diversity

This year’s Emmy nominations highlighted the rising power and reputation of the streaming services — with Netflix and Amazon collecting a combined 70 nods. Television’s diversity was also on display, with each of the top acting categories including at least one minority nominee.

In contrast to the Academy Awards, slammed for overwhelming whiteness, the 68th Emmy nominations to be announced Thursday could play to TV’s strength, its relative willingness to give more viewpoints and more people, including minorities and women, a seat at the table.

CBS has named Catrice Monson SVP of diversity and inclusion. Monson’s new position and the expansion of the department signifies the network’s continuation of a push into corporate-wide diversity initiatives.

Comcast continues to vigorously defend its diversity record with the FCC, calling accusations that it launched figurehead channels to satisfy mandates associated with the 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal “rank speculation.”

Wheeler aide Jessica Almond says that it’s possible minority and LPTV owners may sell their spectrum in the upcoming auction, but there are other means available to promote diversity in ownership and programming.

A study to be released today by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism offers one of the most wide-ranging examinations of the film and television industries, including a pointed “inclusivity index” of 10 major media companies — from Disney to Netflix — that gives a failing grade to every movie studio and most TV makers.

So no one tole you Friends and other 1990s sitcoms gloss over diversity and sexual identity? If you liked the show in the ’90s, it will still make you laugh and cry for all of the reasons it did before. But that feeling that something’s not quite right? You might call it progress.

As TV embraces diversity, characters become more like us, and shows get better. The critics Wesley Morris and James Poniewozik of The Times discuss.

Where the movies have lagged, television has recently exploded with diversity across the dial. Now, the film industry will be playing catch-up to the small screen, where some of the most talented people of color have turned for greater artistic freedom and the chance to tell more varied stories that don’t require capes or marketability in China.

New CBS Entertainment President Glenn Geller thinks the network is doing just fine on diversity — and he points to himself as an example of that. “I’m just a gay guy from Indiana who doesn’t play basketball,” Geller said today during a TCA panel. “But now I’m the entertainment president of CBS.”

The revolution in TV casting that culminated in Empire last season was not a one-network wonder. Proving that up to 16 million viewers would watch a show with a predominantly African-American cast, Empire opened the floodgates for other minority actors — and three of the new fall shows to receive full-season orders are headlined by Morris Chestnut (Rosewood), Priyanka Chopra (Quantico) and Ken Jeong (Dr. Ken).

At the end of May, the legendary Jim Vance will step down from the 11 p.m. news on WRC Washington, 43 years after he started. His latenight replacement, Jim Handly, will team with Doreen Gentzler, Vance’s longtime co-pilot. Anchor changes are usually ho-hum affairs, but the Gentzler-Handly pairing is significant because it runs counter to an unspoken, if more or less rigidly observed, commandment in the TV news business, to wit: In a racially mixed region such as Washington, thou shalt have a mixed anchor “team.”

It used to be conventional wisdom in the industry that having more than one black family on television was risky, a play for too narrow an audience to be a success with ratings and advertisers. But viewers’ tastes and demographics have changed.

The Directors Guild of America report said that employers have made no significant improvement in diversity among TV directors in the last four years. White males directed the vast majority of the more than 3,500 cable, broadcast and high-budget online episodes made for the 2013-14 season, according to the study.

Sleepy Hollow, Scandal and Brooklyn Nine-Nine are among the series that show that broadcast networks have more diversity than their “prestige” cable competition.

Harvard University’s sweeping history of the “collision between journalism and digital technology” immediately drew criticism for its lack of diversity when it was released last week, but its creators say they always intended to expand the project to include more diverse voices. “We made Riptide a website in part because we knew we would want to expand it,” Shorenstein Center Director Alex Jones says. “We are gathering suggestions from a host of sources, including many of the critics of Riptide.”

There’s a lack of diversity in journalism schools, and that results in non-diverse news rooms. Panelists of an RTNDA conference session suggested ways to counteract that situation.  One remedy is to seek out people who don’thave formal training in journalism, but have strong initiative.

Latino groups raise an issue with KNBC Los Angeles, and NBC’s fall schedule shows a reversal from characters’ ethnic diversity last season.

When Comcast was angling to take over NBCU, the cable giant promised prominently to increase the profile of minorities at the company and launch eight independent cable networks, including four under African-American control. But a Who’s Who of African American media figures and civil rights leaders are frustrated that Comcast doesn’t seem to be moving fast enough, if at all.

Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) tells the commission he’s “grossly underwhelmed” by what he calls its “lip service and platitudes.”

Comcast Corp. will offer new programming targeted at African and Asian Americans if it is allowed to buy a majority stake in General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, the company announced this week in agreements with civil rights groups.