The percentage of non-white actors playing leading roles in the most-watched shows on television has fallen by 7% this year, according to an analysis by Samba TV.

Samba, a real-time insights and audience analytics firm, said this is bad news for TV networks and streaming services because the non-white population is growing and viewers are more likely to watch shows in which they are represented.

Similarly for advertisers, consumers are more likely to be engaged and persuaded by characters they identify with.

“Unfortunately, as the United States grows more and more diverse, TV has not followed suit,” Samba TV says in its State of Diversity on TV report. 

“As we strive to create data at the heart of TV and power a better viewing experience for everyone, we hope that our new analysis will show what’s working and where our industry can do better, because everyone benefits from a viewing experience that is representative and empowering,” Samba said.

Within the top 50 TV shows, 39% of top-billed actors were Hispanic, Black, Asian, or another ethnicity such as mixed or Native, while 61% were white, up 5%, Samba TV found.

The proportion of Americans who identify as ethnicities other than white has already hit 41% and continues to increase, and before 2060 more than half of the country will be part of one of these minority groups, Samba TV said, pointing to Census data.

Hispanic actors were particularly underrepresented, with 40% fewer in top roles in the first half of 2024, compared to a year. Hispanic actors had just 6% of the most prominent parts, compared to Hispanic people being 19% of the U.S.

Black actors got 15% of top roles in the top shows, up 7% from a year ago. Asians got 7% of the top roles, unchanged.

In streaming shows, Black actors had 12% of the big roles, compared to 24% on shows on linear neworks. 

Hispanic actors had 11% of lead roles on streaming, compared to 3% on linear shows.

Asian actors were cast in 13% of the top roles on cable and 7% of the leads on linear.

Across the streaming services and linear networks with top shows from 2024, Netflix and ABC were the only two where over half of leads within the top three shows were nonwhite. 

Hulu, Max and Amazon Prime Video all tied for second place among the streamers, with slightly less than half of leads coming from diverse backgrounds, while Apple TV Plus and NBC each had just 22% levels of diversity.

Diverse shows tend to score with minority audiences. 

Samba found a positive correlation of  39% among households with Black, Hispanic, Asian, mixed race, or another non-white ethnicity watching programs with higher percentages of non-white stars, indicating that cast diversity is a selling point among diverse households. 

“With the streaming wars waging, content creators looking to boost viewership should increase cast diversity to gain attention from diverse populations,” the report said.

The strongest correlation was among Hispanic households with 50% of Hispanic households watching shows featuring a higher percentage of Hispanic leads. 

Shows with a high percentage of Hispanic leads like Griselda dramatically over-indexing in viewership among Hispanic households.

While each of the top five advertisers served a disproportionate amount of ads to white households, other advertisers in different product categories are doing a good job at reaching different diverse groups.

Automotive advertisers like Acura, Kia and Volkswagen are serving more than 20% of their ads to Hispanic households. 

TurboTax also distinguished itself by serving ads proportionately to Hispanic households at 19%.

At the same time, each of the top advertisers underserved Black and Asian households.

Representation drives engagement from diverse audiences. Hispanic, Black, and Asian households are all more likely to watch TV where they seem themselves represented, according to Samba TV. 

“Advertisers looking to engage these audiences should work diversity into their creatives,” the report said. “To reach different ethnic groups, advertisers must look to advanced targeting tactics across CTV and digital that allow for precision.”

To reach Hispanic audiences in particular, advertisers should consider moving beyond putting ads on Spanish-language networks. “They should target viewers of top programs among Hispanic audiences, such as Griselda,” Samba TV said.

Diversity could also be a powerful weapon in the streaming wars. “With representation driving viewership, streaming platforms should focus on diversity as a differentiator,” the report said.

“As we strive to create data at the heart of TV and power a better viewing experience for everyone, we hope that our new analysis will show what’s working and where our industry can do better, because everyone benefits from a viewing experience that is representative and empowering,” the Samba TV report said.

Samba TV said its analysis is based on the top 25 highest-reaching direct-to-streaming and top 25 highest reaching linear-TV premiere episodes that were released between January 1, 2024 and May 1, 2024.

Media buying agency GroupM said it is pledging to allocate 5% of its spending on media outlets owned by or focused on Black, Hispanic, Asian American and Pacific Islanders and LGBTQ+ Americans.

The pledge expands GroupM’s Media Inclusion Initiative. 

“As the largest media investment company in the world, we have a responsibility to accelerate growth through the next era of media,” said Kirk McDonald, CEO, GroupM North America. “That means making our industry more inclusive and  equitable for all publishers. As well as, sharing brands’ products and services with audiences that are representative of the changing face of America in service of growing their businesses.”  

