The University of Oklahoma • Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Comunication
Faculty Focus
Diversifying news coverage
Visiting professor shows students importance of diversity
JOURNALIST AND TEACHER: Visiting assistant professor Ray Chavez brings a lifetime of experience exploring different cultures and media diversity. His classes allow students access to that experience.The press covered what it could with numbers. CNN and the Associated Press could report that 400,000 marched down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and 300,000 left work in Chicago to demonstrate against congressional bills concerning illegal immigrants, but they weren’t getting the real story.
What the news outlets really needed to tell the story of that March 2006 day was conversations with people of different cultures who did not always speak English well.
The Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication knows all too well that numbers alone will not do. That’s just one of the reasons it hired assistant professor Ray Chavez to help teach its students to understand cultures other than their own.
“This is my personal blended family,” Chavez says as he points to a picture of Deborah, his Anglo wife from South Dakota, and their three sons. “This is also what I do. I want to help create a world where we can all communicate.”
In all his classes, whether Race, Gender and the Media, Advanced Reporting, Public Affairs Reporting or News Editing, Chavez invites speakers who address media diversity. He also requires students to seek sources representing a variety of ethnicities and points of view.
“Communication through the mass media is the glue that holds a society together, and if we are not communicating with one another successfully, society is going to be fractured,” Chavez says. “In a democracy, we are supposed to listen to the various people and not a single group. I don’t think mainstream media can take any great pride in general about how they’ve done in the past, but they are paying attention now. So they are making changes — positive changes — in addressing those issues for the betterment of the community. The bottom line is that society is becoming multinational and multilingual.”
Chavez can point to small signs of improvement. He notes the term “illegal immigrant” isn’t used as liberally by reporters as it has been in years past. Now “undocumented” is the term. People of color more frequently appear in stories not just about people of color.
Chavez’s students learn not just from the personal experiences Chavez shares with them, but also from his narratives of more than 25 years’ working in journalism.
“Chavez is good; he’s got a lot of stories from the real world,” says journalism senior Christopher Steffen, a spring 2006 Public Affairs Reporting student. His students say they often find the focus on minority coverage enlightening.
“He specifically notes the plight of Hispanics and Native Americans,” says journalism junior Andrew Nash. “It’s good to get that perspective, given I am a white, middle-class male.”
Chavez began incorporating his dual heritages — Apache and Chicano — into his reporting for the Yakima Herald Republic in Washington in 1980 after completing his master’s degree in communication at University of Washington.
“There were questions about pesticides being dumped in the valley’s river on the Indian reservations,” Chavez says. “My response stemmed from my grandma and her guidance and stories. One year, I got a BB gun for Christmas and started shooting pigeons and sparrows. Grandma explained to me that birds were made by the Creator and unless I intended to eat them, I had no right to shoot them. In the Indian culture, there’s a respect for all living things. She instilled in me the values of our culture. Those need to be represented in the mass media.”
Since the ‘80s, Chavez has worked to help others incorporate their cultural understandings into their careers as journalists.
He has introduced inner-city adolescents to mass media at the Five Points Media Center in Denver, and he has taught at the Native American Newspaper Career Conference at Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota. He now will lead the Oklahoma Institute for Diversity in Journalism’s summer workshop for minority high school students interested in media careers. Former Gaylord Associate Dean Fred Blevens, now associate dean at Florida International University, started the workshop.
“To then-Dean Charles Self and me, Ray and the Gaylord College was a match made in heaven,” Blevens says. “The college would like to become a center of Native American journalism. Ray is connected to that goal personally and professionally.”
In spring, Chavez involved his editing and reporting classes in what he called “The Poverty Project.” Students looked at many issues – including race and ethnicity – to find poverty’s root cause. The project, Chavez hopes, will encourage students to look beneath the surface of all major social issues.
“I’m hoping the Poverty Project asks what constitutes poverty and how we are addressing those needs,” Chavez says. “The project is meant to act as a catalyst of change. And you don’t have to be a veteran reporter to do that. I was a bit of a hellraiser when I was a kid. What journalism taught me was how to direct my anger. My professsion now puts me in a position to do something about injustice, not with my fists but with my words.”
