A report by NBCNews.com highlighted the importance of including more people of color in newsrooms in order to dispel harmful racial and ethnic stereotypes perpetuated in news coverage.

The March 11 report highlighted recommendations offered by a panel of experts regarding the ways in which media use criminalizing narratives to depict youth of color and how they can improve accuracy in their coverage. The Advancement Project's Judith Brown suggested that “the way to alleviate this is to have more people of color in top positions in the nation's newsrooms,” which are overwhelmingly white.

Media Matters' Cristina Lopez also recommended improving the representation of racial and ethnic groups on Sunday political talk shows, as “that's where political actors set the agenda for political discussion on all the issues.” A Media Matters study of guest appearances on five Sunday political talk shows showed that throughout 2015 guests were disproportionately white, conservative, and male.

As reported by NBCNews.com:

According to Judith Brown, the co-director of the Advancement Project, the way to help alleviate this is to have more people of color in top positions in the nation's newsrooms.

“We've created this dialogue and narrative in this country about people of color in which they should be treated as less than human,” Brown said.

[...]

“There is a history of how we talk about people of color,” she said. “They are spoken of as disrespectful, disobedient, mouthy, as gangbangers, illegals, thugs, violent, disorderly; leading to the ultimate conclusion that they brought this on themselves. We criminalize and blame the victim.”

Mervyn Marcano is a political communications consultant and is also Afro-Latino. There is already a double standard standard surrounding the coverage of African American and Latino youth, Marcano said, and they “already have a challenge when it comes to getting accurate and humane coverage of their issues.”

Marcano and others pointed out several instances of what they characterized as the media's criminalizing coverage of youth of color, including Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly's much-publicized comments calling a 14-year-old forcibly removed from a pool party by police as “no saint.” In another example, a Florida television station reported on the shooting death of a young Latino using an old mug shot even though other photos were available.

The progressive media watchdog group Media Matters also conducted a study of New York City news outlets - the country's top media market - and found that the news gave disproportionate coverage to crime stories involving African Americans.

Cristina López, who works at Media Matters, said a good place to start changing these stereotypes would be by putting more people of color on TV, especially on the Sunday morning talk shows. Having a diverse newsroom would help alleviate these instances of inaccurate coverage, she said.

“You see a news story or a certain narrative go down the pipeline and eventually it reaches the Sunday shows, which are the places where news gets spun,” she said. “That's where political actors set the agenda for political discussion on all the issues.”

But it cannot end there, López said. Diversity is important down the line, in production rooms, and who gets to comment."

[...]

“We're becoming more diverse and failing to include an accurate portrayal of these communities constitutes misinformation,” said López. "Words matter, and if we let slurs go unchecked we will be normalizing the use of disparaging words.

“Disparaging words, such as those used to describe immigrants, dehumanizes an individual and blames them for diseases, for terrorism and oftentimes it leads to harsher policy proposals,” she added. Media observers such as López recommend steering away from words such as “illegal alien,” “resident alien,” and even “juvenile” because they consider them to be dehumanizing and perpetuate stereotypes.