GroupM also said it hired Cynthia Morgan Jenkins as head of supplier diversity to develop and nurture relationships with diverse-owned media and content partners. She reports to Gonzalo del Fa, president, GroupM Multicultural. 

“The Media Inclusion Initiative helps us, and our clients achieve greater equity while supporting the voices, content and editorial written for and by these communities and creating a more diverse media marketplace in the process,”  said del Fa. “Not only have we doubled the number of clients participating in the Media Inclusion Initiative, but we’re also seeing those brands increase their commitments." 

Also Read: Hispanic TV Summit: Latinos Feel ‘Invisible’ and That's a Problem for Marketers

GroupM says that since it launched its Media Inclusion Initiative 18 months ago, its clients have made a triple-digit percentage increase in client spending in Black-owned media. The growth outpaced the industry according to data from Standard Media Index.

“GroupM has shown a commitment to supporting Black-owned media and we’ve seen leading brands within GroupM step up and partner with REVOLT to do impactful work over the past two years,” said Detavio Samuels, CEO of Revolt. “We believe GroupM’s latest initiative will encourage more brands to place bigger bets on Black-owned media companies and this new initiative is a step toward shifting the paradigm moving forward.”

in July 2020, GroupM launched the GroupM Multicultural Marketplace, which features 300 Black-and Hispanic-owned and/or focused publishers  that create, curate, and distribute content specifically for minority audiences.   

“We’ve seen increasing client support for our Media Inclusion Initiative since we first launched in May 2021,” said Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer GroupM US. “By providing an intentional way for brands to support diverse-owned  media we can ensure our clients are providing a platform for diverse voices, ensuring inclusive representation and reaching broader audiences.”  ■

Jennifer O’Connell, former HBO Max executive VP, nonfiction and live-action family originals, and Rebecca Quinn, former HBO Max senior VP, nonfiction original programming, have formed Velvet Hammer Media, which will create, produce and distribute nonfiction content.

Velvet Hammer Media will be dedicated to inclusion and, under its Inside Access program, every production will hire a BIPOC (Black, Indigineous, People of Color) talent, giving them hands-on experience in critical decision-making roles.

“We have spent our entire professional lives in the content business, building and nurturing vital relationships with creatives and executives, and we look forward to furthering those collaborations and friendships through VHM. At this pivotal moment in our business, we’re excited to bet on ourselves and leverage our complementary strengths, said O’Connell and Quinn, who will be co-founders, co-CEOs and executive producers at the new Los Angeles-based company.

“While VHM will utilize our deep experience and creative acumen, we will put equal focus on the way business is done, with trust, transparency and an unwavering dedication to inclusion,“ the co-founders said. “We are humbled and grateful for the outpouring of support we’ve already received from buyers and creators, and valued crew. We are ready for this moment and could not be more energized about our new venture.” 

VHM said that development and production veteran Nick Alarcon is joining the company as VP. He was previously with Pulse Creative and Bunim/Murray Productions.

At HBO Max, O’Connell was responsible for shows including Selena + Chef, Fboy Island, The Hype, Legendary, Steph & Ayesha Curry's About Last Night, The Big Brunch with Dan Levy and The Climb with Jason Momoa. Before HBO, she was with Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Core Media Group and Shed Media.

Quinn’s projects at HBO Max included Legendary, The Hype and Fboy Island. She also launched The Access Unscripted Program at HBO Max. Earlier in her career, she was president of Pulse Creative. She started her career in non-fiction casting.

VHM is represented by WME and Weinstein Senior. ■

The Federal Communications Commission chose the Friday going into Martin Luther King Day weekend to release the latest media-ownership diversity numbers and the tale of the tape for broadcast TV — as well as radio — still reads majority white and male on both the commercial and noncommercial side, though there is slight progress.

The sixth biennial report on ownership of broadcast stations covers commercial and noncommercial, full-power and low-power TV and radio stations and is based on data as of October 2021.

Looking at full-power commercial TV stations, the report said men had a majority interest in 51% of those stations, down from 56% in 2019, while women held majority interests in 6% of those stations. Female ownership is up a tick from 5% in 2019 (for 39% of the stations, no single entity had a majority interest).

Black/African Americans accounted for 3% of the majority interests in full-power TV stations in 2021, up from 1% in 2019, while Asian Americans had 1%, up from 0% in 2019.

No Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander held a majority interest in 2021, as was also the case in 2019.

