‘America Knows Less About Itself at the Very Moment It Needs to Know the Truth’

While communities of color are under attack, Black journalists lose ground. Still, Black media-makers are expanding our thinking. And there’s a Black Crossword.

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission in response to widespread demonstrations over the treatment of Black Americans. The following year, the panel released a report, outlining systemic white racism across society—and sharply criticizing the press’s failure to cover the subject of race. “Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective,” the report concluded, calling on newsrooms to hire and promote more Black journalists. A decade later, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) started a recurring survey to track the news industry’s progress toward inclusion, setting an ambitious goal: that the demographics of newsrooms would mirror those of the broader US population by the year 2000. The survey, which for years served as one of the industry’s primary benchmarks for tracking newsroom representation, was last conducted in 2019. ASNE, later known as the News Leaders Association (NLA), disbanded in 2024.