TV NEWSROOMS WHITER:

The percentage of people of color working in television newsrooms dropped from an all-time high of 24.6% in 2000 to 20.6% last year, reported the Radio Television News Directors Association July 15 in its annual survey.

Latinos working at local television and radio stations declined from 10.1% to 7.7% of newsroom employees - a drop of more than 20% in just one year.

The survey also revealed that a sharp decline in the percentage of journalists of color working at radio stations started with the elimination of the Federal Communications Commission's equal employment opportunity regulations.

Among its other findings:

• Overall newsroom employment for people of color working at English-language television stations (that is, factoring out Spanish-language stations) dropped from 21.8% to 19.0%.
  
  
• Latinos made up 7.3% of all newsroom employees working at English-language stations in 2000 and 6.1% in 2001.
  
  
• Latinos working at Spanish-language stations accounted for 2.8% of the TV newsroom work force overall in 2000, but dropped sharply to 1.6% in 2001.
  
  
• Newsroom employment for Latinos at radio stations plunged from 5.5% to 2.4%, and from 10.7% to 8.0% for people of color.

But according to Bob Papper, the Ball State University professor who conducts the survey for RTNDA, even with sharp reductions in newsroom staffs that occurred throughout the industry last year, the real employment picture for people of color may not be as bad as these statistics suggest. Papper noted that the 24.6% figure from the 2000 survey may have been a "statistical anomaly" and that this year's data are more in line with those of previous years. Moreover, there was an unusually low response rate to this latest survey from Spanish-language stations, which may have led to an undercount of the employment figures for Latino journalists, Papper said.

RTNDA survey includes employment data only from local television and radio stations, not from the news divisions of the national television networks. For years, the networks have refused to participate in the survey.

National Association of Hispanic Journalists president Juan Gonz lez reacted to the omission, "There are approximately 6,000 newsroom jobs at the networks and the cable news stations. They are among the most important and coveted jobs in television. Yet we have no regular public survey similar to those from RTNDA or the American Society of Newspaper Editors that monitors how well the networks are doing when it comes to diversity. I urge the network news chiefs to change their policies and adopt the same openness about their employment record that the majority of local television and radio stations have been practicing for years."