Chicago mayor only grants one-on-one interviews to POC on 2-year anniversary
https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-mayor-lori-lightfoot-black-reporters-brown/10663890/
In a two-page letter to members of the media, she wrote: "It is impossible for this glaring lack of diversity not to be reflected in the daily coverage of government, politics and city life every single day."
"She makes a really great case about diversity and the lack of diversity, but she doesn't make the case about what's wrong with the way she's being covered," ABC7 Political Analyst Laura Washington said. "What she says implies that she's being covered unfairly, there's implicitly or explicitly bias, but she never makes the case for how that plays out in the media."
Northwestern University Journalism Professor Ava Greenwell has written a book about the diversity issues in newsrooms, which go back decades. She supports the mayor's desire to draw attention to the issue. When we're looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and inequity and all these other places, the news media has no choice but also to look at itself in this situation and see if it doing the best job it can to actually fostering equity across the board," Greenwell said.
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The President of the Chicago Chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists sees the letter as no big deal, because diversity in newsrooms is something they've been fighting for years.