On the noncommercial side, men held majority interests in 71% of full-power noncommercial TV stations, down slightly from 72% in 2019. Women accounted for 20% of the majority interests in those stations, up from 20% in 2019. Blacks/African Americans represented only 1% of majority owners, up from 0% in 2019. But no Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander held a majority interest.

Across radio and TV, men had attributable interests in 61% of commercial broadcast stations while women held only 9% and Hispanics/Latinos 6%. White persons held 73% of majority interests while racial minorities only 4%. African Americans had majority interests in only 2% of stations while Asians held 1% majority interests. No American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander held a majority interest.

The FCC said the report should come in handy “to the public, Congress and the commission because they provide an insight into the ownership of broadcast stations, both commercial and noncommercial, over time, that could be relevant to the commission’s policymaking as well as used by interested parties.” ▪️

Workplace representation for women in the cable and communications industry has increased since 2019 while the representation of people of color fell in that period, according to a joint NAMIC and WICT diversity employment study released Tuesday.

The executive summary of the 2022 AIM/PAR Workplace Diversity Survey — unveiled at a Town Hall meeting in New York in conjunction with the WICT Leadership Conference and the NAMIC Conference — reflects the impact of the pandemic as well as social-justice movements in the country since the last survey was conducted in 2019, the organizations said. 

Also: Departing Kaitz Foundation Head Michelle Ray on Diversity Efforts: ‘There’s Always Going to Be More to Do’ (Q&A)

The 2022 survey — which generated participation from 18 organizations representing 69% of the industry workforce — reported that female representation in the workforce increased by 5 percentage points since the 2019 tally, even as women overall were significantly more impacted by the pandemic in terms of employment. Overall, women made up 51% of the workforce at programmer companies and 31% of the overall MSO workforce, according to the survey.

Women also comprised 47% of all new hires in participating media, entertainment and technology companies, up 1 percentage point from 2019. Women and women of color saw increases in professional, manager and executive/senior manager roles, according to the survey. People of color were promoted (14%) and transferred within (8%) the surveyed organizations at slightly higher rates than overall rates within the industry. 

“Despite the Great Resignation and she-cession, our industry has created environments where women are able to thrive, while also highlighting challenges to overcome,” WICT Network president and CEO Maria E. Brennan said. “As we continue to navigate new ways of working, we will use this data to help companies strengthen their practices to ensure that women remain on a trajectory to achieve parity with men.”

The industry employment and representation picture for people of color was not as positive. People of color experienced a 7 percentage point reduction in workforce representation, dropping to 37% from 44% since the 2019 survey. The biggest losses were employees at the junior level professional and manager ranks at cable MSOs, while people of color found employment gains among participating content companies, according to the survey. 

National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC) president and CEO A. Shuanise Washington told Multichannel News that she hopes the participating companies will learn from the results and find ways to attract and recruit people of color to their companies. 

“Once they look at their individual results, they will do an internal assessment of what happened, and whether there are things that they could be looking at more intentionally as it relates to people of color,” she said.

Washington added that the results of the survey are vitally important to the industry's ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. “The fact that this industry measures itself is critical — I don’t know any other industry that does that,” she said. “What gets measured gets done and we always need to be focused on that.” 

The AIM/PAR survey is administered by PwC and funded by the Walter Kaitz Foundation, which holds its annual fundraising dinner Wednesday night at the Marriott Marquis. ■  

National Geographic has tapped Karen Greenfield to fill the newly created position of senior VP of content, diversity and inclusion.

In her new role, Greenfield will work with Nat Geo content creative teams to “develop and produce inclusive storytelling for a multicultural and multigenerational audience,” according to the network. Greenfield, who previously served as senior VP of business operations as well as National Geographic content, diversity and inclusion council chair, will also work with leaders across The Walt Disney Co. to ensure Nat Geo talent and programming are integrated into company-wide DEI initiatives.

Greenfield will report to National Geographic content president Courteney Monroe. “For 134 years, National Geographic has used the power of storytelling to change the world. An essential component of that is ensuring that everyone’s voice is included,” Monroe said in a statement. “Karen is an exceptional executive with a proven track record leading diversity and inclusion initiatives and working with the world’s leading content creators. I am thrilled that Karen will be leveraging her extraordinary talents and passion to help guide us in our mission to inspire and elevate diversity and inclusion in every aspect of our work and storytelling, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.”

Nat Geo also announced that it has renewed for the second year its Nat Geo Media Scholarship program for students who attend historically Black colleges or universities (HBCUs). The initiative, led by Greenfield, last year awarded four recipients a $10,000 scholarship, an opportunity to participate in a two-week immersion program at National Geographic headquarters, and a mentorship with a Nat Geo employee, said the company. 

