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Journalists: Here’s one way to diversify your sources

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Last month, business reporter Ben Bartenstein shared this Twitter thread about the systematic effort that he and his colleagues at Bloomberg embarked upon to ensure that their stories incorporated quotes and perspectives from women experts, instead of relying on the usual (typically white) male suspects. The thread is instructive both because of he lays out the steps of his process and his results, and because of its implications for institutions looking to translate their stated commitments to diversity into a deeply rooted cultural practice. What follows are notes on Bartenstein’s thread that I plan to use in my classes next semester.

First, here’s a link to the thread:


The process Bartenstein laid out had several important components that can be broadly adopted in newsrooms and classrooms:

  1. His company had a stated commitment to diversity.
  2. He established a baseline by reviewing his stories in the previous year.
  3. Working with colleagues, he researched the problem and found that in fact that they were ignoring many of the women experts in their fields.
  4. He and his colleagues developed relationships with these sources and their company initiated a training program to help these experts become comfortable on television.
  5. He gave his management monthly updates.
  6. In the spirit of continuous improvement, he has established new goals and benchmarks for the coming year.

Implications for journalism education

I can easily see this being adapted for journalism education programs and campus media, where there are analogous problems. Predominantly white campuses often lack diverse staffs. Part of the goal of undergraduate journalism education and campus media organizations is to help cub reporters learn to think more broadly and systematically about sources, instead of relying on their personal networks and cultural assumptions. That’s a major goal of undergraduate education, generally.

Future research and resources

Bartenstein and his colleagues built their own database of diverse sources, perhaps because their beat is specialized. But his thread did make make me wonder what use journalists are making of the various resources that have been created over the years to help journalists find and identify diverse sources. Perhaps that will be a future research project.

In the meantime, I’ve started a Google spreadsheet of resources for educators looking to help students establish good habits in diverse sourcing. Please feel free to contribute.


Citizen Jordan

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Dear Great-grandfather Jordan,

I wrote to you about eight years ago, around Independence Day, when it’s common to hear recitations of Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro.” That speech was given some years before you were born enslaved in Devereux, Georgia. Mr. Douglass was speaking in Rochester, New York, and I doubt that his words reached your parents, Holland and Judy Priscella:

My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery.. I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!

Frederick Douglass

The headlines in 2018 have me thinking about the meaning of the citizenship that Douglass so casually claims here – a right he can assert because he escaped from his slavemaster. It’s a right that he knows he can lose, because under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, it would have been legal for his former master to kidnap him back into bondage.I’m thinking about Douglass and you because there’s been talk in the news about rescinding or reinterpreting part of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution – the part that accords citizenship to anyone born on US soil, with a few narrow exceptions.

It was the 13th Amendment that made your enslavement illegal, the 14th Amendment that gave you citizenship, and the 15th Amendment that gave you the theoretical right to vote. Of course, it took almost another century to make that last right real. Now, it seems some people think some parts of those measures should be up for debate.


The last time I wrote, I told you how I learned about you from an off-hand comment from my dad, your grandson, as we watched the TV miniseries Roots. We watched Kunta Kinte get beaten for not using his slave name and we saw him get his foot chopped off for running away, and my dad quietly said, “My grandfather talked about that.”  I told you how older relatives told me you and your sister Elsie talked about beatings and everybody being forced to eat from horse troughs. Cousin Mel told me that you said the Master beat your daddy in front of all of the slaves “to show how it was going to go.” And they also told me about the camp meetings, and the singing and dancing on the holidays, how, when word came that Civil War was over, everyone was singing and shouting, “We are free!”


And I told how I went to Princeton University library, where I was an undergraduate, searched the 1860 Slave census and found an inventory of slaves of one John HW Mitchell. It was Cousin Ella who confirmed she had heard tell of that name. All these years since, I can’t look at those records without wanting to cry.

  • An excerpt of the slave rolls for John HW Mitchell in the 1860 census
  • The last of JWH Mitchell’s listed slaves.

