“While slightly more than half of local television news anchors are now women, women still make up only 28 percent of local news directors and 16 percent of the general managers at TV stations that air local news. People of color fill just 16 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of these key decision-making positions.”

This just shows how it is in the news media today. It took years and years for women to become recognized as news anchors, yet only a quarter of them are only the managers and directors, and slice that in half, you’ll get the percentage of people of color. The news media industry is still run by the dominant white male, from anchors, to the directors and managers, to the head of the corporation. So it was a pretty big deal when this happened: “In 2006, CBS finally hired a woman for a position equivalent with her male competitors at ABC and NBC, making Katie Couric the first female solo anchor of a weekday network evening news broadcast and the program's managing editor.” That was five years ago, and I can’t believe that didn’t happen sooner. It just shows how women are progressing in the world run by dominant white males.

An alternative news media that I researched is Huffington Post, which is run by Arianna Huffington. It is a news website and blogging content written by independent voices, rather than being twisted and edited by the mainstream media. “The Huffington Post was launched on May 9, 2005, as a commentary outlet and alternative to news websites like the Drudge Report.” From there, it grew to have millions and millions of visitors looking for independent resource in news, politics, media, business, entertainment etc. Their online traffic is more than The Washington Post and USA Today, and even matching The New York Times. Each of their post has more than 5,000 comments, which shows their interactive readers in action. Though it had financial woes because Internet Ads can be a limited source of funding. But now AOL has acquired Huffington Post, yet, it still gives Arianna Huffington the editor in chief position. We don’t know how this will turn out, with the buyout of a main stream conglomerate, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Sources:

http://www.now.org/issues/media/women_in_media_facts.html#tvradio

http://www.civilrights.org/media/ownership/

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/25/arianna-s-answer.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffington_Post