“I could not be prouder to not only work for National Geographic, an iconic brand whose mission is to ensure all voices are included in storytelling, but also work alongside Courteney and her senior team, who believe in this value,” Greenfield said. “The green-light of the second year of the Nat Geo Media Scholarship is a testament to their commitment.” ▪️

A group of minority-owned media, led by Fuse Media, is asking the Federal Communications Commission to collect data on the diversity of content vendors used by licensed media and telecommunications companies. 

The group’s petition wants streaming services owned by licensed media companies included among those who have to report on diversity, as well as traditional platforms like broadcast, cable and satellite TV.

Those companies would include Alphabet, Fox, Amazon, Paramount, Comcast, The Walt Disney Co. and Dish Network.

“The commission is charged with promoting competition and diversity in the video marketplace yet, despite multiple information-gathering dockets, currently fails regularly to collect and report on data regarding the demographic diversity of vendors providing one of the most critical inputs to the video marketplace: content,” said the petitioners in their filing.

The petition said the vendor diversity report would help the FCC measure competition and diversity and help the public make more informed decisions about which services they want to consume.

Also: Latino Management Group Buys Control of Fuse Media

“Today, we take a step toward genuinely embracing diversity in the video marketplace,” said Miguel “Mike” Roggero, CEO of Fuse Media. “As a Latino-owned, independent company, we understand that a competitive and culturally authentic video marketplace features a wide range of voices, including from communities of color. Roggero added, “Accurate data about the market will help foster a more vibrant, inclusive media landscape, which is vital in enabling us to tell stories that are truly representative of all audiences.”

In the past, Fuse has charged that distributors including Comcast and AT&T  have discriminated against it because it is minority-owned. 

Also signing on to the pettion were Common Cause, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Public Knowledge and the United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry. ■

All 50 state broadcasters’ associations say they are all for diversity and inclusion in their industry, but the FCC‘s reinstatement of its Form 345-B diversity reporting requirement is not the way to get it and is, in fact, not even legal or at best on the fringes of legality.

In comments to the Federal Communications Commission, the associations said that they have been leaders of industry efforts to improve outreach and promote nondiscrimination in employment. But they have also stood with the National Association of Broadcasters to “against efforts to reinstitute and enable regulatory practices found by the U.S. Court of Appeals to be unconstitutional,” because the form used “impermissibly pressure[s] broadcasters when making a hiring decision to achieve an FCC-favored outcome.”

In launching the July notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), the FCC said that nothing in the court decisions on the agency‘s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data collection — which were based on how the regulator used the data — prevents the FCC from simply collecting the data and making it publicly available.

Broadcasters have argued that releasing the data to the public will pressure them to adopt impermissible race- and gender-based hiring decisions, which the courts ruled out, including by those filing petitions to deny license renewals based on that data.

Back in July, the FCC signaled it was considering restoring the mandate that broadcasters file data on the diversity of their workforces and that the data be available to the public. Democrats in Congress, and at the FCC, have long called for a return to that data collection.

The annual collection of Form 395-B data on workforce composition (race and gender) has been in limbo for two decades. The filing of the form was suspended in 2001 following a U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruling vacating part of the FCC's EEO requirements. Even though the FCC in 2004 revised the regulations on filing the form, broadcasters still did not have to file it due to unresolved issues about data confidentiality.

The FCC asked if there were a way to make sure that the employment data was used only for analyzing industry trends and agency reports to Congress.

The FCC is also pondering making the Form 395-B information anonymous rather than attributable to a particular station, as was the case before the filing was suspended. The state associations and the National Association of Broadcasters have said that if, despite their warnings, the FCC proceeds to collect the info, as a Democratic majority is likely to do once it has its three Democrats installed, it should definitely be on an anonymized basis. That would help guard against the filing of petitions to deny based on the data, they said.

As we approach 20 months of living and working in a global pandemic, the data coming out amid this new She-cession points to troubling setbacks for women in the workforce. More women have lost jobs than men, more are considering leaving the workforce or downsizing their careers and more are disproportionately shouldering pandemic-era burdens, including childcare responsibilities. According to the World Economic Forum, it will now take 135 years to close the global gender gap instead of the 99 years previously projected pre-pandemic. 

Knowing the data is important. The landscape has dramatically changed, especially for women, and we must pay attention. But the real question we need to be asking ourselves is, what are we doing to address this? 