 Being a child of the Civil Rights era, I had already come to Princeton with a commitment to the struggle for human rights. That document further galvanized that commitment, because it told me that the nation that Francis Scott Key dubbed the “Land of the free and the home of the brave” only took notice of our family as your “owner’s” inventory – and even that wasn’t worth the trouble of listing you by name. If you were fortunate and they hadn’t been sold away, your parents, brothers and sisters were in that document, but your relationships to each other were not important enough to note. And let’s not even mention your forebears. I measure the value of my own work by the extent to which I help people see the insidious consequences of defining human beings as mere commodities to be bought and sold.

The precariousness of your family bond was underscored for me by a document from 1795 recorded in Lois Helmers’ compilation, “Early Records of Hancock County, Georgia.” In that document, one Daniel Richardson declares that :

[O]wing to the natural love and affection which I have unto my beloved daughter, Polly Thomas…I  have given my negro woman Jenny and her increase… one boy named Tom and a girl named Malinda…”

Lois Helmers

Any “natural love and affection” Jenny might have had was not worth noting, of course. That’s the way it was. They could tear you away from your family to provide for their own.You and your family do show up in the 1870 census, and your father is in the Returns of Qualified Voters,  Reconstruction Oath books 1867-79. In the 1870 census, you are listed as being 10 years old having the occupation of “farm laborer.” It says your dad was 58 and your mother 45, and they had both been born in Georgia. The box for parents of foreign birth is unchecked. And thanks to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, the box “Male citizens of US 21 years and upwards is checked. It also says none of you had attended school in the previous year, nor could you read or write.

There’s an 1882 marriage record for a “Jerdan” Mitchell and a “Mittie” Holsey which may belong to you and your wife, Martha. The 1900 census says you gave the year of your marriage as 1883, and Cousins Ronald and Eva said there’s a framed copy of your marriage license somewhere with the 1883 date, although I’ve never seen it and my cousins are with you now. But Ronald did say that it was a point of pride for you and the family that you were legally wed. Apart from religious sanction, being married theoretically gave you the rights of a patriarch – something your father didn’t have.

The 1920 census records your younger children starting to attend school. It looks as though Mattie – your daughter and my grandmother — got the farthest, which was 6th grade.  For a time, she and her husband owned a house. From being property to owning property in one generation. She sold it after he died in 1959. She died during my first semester at Princeton.


These things all became legally possible because of those Constitutional amendments rendered you and your descendants legal persons, and that provided the foundation for the decades of litigation and protests it took to get laws and enforcement mechanisms to make the promise of citizenship real.


Your grandchildren were part of those protests. It’s what made it possible for a black man to be President, and for a black woman to have a chance at becoming Governor of Georgia. I think you might have an idea how much excitement that created – and how much anxiety, too. You were a teenager when black men were elected to state and local office during Reconstruction, but by the time you were in your early 30s, Jim Crow law undid those gains. A black man who got ahead in business or who demanded fair wages risked lynching. During the time we had a black President, threats against his life and that of his family were a constant worry. In the two years since he left office, hate crimes have been on the rise.

Southern violence was part of what motivated you and your wife to join your children and their families in New Jersey in the 1920s. Once there, you all found the same battles in a different guise. So I was raised with an awareness of the need for both hope and vigilance.


The people who want to repeal birthright citizenship say they are targeting the children of unauthorized immigrants – that in fact, they want to return the 14th Amendment to what they see as  its original intent – granting citizenship to the formerly enslaved and their descendants. I wonder what you would say about that if you knew about the 2015 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that undid a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Ever since, lawsuits and charges of voter suppression have been on the rise. In Hancock County in 2016, sheriffs went door to door threatening to take away people’s right to vote unless they came to the courthouse and proved that their addresses were valid. One of the people quoted in the newspaper talking about it had the last name of Warren, same as the family your daughter Melvina married into.

You lived through the Second World War, so you saw what happened when Germany decided to take citizenship away from millions of its people – including the grandparents of my friend Tamar. It was a prelude to the Holocaust. Tamar’s mother came to this country as a refugee from Nazi Germany.  She was naturalized and she married an American, so Tamar is a citizen by birthright. Our family histories have impressed upon us the fact that our rights are only as secure as our willingness to defend them.

