It's a tough field, this world of TV journalism. What, with all the makeup, the three-inch heels, the power suits, the toothy smiles. The speech, diction, grammar lessons. The shade of your skin, the size of your nose, the shape of your mouth. That all matters.
It's even tougher if you're a person of color, minority journalists say.
Carmen Sesin, left, talks with Berta Castaner at the popular NBC-Telemundo booth at the Unity convention's Career Expo.
(Dudley M. Brooks -- The Washington Post)
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The Miami/Fort Lauderdale market is probably not the place for an Asian American journalist. Network news, for a Mexican American with a thick Spanish accent, is seemingly out of reach, say Miguel Angel Garcia, 25, and Antonieta Gonzalez, 32, who both work at Telemundo.
Traverse City, in northern Michigan, is not ideal for an African American journalist, Marquita Pool-Eckert, a CBS affiliate producer, tells Irene Warren. The women are at the Career Expo for this week's Unity: Journalists of Color convention, the nation's largest gathering of minority journalists. "Now, Detroit. That would be fine; you know what I mean," says Pool-Eckert.
Warren nods. "I get you."
That exchange is just one example of how restrictive life in front of the camera can be. There has been plenty of progress, for sure, but turn on the television in many markets, especially the smaller ones, and what comes to mind after all these years, minority journalists say, is old-fashioned tokenism: the token African American reporter, the token Asian American reporter (Chinese? Korean? Japanese? What's the difference?), the token Latino reporter, minus the accent.
"It just takes time," explains Sue Kwon, sotto voce, while standing in a recruiting booth. With the minority population of the country inching toward 33 percent, the number of minorities in TV's workforce -- the anchors, reporters, producers and others behind the camera -- has been at 20 percent (plus or minus 2 percentage points) every year in the past decade, according to the Radio-Television News Directors Association. There was a slight bump this year, to 21.8 percent. The newspaper industry is lagging further behind, with minorities at nearly 13 percent of the workforce.
"News executives, in hiring on-air talent, need to factor in a lot of things," says Kwon, 36. She's a Korean American reporter for KPIX, a CBS affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"Who's their audience? Who would their audience be comfortable with?"
She pauses, takes a sip of regular coffee.
"Look at it this way. You don't see too many Asian American men in TV news because, in general, when society thinks of Asian American men, they think of . . . something else. But, really, we know that not all Asian American men are karate-chopping engineers."
Not Brian Ojima. Dressed in a deep-brown suit and a striped tie, Ojima, a Japanese American sports anchor at KTEN, an NBC affiliate in Denison, Tex., stands in a racially mixed crowd snaking its way to the busy NBC/Telemundo booth. Some want a job. Some want a better job. (Telemundo and Univision Communications are serving the nation's fast-growing Hispanic market.)
"What can I say that won't get me in trouble?" the 28-year-old Los Angeles native says, laughing. "What this comes down to is breaking stereotypes, and I have to say that in the past three or four years, with athletes like Yao Ming [of basketball's Houston Rockets] and Ichiro Suzuki [of baseball's Seattle Mariners] doing pretty well in the major leagues, there's been, I think, more acceptance."
But the issue of representation is not just in front of the camera. Several of the TV journalists interviewed yesterday talked of the need to get more people of color behind the camera, especially into management. That's where the decisions are made, from hiring to what airs at 6 o'clock.