The pandemic has made clear the need for major course correction across organizations and industries to support, recruit, retain and advance women. Being relevant and remaining a leader in the marketplace means not being afraid to change, instead embracing it. After all, our industry thrives on change and disruption; both of which often lead to innovation. 

As diversity and inclusion (DEI) advocates, corporate leaders and individuals must ask what we need to be doing differently to right wrongs, to be more diverse and inclusive, to earn back the gains lost during the pandemic and to build on them. 

When we asked ourselves at WICT — Women in Cable Telecommunications — what we should be doing to meet this moment, we realized it was time for action, time for change within our own walls. And while WICT has always adapted our business model to ensure we remain relevant, WICT’s name has not kept pace with the times. As a result, Women in Cable Telecommunications no longer speaks to the full breadth of who we are and where we are headed. Recognizing that meant it was time to dig in and let data inform some sound decision-making, because at WICT, we love data! 

Engaging some of the top branding experts there are, we met, we gathered, and we listened. In doing so, we realized we not only needed to evolve our brand to build a stronger WICT; we knew we had an added obligation to be more inclusive than ever given how much ground women lost in the workplace during COVID-19. 

We also know that the more women we can connect and support now, the better for our industry, and frankly the better for the communities our member companies serve. This introspection helped us realize that for all the benefits WICT provides to our members and the industry at large, there is one thing that reigns supreme - it’s all about our network.

So, starting Oct. 20, Women in Cable Telecommunications is The WICT Network: Empowering Women in Media, Entertainment & Technology. We are being intentional with our name, logo and actions widening the circle of our network. 

Women want to be connected to one another and data shows wide developmental networks help female leaders rise in their careers. We are in a position to help make that happen. So we’re going to do just that.

Updating our brand and name isn’t a revolution. It’s an evolution. For over 40 years, The WICT Network has provided an unparalleled peer-to-peer and B2B network through member resources, educational events and diversity research. We’re still doing that and more. Our new name and tagline is a reminder that we’re also going to be doing more than ever to reflect the companies and individuals we serve.

Change like this isn’t about optics. It’s about something far more fundamental — the business case for diversity, equity and inclusion. Prioritizing women in your workforce isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s good business. The data is very clear. Diversity in organizations increases innovation, profitability, recruitment, retention, employee satisfaction and more. According to McKinsey’s Diversity Matters, company profits and share performance can be close to 50% higher when women are well-represented at the top. And that’s just one of many studies. The WICT Network website will point you to an abundance of compelling research demonstrating that workforce parity is the bedrock for becoming a better, stronger, more profitable company. 

While our new name and logo is an exciting step in our evolution, there is so much more for all of us to do. The pandemic did a lot of damage in a very short amount of time, so it is reasonable to believe we can undo the damage in just as short a time. We’ve made a course correction within our own organization. Ask yourself, is there more you can do within yours?

The Motion Picture Association has announced a fellowship program to help diversify the industry's legal and lobbying staffs.

Hollywood has taken flak for insufficient diversity in front screens, large and small, as well as behind them.

MPA in conjunction with the Entertainment Industry College Outreach Program (EICOP) has launched the Entertainment Law & Policy Fellowship, a year-long paid program with the legal department and government affairs shops of both MPA and one of its member studios — The Walt Disney Co., NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros.

The program is open to recent graduates of HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), HSIs (hispanic-serving institutions) and MSIs (minority-serving institutions). Applications are being accepted beginning today (Sept. 28) and through Dec. 20. Applicants must commit to participating between June 1, 2022 and June 1, 2023.

Fellows will spend three months in MPA’s Los Angeles office and then three months at its Washington headquarters, followed by six months at one of the member studios.

The fellowship will include housing, travel, and stipends.

The program was launched to coincide with MPA's 100th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiative.

MPA chairman Charles Rivkin said the fellowship will ”strengthen our ongoing efforts to diversify the Hollywood pipeline, which is critical to ensuring that our industry continues to create and tell stories in innovative ways that push boundaries and shape culture.”

NBCUniversal, along with sponsor Target, will be spotlighting Black filmmakers during its Summer Movie Nights and showing their work on its other platforms.

The commercial loads during movies on NBCU cable networks Bravo, Syfy and USA are being cut by 25 to 35 minutes, creating a platform for shorts from the Scene in Color Film Series.

NBCU and Target worked with producer Will Packer to identify three artists and films to feature as part of the Scene in Color Film Series.

NBCU will be providing blind script deals for all three emerging filmmakers with the opportunity to work with NBCU executives to develop a TV pilot script. Packer will also serve as a mentor to the filmmakers, supported by a grant from Target.