I suspect, Grandpa, that birthright citizenship is the one thing that you were hoping that your family could count on. It was the foundation for getting voting rights, access to education, the means to earn more than a subsistence living. It’s still the foundation for the legal struggle to protect those rights – and to address other disparities under the law. If I understand anything about your legacy, Grandpa, it’s that I need to use the education that your struggle made possible to ensure that we never lose sight of what it took for you to become a legal person – and how easily those rights could all be undone if we lack the will to protect them.

With love,

Kim

Ed

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I commute to work by train and bus, from one city center to a suburb of a smaller city. The train stations are sites of uncomfortable interaction between people who have a home to travel from and a place to travel to, and those who are shipwrecked and hoping the station will provide some temporary harbor. For more than a year, I’ve been doing this dance with a man who used to work at my job.

This man, whom I’ll call Ed, was someone I would see in the halls when he was assigned to my building. We would exchange pleasantries. Sometimes he asked about my work, or shared a newspaper article he found interesting. I once visited a church that he attended, and after that, he sometimes told me about his Bible studies. He was a conservative Christian with especially traditional views on gender and an interest in history.  He was one of many people I typically chatted with in the course of a week. When I didn’t see him after a while, I thought little of it.

The first time I saw him in the train station, I assumed he was a passenger on his way somewhere. It was the neatly packed shopping cart that gave me pause. “Ed?” He acknowledged me with a smile and a shrug. Yes, he was living in the streets, he said. No, he wasn’t working. There had been some sort of break with his family, and so he was on the streets. He didn’t feel safe in the shelter, he told me. Too many people drinking, cursing, doing drugs – “and you know I’m not used to that,” he said. His Bible was his refuge. 

Over time, during brief interludes between bus and train, Ed has offered little nuggets about surviving on the streets. There are optimal times to go to the soup kitchen if you want a decent meal as opposed to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You have to time your visits to the library as well if you want to use a computer. You need access to a computer to apply for jobs. Don’t use the restrooms in the train station after a certain time of night, he warned, because you might come across drug users. If you ever find yourself discouraged, you can use one of the pay phones to make a free call for prayer.

Early on, I would buy him a sandwich if I was getting something. Sometimes he would offer me coupons for the fast food restaurants in the station. He tells me that he doesn’t need money for food – it’s housing he can’t afford.  He would work, but jobs are scarce for men over 50 who have only done manual labor. He can’t work like that anymore, anyway. He tells me that the social service agencies say the only way he can get subsidized housing is if he cops to a mental illness that he insists he doesn’t have.

He’s not asking me to fix it. He says he appreciates being able to talk to someone who knew him before he found himself adrift.

All of this brings me to what happened tonight. Our paths crossed in the station, and we stopped for a brief chat. He told me had briefly been in the hospital. I offered to pray for his recovery.

I was about to take my leave and two police officers approached. You know you aren’t allowed here, one of them said. I tell the officer, I know him. I used to work with him.  I understand, one of the officers here, but other passengers have complained about him, and he’s been ordered to stay out of this building. They told Ed that he would be arrested if he came into the station again. As he walked away, Ed said some police officers were kinder to him than others. Pray for me, he said. It’s getting cold.

I don’t have any deep insight or grand conclusions to draw from Ed’s story. I don’t know what happened on his job, or with his family that contributed to his circumstances. I don’t know what interactions he might have had that led to the police officers’ actions. I know this was someone who drove his car to work every day, and had a home to go to at night. Now he’s risking arrest to have a conversation with an acquaintance.

RetroBlogHer: Malpractice reform and the health care overhaul: The truth behind the rhetoric

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Note: From 2006-2012, I was an editor and contributor to BlogHer.com. Because of changes in ownership, the content I created is no longer visible on the site. I have been retrieving some of the work that I did on the site that got the most response and republishing it here.  

This particular blog post was part of a 2009 BlogHer collaboration with the Sunlight Foundation to stimulate informed discussion on what would become the Affordable Care Act.  Sunlight had created a tool, OpenCongress.org, that allowed one to read the full text of proposed legislation and annotate it paragraph by paragraph with comments and questions. One could track the progress of the bill by adding a widget to a personal blog or website. 

