WASHINGTON—What role does the media play in our perception of race today? Two panels of America’s top journalists, professors, and media executives gathered together on Thursday in Washington, D.C. to confront this question.

“Race does permeate every bit of every thing” Shorenstein Fellow Deborag Mathis declared. “It’s often that race is at the bottom of the thing.”

But while panelists agreed that race permeates American society, and that the media affects public perception of race, they were deeply divided in how precisely the media is directing racial dialogue.

Sponsored by the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (KSG), the Conference on Race and the Press had two separate gatherings: “The Local Story” and “The National Story, and a keynote address by former President Bill Clinton (see related article, page 1).

As advertised, the conference’s first panel, entitled “Race and the Press: The Local Story,” only scratched the surface in the debate over the responsibility of local media in shaping public perceptions of race in its allotted hour and fifteen minutes.

Moderated by Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press Thomas Patterson, the panelists tackled issues including diversity in news organizations, proper contextualization of news stories involving race, and unbalanced crime coverage in local newscasts and newspapers.

Paul Tash, the editor and president of the St. Petersburg Times, stressed the importance of minority representation in the leadership and decsion-making of newspapers in ensuring that news coverage is balanced and fair.

“The answer to real diversity is to have enough minority journalists in a news organization so that both their similarities and differences balance out,” Tash said.