The program starts Thursday with White House Down on Syfy. 

Featured in the Scene in Color Film Series are Chicago filmmaker Addison Wright, who spotlights Black ballerinas who are blending hip-hop with classical pointe in Hiplet: Because We Can; activist and filmmaker Ewurakua Dawson-Amoah shows Black women there is room for them in the media industry with her visual poem To The Girl That Looks Like Me; and Brooklyn-based Kristian King’s Twice as Good tells the story of an over-achiever readying to chart her own path. 

“We know that in order to change the industry, we must start from within,” said Miguel Rodriguez, senior VP, production operations, creative partnerships, advertising & partnerships, NBCUniversal and Steven Rummer, senior VP, strategy and creative partnerships, advertising & partnerships, NBCUniversal, in a blog post about the program.

“That’s why NBCUniversal has doubled down on its commitment to hire and retain diverse talent, from the decision-makers casting our shows, to the people yelling ‘cut,’ to the costumers and makeup artists and set designers that bring our stories to life. Because when people from all backgrounds, experiences, and cultures bring their own stories to the ones we’re telling onscreen—that’s how we create content that truly resonates,” they said.

Docu-style custom content where the filmmakers discuss their stories will appear across the summer on the three cable networks, while the films are featured on NBCU’s digital properties including Peacock, the NBC One app, Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango Movieclips.

Target will have consistent branding throughout the movie nights via branded elements such as open bumpers and snipes, across all custom content.

“Inclusivity is core to the Target brand, and partnering with NBCU to share the stories of the Scene in Color Film Series broadly and boldly helps create a more equitable and representative creative landscape,” said Maurice Cooper, senior VP of marketing at Target. “We need the voices of these emerging creators now more than ever, and are proud to invest in their continued mentorship, development, and ingenuity.”

Nexstar Media Group said it named Courtney Williams as chief diversity officer, a new position at the company.

Williams has been VP of human resources at Nexstar and will continue to report to Terri Bush, senior VP of human resources and associate counsel.

Also Read: Yasmine Osborne Named Hearst TV Director of Diversity & Inclusion

As chief diversity officer, Williams will oversee the creation, development and execution of a comprehensive strategic plan to expand Nexstar’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She will also chair Nexstar’s Diversity and Inclusion Council, the company said.

“Courtney has a deep understanding of and commitment to Nexstar’s ongoing diversity and inclusion efforts and has helped spearhead some of the Diversity and Inclusion Council’s key initiatives, including the introduction of several employee resource groups and our recently launched mentorship program,” said Bush. “Her leadership and experience make her the ideal person for this critically important position.”

Read Also: Brian Tee's Prescription for Greater AAPI Representation on Television

Before joining Nexstar in 2019, Williams held human resources posts at General Electric, Coca Cola Refreshments, Gannett and Tribune Media.

Also Read: Nielsen, Boston Globe Media Studying Inclusion and Diversity

“Diversity is one of Nexstar’s core values and I am looking forward to helping the company identify, recruit and promote employees of diverse backgrounds and life experiences and to developing a systematic process for continuing to enrich our workplace culture with a wide variety of viewpoints and beliefs,” Williams said. “The work of Nexstar’s Diversity and Inclusion Council has made significant progress during the past 18 months and I am confident that future initiatives will continue to make a significant impact on the 13,000 employees across the Nexstar Nation.”

Nielsen said it has been commissioned by Boston Globe Media to conduct a cross-platform brand study about diversity and inclusion.

The study is designed to help the Globe’s properties to strengthen its brand position and build better engagement with local communities.

“We are at a transformative moment in the media industry,” said Peggy Byrd, chief marketing officer at Boston Globe Media. “To ensure that we reflect the rich diversity of our city and region, we want to invite our readers and potential readers in by activating stronger relationships with our brands within the communities we serve. By leveraging Nielsen’s data, insights, and its accurate representation of diverse audiences, we’ll develop a deeper understanding of our true market characteristics and will be in an even better position to serve our communities with content that resonates and drives stronger engagement.”

Also Read: Nielsen Gains From Unit Sale And Raises Forecast for 2021

Nielsen will conduct interviews across a range of ethnicities, ages, gender identities and socio-economic backgrounds and will provide potential strategies for the organization and its advertising partners to develop more engaging content and attract new audiences. 

