News

Dori Maynard on covering cultural diversity

September 25, 2009

Photo/Carey King

By Joshua Tapper '10

In an engaging lecture cum workshop last night at the Journalism School, Dori Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, described ways issues of diversity create problems for journalists in today’s cultural environment.

Maynard challenged the audience to be aware of these five fault lines — race, class, geography, gender and generation — not only in everyday interactions, but when reporting stories as well. “Journalists are the moderators of our great national conversations,” she said. “They need to be aware of the fault lines.”

Maynard’s late father, Robert, a former editor and owner of The Oakland Tribune, devised the Fault Lines framework in response to “the seismic social earthquakes of the 1970s.” He believed the U.S. was divided and could only be reconciled once its social gaps were bridged.

The Fault Lines program educates participants on how to navigate America’s vast cultural landscape. The program “equips participants to recognize, connect with and leverage the diversity around us, as well as to value the diverse points of view we all bring to the table,” according to the Maynard Institute Web site.

Our collective inability to have conversations that aren’t muddled by one of the five faults is a part of the problem in today’s national dialogue, said Maynard, a former reporter and Nieman scholar at Harvard University. “It’s very unlikely we will agree with each other,” she said, stressing that mindfulness of the fault lines will create a better arena for listening.

“Having as much diversity in the newsroom as possible, and talking across diversity will enable journalists to look at a variety of angles,” she said.

Journalists sometimes have a tendency to “exclude people we just didn’t see.” Maynard encourages reporters to understand the fuller context of their story, not just the immediate facts.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” she said, and “we need people to push us to look at other opinions.”

After her lecture, Maynard divided the crowd into five groups, each representing one of the fault lines. Each group brainstormed ways a topic — in this case, the recession — could be reported using one of the fault lines as an angle. She challenged M.S. student Nate Rawlings '10 to conduct a mock interview of a transgendered person affected by the economy. While his authoritative method won him praise, Maynard stressed four things to keep in mind when conducting an interview “across the fault lines”: leave aside assumptions; keep judgments out; acknowledge the difficulty of the conversation; and be as human as possible.

The workshop’s message was that stories can be stretched to include a wide range of people and perspectives. It’s healthy and necessary, Maynard suggested, to ask what a diversity-neutral story might look like through a different cultural prism.

Even exploring one of the fault lines will give readers “a sense of totality of their universe.”

Joshua Tapper ’10 is a full-time M.S. student in the magazine concentration. His aspirations include writing long-form narratives on cultural affairs and recording oral histories of old Jewish men.