This was one of several blog posts I wrote on particular aspects of the act. This is the opening post in the series. Other members of the staff also researched the bill and posted from their respective beats. For the most part, the discussion, while passionate, was informed and civil.
 

Malpractice reform and the health care overhaul: the truth behind the rhetoric

March 9, 2010 by Kim Pearson

I used to have a gynecologist that I absolutely loved – at least as much as you can love someone who wields a speculum. She saw me through a difficult pregnancy. She made me feel as if she really cared about my health. She listened to me and answered my questions.

Then my insurance plan went out of business. I found an HMO that had a roster of doctors I wanted, including my gynecologist. That was fine for a while, until the day I called for an appointment for my regular checkup only to learn that she was dropping my insurer, along with several others. As with many other ob-gyns, I was told she’d concluded that her reimbursements from the insurance companies didn’t cover her malpractice premiums.

Fortunately, I found another great gynecologist. However, stories about doctors’ complaints about excessive malpractice insurance premiums and frivolous lawsuits have persisted. Indeed, one of the few areas of apparent agreement between Pres. Obama and his Republican opponents  in  the health care reform debate is that finding ways to limit medical malpractice suits might be one way to reduce health care costs. Of course, supporters and opponents of the current health care reform legislation differ about the best way to approach that reform.

Republicans favor laws that limit liability, while the Democrats have emphasized reducing medical errors. Republicans tout a Congressional Budget Office estimate that tort reform could cut medical expenditures by $54 billion over ten years.

But there is the problem that little evidence exist to show that malpractice reform really reduces patients’ costs, while considerable evidence suggests the wrong kind of reform could cost patients’ lives. At Pres. Obama’s televised health care summit with Congressional leaders last month, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) drew on his experience representing both plaintiffs and defendants in malpractice suits to make precisely that point:

(You can also read the transcript.)

Tort reform has long been a central tenet of health care reform proposals by Republican leaders. The alternative health care reform legislation sponsored by Rep. John Boehner limits plaintiff’s non-economic damages to $250,000. (Read the bill .pdf)

During Pres. Obama’s televised health care summit, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) touted Texas’ tort reform law which he said had attracted 18,000 doctors to the state and reduced malpractice premiums by 27 percent. But Seminal at Firedoglake cites a study by Public Citizen which found that since Texas passed its law limiting defendants’ liability to $250,000,  more people are uninsured, health care costs are rising faster than the national average, and the numbers of doctors in under-served areas has actually declined. The full Public Citizen Study is here (.pdf)

As Pres. Obama noted at the summit, both his plan and the health reform bill passed by the Senate include grants to states for programs to reduce medical errors. Health and Human Services Secretary argued for the merit of this approach in this exchange about controlling costs with David Gregory during a March 7 appearance on Meet The Press:

 MR. GREGORY:  But you, but you don’t, you don’t deal with tort reform, which the president has talked about more recently.

 SEC’Y SEBELIUS:  Actually, we do deal with tort reform.  That’s just not true. He moved ahead on tort reform early on, directing me to…

 MR. GREGORY:  Pilot programs is what you supported.

 SEC’Y SEBELIUS:  …pull money out.  Well, but states are in various stages.

 MR. GREGORY:  Right.

 SEC’Y SEBELIUS:  And many states, like my own state of Kansas, have already passed full tort reform; others haven’t at all.  This is really a state-level situation…

 MR. GREGORY:  But whether it comes to…

 SEC’Y SEBELIUS:  …where we want to see the best ideas that work.

MR. GREGORY:  …malpractice reform, whether is comes to…

SEC’Y SEBELIUS:  Which is in the bill.

MR. GREGORY:  …subsidizing volume, whether it comes to, you know, salaries for doctors and so forth, do you really assert–you disagree with Warren Buffett that this adequately bends the cost curve?

The strange thing to me is that critics of the proposed health care reforms deride it as a government takeover of health care, but on this point, they seem to want a mandate from Washington instead of allowing local governments to take the lead. Seems a curious contradiction of Republican ideology, in addition to being of dubious fiscal soundness.

Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|KimPearson.net|