“The Boston Globe serves a diverse, urban and regional community and we are excited to work with them to provide key audience measurement metrics and insights to support their success,” said Sandra Sims-Williams, Nielsen’s chief diversity officer. “Nielsen is the only company that can offer truly diverse and representative measurement capturing audiences that reflect the rich fabric of our country. As part of our client commitment, we work with local, regional and global businesses to ensure they have the market intelligence they need to support their industry and community partners while achieving their business objectives.”

Spectrum Reach, Charter Communications advertising sales unit, said it is committing $50 million in media, resources and creative services to help businesses reach and engage multicultural audiences.

The commitment is part of Spectrum Reach’s Connecting Communities initiative, and includes $15  million in advertising and support for multicultural-owned businesses through a “pay it forward’ program, and $35 million in advertising value to help small- and medium-sized businesses create affordable and authentic ad campaigns.

Read Also: Spectrum Reach Launches 'Rebuild My Town' Initiative

The program kicked off with a webinar featuring NBA star turned businessman Earvin (Magic) Johnson and two other entrepreneurs and philanthropists: Nely Galan, former entertainment president at Telemundo, and Daniel Lubetzky, founder of Kind Snacks.

“In our increasingly diverse society, it has never been more important for businesses to understand and engage multicultural audiences,” said Michael Guth, senior VP, marketing, Spectrum Reach. “We know businesses are trying to reach diverse audiences, and with our expertise, products and resources, we can help them broaden their reach and build stronger, long-lasting relationships with their multicultural customers.” 

The program provides participating businesses with support from Spectrum Reach sales and creative people, a three month optimized TV schedule using its AudienceApp media planning tool and free customized commercials.

To help small and medium-sized businesses reach multicultural audiences, Spectrum Reach is offering new and existing clients a 20% match, up to a maximum value of $20,000 per month, on any new TV campaign purchased through June

Ken Jeong will host See Us Unite for Change, a special paying tribute to the Asian-American experience that will appear May 21 across the MTV Entertainment Networks. It will also stream on Facebook Watch.

Airing during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the show is being designed to use music, comedy, short films and speakers to inspire and educate viewers at a time when Asians are being targeted in hate crimes.

Also Read: 'Far East Deep South' To Broadcast on World Channel May 4

The event is being produced by The Ford and MacArthur Foundations, working with Jesse Collins Entertainment and MTV Entertainment Studios.

“We are outraged and deeply saddened by the escalation of hate crimes against AAPI communities and stand with them in the fight against xenophobia and bigotry,” said Chris McCarthy, president, MTV Entertainment Group. “Hate against one of us is hate against all of us and by working together on a global scale, we can help end this senseless violence.”

“This event comes at an important time for our AAPI community, as we unite with our allies to celebrate the breadth and diversity of the Asian American experience,” said Sheila Lirio Marcelo, See Us Unite for Change executive producer and founder of Care.com. “There is more work to be done in raising awareness of the contributions of our AAPI community and we’re honored to have the support of our partners as we work to build solidarity in service of a more equal and just society in America.”

The executive producers of this event are Sheila Lirio Marcelo, and Jesse Collins, Kimmie Kim and Carol Donovan of Jesse Collins Entertainment.

“I am honored to be a part of an event that will highlight the rich history of the Asian community,” said Jesse Collins, founder & CEO, Jesse Collins Entertainment. “Asian Pacific Americans have played an important role in shaping our country and bringing visibility to this broad community is something I am truly honored to do.”

See Us Unite for Change is part of a broader advocacy campaign, See Us Unite, that is designed to accelerate impact and expand support for the AAPI community through the amplification of voices and education about the Asian American experience. 

Disney Ad Sales promoted several executives and created a new multicultural solutions division.

Adam Monaco was named executive VP. Monaco, who had been senior VP, will lead category, agency and local political sales for Disney’s news, sports and kids linear and digital ad-supported streaming businesses. 

He assumes responsibilities last handled by Debra O'Connell, now president of Disney Media Entertainment Distribution Networks unit and reports to Rita Ferro, president of Disney Ad Sales.

Also Read: Laura Gentile Promoted At Disney Networks Division

“Adam has done a tremendous job developing unparalleled relationships with clients and marketers,” said Ferro. “Given the scope and size of our portfolio, coupled with the rapid change of our industry, Adam’s leadership in driving transformation will be instrumental in ensuring that we take a unified approach to market, introducing sales strategies that capitalize on our breadth, while developing our exceptional talent across our sales teams.”

Ferro also announced the creation of a Multicultural Solution Division of Disney Advertising Sales.The division signifies Disney Ad Sales’ continued investment in diversity and inclusion and focus on engaging diverse audiences with relevance and authenticity. 

