Biden's Cabinet is the Most Racially Diverse in History, the Political Journalists However are Still Overwhelmingly White - That's a Problem

The United States has a new president and there is no denying the fact that for many people of colour even in the depths of winter the sun seems to be shining a little brighter.

The weight of the last four years living with the world’s superpower being overseen by a person who retweeted known white nationalists, and who frequently found moral equivalence between racists and anti-racists, has been lifted.

The new administration is arguably the most racially diverse in history. According to CNN 50% of President Joe Biden’s cabinet appointments so far are people of colour. This compares to 16% under President Trump, and even beats the previous record of 42% under Barack Obama.

While I believe this level of diversity should be celebrated there is one massive problem that people are not talking about...

The lack of diversity of the media and journalists that are meant to be a check and balance on the government.

According to NiemenLab about three-quarters of US newsroom employees are non-Hispanic white, and white men make up roughly half of all newsroom staff.

Statistics around the diversity of the specific journalists who make up the White House press corps are thin on the ground, but in 2018 the Washington Post ran a piece titled “The White House pre4ss room is overwhelmingly white. Does it matter?”

The piece was prompted by rival newspaper, the New York Times, appointing its seventh reporter to cover the White House and all seven of them being white.

The piece also pointed out that while the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) “doesn’t take a census of its 600 regular and associate members… in its 104-year history, the WHCA has had only two nonwhite presidents, and only five nonwhite correspondents have served on its board”.

And in case you were wondering, the Washington Post piece answered its own question by concluding that the lack of racial diversity in journalists at the White House definitely does matter.

It matters because politicians irrespective of their best intentions and racial backgrounds are only human. What they focus on and the issues they prioritise are invariably determined by the public discourse around them.

They will pay closer attention to the issues which are getting more public scrutiny, and seek to address problems that could affect them negatively in the court of public opinion.

All of those things are shaped, or at the very least influenced, by the media in general and the journalists covering politics in particular. It is hard for a politician to address an issue such as higher rates of mental health problems in the black community, and to justify committing real resources to it, if the press are not even going to talk about it or see it as a problem.

It is equally difficult for politicians to ignore even minor issues that may only affect a small privileged part of society if it is making headline news every day.

If we want the increased racial diversity in President Biden’s new cabinet to make a real difference then we must concentrate our efforts on where the diversity is really lacking, and that is among the journalists that cover what that cabinet is going to do.