The Invisible Costs of Working on “Diversity” for Minoritized Journalists
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.48(2025).6419Keywords:
journalism , diversity, discriminations, routines, minoritized journalistsAbstract
Journalism has long been criticized for its lack of diversity, both in the newsrooms and in content production. In response, media professionals, policymakers, and even some scholars commonly assume that hiring journalists from minoritized groups would lead to a more diverse and inclusive news coverage — or, put simply, that “diverse” journalists would produce more “diversity-related” content. Yet, interviews with LGBT journalists and racialized journalists working in French-speaking Belgium call this assumption into question.
Drawing on 61 semi-structured interviews, this research challenges institutional discourses that frame minoritized journalists as a solution to the lack of diversity in media content. The findings highlight three key issues: minoritized journalists feel that they have a limited influence on newsroom content due to routines and bias, their efforts to improve representation result in unpaid, unrecognized and invisible labor and they face professional risks for engaging in diversity-related work.
Systemic barriers embedded within newsroom routines, editorial gatekeeping and entrenched journalistic norms significantly restrict minoritized journalists’ capacity to influence media narratives. As a result, they often find their ability to shape coverage severely constrained. Yet, pushing back against these institutionalized practices and ideological frameworks in an effort to foster more inclusive reporting demands considerable labor — labor that is frequently invisible, uncompensated, and disproportionately borne by journalists from minoritized groups. Moreover, this study reveals a distinct professional penalty associated with working on diversity. Many minoritized journalists recount being cast as biased simply for defending stories that reflect the realities of their own communities, further reinforcing their precarious position within news organizations.
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