Christina Carey Dunleavy is joining Disney as VP, commercial operations, Disney CreativeWorks and Multicultural and will head the new unit. She previously was a VP with Discovery. Ray Warren, joins as director, multicultural solutions, reporting to Dunleavy. He was with Cadillac before starting his own marketing company.  

On the advanced advertising front, Lauren Benedict was promoted to senior VP, addressable sales and Danielle Brown was named senior VP, data enablement and category strategy. Both report to Lisa Valentino executive VP, client solutions & addressable enablement, as Disney prepares for an addressable future using data to maximize results for clients.

“Lauren, Danielle, Christina and Ray are representative of the diverse leadership talent driving a new way of doing business with Disney Ad Sales that’s addressably-led, fueled by precision targeting and centered around best-in-class multicultural solutions,” said Valentino.

Disney also promoted Jennifer Donohue to senior VP, local and Becca Vodnoy to senior VP, sales. Both report to Monaco.

Starz said it is working with the Alliance of Women Directors to increase the number of female directors working on its productions.

The deal is part of Starz's #TakeTheLead initiative, which aims to promote diversity in front and behind the camera.

Starz also said it is committed to give female directors the first television directing assignments.

“We’re proud of the opportunities we’ve created for female and diverse directors thus far, but know there is more we can do,” said Starz CEO Jeffrey Hirsch. “Since mentoring programs don’t always materialize into staff opportunities, we’re excited that this program includes a commitment to not only support, but ultimately hire talented directors who just need an opportunity to put their skills into action.”

Alliance of Women Directors members can apply to be part of the Starz program via the AWD website. Candidates will be selected through an independent process and meet with Starz Original Programming executives and Starz showrunners who will determine program participants.

Also Read: Starz Launches #TakeTheLead Initiative

“More women and people of color behind the camera translates to stories on screen that are more authentic and reflective of our world,” said AnnaLea Arnold, executive director at AWD. “By amplifying narratives by, about, and for women, Starz is making impactful change in the industry and has raised the bar of what inclusion looks like. We’re happy to be a partner on Starz #TakeTheLead initiative and look forward to creating even more opportunities for women and people of color.”

Also Read: Starz Shows the Power of Diversity

As part of its #TakeTheLead initiative, Starz is hosting a series of monthly Transparency Talks that brings relevant discussions to the forefront with organizations and members of key organizations including the ACLU of Southern California, Producers Guild of America, Writers Guild of America, California Film Commission and The LatinX House.

The first Transparency Talk took place Friday. The second Transparency Talk is scheduled for Thursday, May 13, with the series culminating with the first-ever Starz Summit, a day that will showcase the company’s creative diversity and commitment to the next generation of diverse voices.

Verizon said it will increase its spending with Black-owned media companies and will hold a Black-owned Media Summit with Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group, which has been pushing for big business to spend more with minority enterprises.

At Multichannel News’ Culture X Conversations conference last month, Allen said he was not happy with the way advertisers do business, declaring plans to sue companies including Coca-Cola and McDonald’s to get a minimum share of their media spending.

Read also: Cover Story: Byron Allen Wants to Save the World 

Allen and the leaders of other Black-owned media companies, took out an ad in the Detroit Free Press, Wall Street Journal and other other papers last month criticizing GM CEO Mary Barra for refusing to meet with them. The ad charged that GM less than 0.5% of its ad budget on Black owned media.

GM later said it would boost spending with Black-owned media to 4% in 2022 and target 8% by 2025. 

Verizon said it would work with Allen Media Group on a new diversity, equity and inclusion initiative aimed at increasing media spending with U.S. Black-owned media companies, highlighted by the Media Summit, which is scheduled to take place in May.

“Verizon has been working to address diversity, equity and inclusion issues for years and we are proud of the actions we continue to take to move the industry forward,” said John Nitti, chief media officer at Verizon. “Increasing our financial commitment to Black-owned media companies and partnering with Allen Media Group to host a summit that will provide these companies with resources to help enable long term growth is a crucial part of our responsible marketing action plan. It is also an important step in creating the equity the industry needs."

“I’m very proud of Verizon, one of the largest advertisers in the world, coming to the table to make sure we have real economic inclusion for Black-owned media,” said Allen. “The biggest trade deficit in our nation is the trade deficit between corporate America and Black America, and we must close that gap immediately.”

Nielsen said it named Sandra Sims-Williams as chief diversity officer.

Sims-Williams replaces Nielsen CEO David Kenny, who had also been the company’s diversity head since 2019.

"Diversity, equity and inclusion is the heart and soul of Nielsen's business. As we continue to evolve our company, