they said.
"We have not had that discussion (about whether to change cities) yet...we do feel if the market cannot address its diversity issues it may not be the venue for us," Ciara said.
In the meantime, Vaughan said he would plan to push up a February meeting in Las Vegas with other association members so that he could speak to media representatives in the area about racial parity in the newsroom.
"Some of these diversity issues need to be addressed before 2007," Vaughan said. "We don't want to wait."
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