Diversity Fire?

     One of the big TV networks is splitting up, spinning off its opinion-focused cable channels and websites from the main news and entertainment operation, and who could blame them?  Their audience goals are very different, and opinion TV rises and falls on the tides of politics; today's soaring eagle is tomorrow's albatross.  Meanwhile, the more mainstream outlet strives to serve (and gather) the widest possible audience.

     That said, mainstream TV in the U.S. still skews white, male and upper-middle class in a manner very disproportionate to the population as a whole, and news staffing leans more that way than entertainment.  One fix, long required by the FCC, has been not diversity hiring but diversity outreach: licensed stations are required to cast a very wide net when seeking employees, and to document their efforts.  The theory is that talent (and the enthusiasm required to employ that talent for the relatively low pay earned by most positions) is rare enough that qualified applicants will have a fair chance -- if they know the jobs are open.  And it has worked; TV today is more diverse than it was sixty years ago, for all that it remains less diverse than the country as a whole.

     Large broadcast companies have supplemented this with news (and entertainment) sub-groups that look for stories about, from, or of interest to underrepresented demographic groups and while it might be tempted to ascribe that to some notion of liberal uplift, guess again: those groups are markets for advertising, and if you can expand the reach of some generic cop-and-lawyers show by adding a Goth-y computer gamine, a lady boss, a gay cop or ensuring that the cast is a cross-section of America, they're gonna do it, and pick up an extra ten or twenty percent in ad revenue because they've got better ratings among red-headed working mothers of Latvian descent, etc. than the competing networks; likewise, news divisions don't want to miss developing stories just because nobody on the staff speaks Spanish or is likely to notice a wave of murders among an ethnic minority or a pandemic emerging among a disregarded group; those are legitimate news "beats," and you need reporters who know the territory.

     So it's not a great sign when a line like this scrolls across social media:
     "NBC News has laid off 150 employees, eliminating teams dedicated to Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ issues."
     The details are not quite so dire, some of them will land jobs on one side or another of the split; but the teams will be gone, out from under the current glare of official disapproval, just a little more compliance in advance.

     It's become fashionable, at least in some circles, to sneer at the notion that diversity is a major source of our country's strength, but the version of that sentiment without layers of gloss and varnish is that we're a chaotic, cross-grained mob who, faced with a problem, will try to solve it in a dozen different ways and fight among ourselves over who has the best solution even before it is solved -- but we will solve it, and then bicker about the solving while tumbling towards the next crisis.  Hammering our lovely, awful mess into some square-cornered whitebread straitjacket isn't going to make us better, and you can take that to the bank.