Diversity

This paper examines how and why activist groups representing marginalized communities of color are increasingly engaging in communications technology policy issues, particularly in relation to issues of digital access and representation.

In 2016, Free Press released Digital Denied, which showed that disparities in broadband adoption — commonly known as the digital divide —stem not only from income inequality, but from systemic racial discrimination. The report found that nearly half of all people in the country without home-internet access were people of color. Much of that gap was indeed the result of income inequality.

Disruptions and threats to an individual’s digital security have profound impacts on that individual’s willingness to use technology—a particularly big problem when you consider just how much technology permeates people’s everyday lives.

Through a series of interviews with Native media practitioners and experts, Jodi Rave of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance reports on the major trends and challenges for American Indian media today:

This study draws on participant observation and interviews with low-income adults in Chicago to show how the poor stay connected to phone service and mobile Internet through the possession of multiple phones, including those subsidized by government aid. The “accumulation” of phones by individuals is widely observed, though underexplored in scholarship. Popular media coverage in the US frames the possession of multiple phones by people in poverty as criminal or excessive.

Newsroom employees are more likely to be white and male than US workers overall. There are signs, though, of a turning tide: Younger newsroom employees show greater racial, ethnic and gender diversity than their older colleagues, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of US Census Bureau data. More than three-quarters (77%) of newsroom employees – those who work as reporters, editors, photographers and videographers in the newspaper, broadcasting and internet publishing industries – are non-Hispanic whites, according to the analysis of 2012-2016 American Community Survey data.

Research already shows that existing disparities related to broadband access are not race-neutral. Logically, that means that the analysis of these disparities should also not be race-neutral. Demographic data on broadband deployment is a win-win and will help industry, policy makers, public interest groups, and civil rights organizations create policy solutions that address the digital divide among varied racial groups in rural communities.

If Democrats take back the House in November 2019 could have more minority representatives in Congress than it's had in its 230-year history. And Congress would finally start to look more like the country it represents. But while voters across the country are increasingly choosing to elect candidates who look like them, the media covering Congress are still lagging far behind with regard to diversity: 83% of the workforce at US daily print and online media outlets is white, and 87% of leadership positions are occupied by white reporters and editors.