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By Francisco Vara-Orta, IRE & NICAR

For anyone who values diversity, belonging, equity and inclusion, it would be an understatement to say this year has taken a toll on those who rely on these principles and champion them. But that doesn’t mean we give up the fight. 

After the 2024 presidential election results, a rollercoaster of emotions came upon many who are charged with trying to help the journalism industry through inclusion work as the world’s demographics change. Feelings included dread, anxiety, anger and resignation. I wrote about this topic a year ago for Nieman Lab’s predictions for 2025.

What’s the feeling in the deepest of our bones? This isn’t our first rodeo — nor do we have illusions this will be the last time. After the #MeToo movement in 2017 and racial reckoning protests of 2020, we feel whiplash to the backlash. All because of journalists who are simply trying to make sure our audiences feel seen in our work by centering the truth. Regardless of whether the truth hurts or feels triggering, and inconvenient to those whose primary goal is making the journalism industry profitable.

Voter turnout shows we remain narrowly divided, swinging back and forth since the dawn of the new millenium. That’s especially true when it comes to the gradual and hard-fought visibility of historically marginalized groups obtaining power and representation for the first time in this country’s history. 

The stakes are visibly higher. People are dying and losing their livelihoods in front of our eyes due to the “culture wars” ginned up by those seeking to hold onto power. And the cruelty is being documented in graphic real time in ways humanity likely wasn’t set up to deal with well. On top of that, AI makes it hard for consumers and even fact-checkers to know what is real and what is not.

Some industry folks in the DBEI space I spoke with in recent months felt that it was important to note that not all is lost in progress made toward greater representation of the communities we serve. They cited how there was no mandate in the outcome of the last election as only 1.5 percentage points separated the two leading presidential candidates on very different platforms around inclusive policies. 

What is most frustrating to many who have been doing DBEI work in journalism is that many of our leaders have been sounding the alarm for decades that our audiences feel stereotyped or caricatured as one-dimensional in how we frame them. That continues to damage trust in communities, regardless of their political party affiliations.

Minimizing harm is enshrined in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics that journalists are supposed to uphold in our work. So we must remember what’s most at stake is the continued harm we as a field can cause by not challenging the “conventional wisdom” that mainstream media tends to glob onto in framing marginalized communities in the past and present that is fed to them by politicians.

We see that power in investigative journalism as a throughline over the decades: from Ida B Wells’ courageous investigations into Black people being lynched (recognized posthumously, mind you) to IRE’s beloved data journalism expert Phil Meyer’s work on civil unrest coverage that mischaracterized Black U.S. citizens’ reasons for protesting. There are so many examples of late, including Latine journalists covering ICE’s sprawling, violent activity in communities across the country, as well as trans journalists and journalists with disabilities covering their communities with the care and respect that has so often been lacking in other outlets.

At the individual level, I believe most journalists are out there pushing for the truth to be shown, even if it’s attacked or inconvenient. But it’s the systemic malpractice of lazy framing that gets clicks or keeps the comfortable unafflicted or even validated.

It’s absolutely understandable that many who care about this issue just throw in the towel or go completely numb. This is especially true when the press as an institution has publicly failed for decades to meet our own goals of having newsrooms that better reflect the communities we serve. As I note in our training, the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1978 pledged to create newsrooms that reflect the nation’s diversity by the year 2000. But the country’s newsrooms failed to meet that deadline — so ASNE set a new goal of 2025. (ASNE was later renamed the News Leaders Association.)

But as recently as 2018, as Nieman Lab reported, only 17 percent of newsrooms submitted their demographic data to NLA researchers. Then NLA dissolved altogether in 2024, leaving a hole in the journalism association space and the future of its flagship diversity survey in doubt. The survey is still in limbo as NLA seeks a new home for it. Most recently, NLA found that people of color comprised about 22 percent of U.S. newsroom staff, compared to around 42 percent of the U.S. population. But without a national survey now, it’s hard to know how much we have regressed, progressed or remained stagnant on representation of our communities.

We at IRE like to say that if you don’t have the data then you can’t see a problem — and those problems then become easier to sweep under the rug by those in power. It can feel intentional and hypocritical for a field whose leadership champions transparency and accountability from the powerful people we cover. But what about us?

For many who have stood by the tenets of the SPJ code of ethics and have been dressed down by elected officials in public, doxxed by their supporters online, and/or fired for trying to publish the truth, it’s not about being “woke” — it’s about accuracy. And the vast majority of Americans believe the First Amendment makes us unique among democratic republics for our protections for freedom of speech and for the Fourth Estate. But if democratic ideals and practices that have been the norm and lionized by both major political parties are now under threat, then so is freedom of the press.

I recently came across a post by Col. John Boggs U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.), who now teaches at Arizona State University, in conversation with Matthew Cahill, CEO of Percipio Company, about his claims that perhaps DEI is dead. 

“Or maybe it’s just hibernating — ready to re-emerge stronger, stripped of politics and re-anchored in purpose” they wrote in the post. “Either way, the mission continues. Because the organizations that get this right won’t just win the cultural argument — they’ll win the performance battle. Not because of quotas or checklists, but because of conviction.”

So in all this chaos and cruelty, maybe there remains space to rethink what people want and who is feeling left out. Can we break out of simply distilling down the angst against three-letter acronyms — BLM, CRT, DEI — and aim to create a more equal society to benefit the workforce and our neighborhoods haunted by largely inherited problems?

But another lesson we’ve all learned this year is that the future is impossible to predict. And that complicates efforts to answer to an ever-moving needle of what we can expect from those in power. 

Still, there’s the one thing I know from speaking with my elders doing this work: This too shall pass. What’s unclear and unsettling is what will be left behind and what will sprout from it. This next year will bring a hyperfocus on midterm elections in the U.S. And those results will tell us a lot about where the country is after people have watched their neighbors being rounded up by ICE, having to flee for best-practice health care or otherwise struggling under a system not designed for them.

Regardless, many of us will risk our careers and even our lives to tell honest stories — and it’s important for every journalist to support that work. That’s the true spirit of DBEI in newsrooms. 

Everyone deserves the right to be listened to and listening to all these emotions will allow us to deal with the roots of problems haunting our communities. Now is the time for a unique test of solidarity across the journalism industry. Our future depends on it.

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