SAG-AFTRA

Summer 2020

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42 SAG-AFTRA | Summer 2020 | sagaftra.org Race, Media & SAG-AFTRA S ince its founding, SAG-AFTRA has championed inclusion and held fast to the belief that our entertainment and our newsrooms should reflect the world in which we live. SAG-AFTRA continues to step up in this important role. That's why, with racial inequities in the national spotlight, SAG-AFTRA has an important role to play in the conversation. Sparked by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, unrest broke out nationwide as protesters demanded police accountability and an end to the indiscriminate killing of African Americans. On the scene and in the newsroom, SAG-AFTRA journalists have been confronted with the realities of a system that does not treat all people equally. America's racial strife has also helped to underscore the way the media cover — or often fail to cover — minority communities. The situation prompted SAG-AFTRA's National Broadcast Steering Committee to take the unusual step of issuing a public statement calling for more diversity in newsrooms (see sidebar, page 51). It's crucial for news organizations to represent the communities they cover, from decisions on what topics are worth reporters' time to the way stories are written. Broadcaster and Chicago 1st Vice President Craig Dellimore said, "While we can say we want everything to be objective, it is important to realize that it's objective from [one] perspective. "If you grow up an upper-middle class white person in a big city versus growing up as a less-privileged Latinx person from the suburb, you're going to see things differently. It doesn't mean one is right and one is wrong, it simply means that you may recognize something as important to people that another person might not. Having that mix in a newsroom, having that discussion in a newsroom, I think makes what we do more relevant to the people who are consuming our work." BLACK LIVES matter

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