Wickham joined the journalism profession in 1973. He has worked as an analyst for CBS News, a reporter for both The Evening Sun and The Sun of Baltimore; as a Capitol Hill correspondent for U.S. News and World Report and as a contributing editor for Black Enterprise magazine.
He says it’s not enough for newsrooms to simply look like America. “The real promise of diversity of the industry is not simply that newsrooms will look like all of America, but that newsrooms will think like all of America,” Wickham says. “We need the diversity of perspective, cultural backgrounds, history and knowledge in the newsroom. In today’s newsrooms, there may be people who look different from one another, but they all think alike. If the diversity of perspective and background had truly been reflected in newsrooms, we might have seen 9-11 coming before it happened,” Wickham says.
While North Carolina A&T has a credentialed faculty and a newly accredited journalism department, Wickham says his weekly flights into Greensboro allow students to interact with a foot soldier instead of an administrator.
“I offer something unique and different in that I come from the Washington political battlefield every week, fresh from a new fight,” he says. “It’s tantamount to a soldier in Iraq, coming home once or twice a week from the battlefield to teach a war college, to teach battle strategy.”
— By Tracie Powell
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
