Blog
50th anniversary of Kerner Report
- By: ASNE staff
- On: 03/01/2018 17:25:08
- In: Diversity
ASNE commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Report, which was published in 1968 by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission) to examine the causes of the 1967 race riots and provide recommendations for the future.
Included in the report was criticism at the mainstream media that "The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and white perspective." The report also stated that "fewer than 5 percent of the people employed by the news business in the United States today are Negroes" and that "the journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training and promoting Negroes."
During a Kerner discussion at the 2017 ASNE-APME conference, several black journalists said that the news industry has incorporated the commission's recommendations but still faces some of the same problems in diversifying newsrooms and covering issues, such as Black Lives Matter.
To learn more about what has changed since the report was published 50 years ago and what still needs to be changed, watch live the Newseum event "Fifty Years Later: the Kerner Report" from 10 a.m. to noon EST today (March 1).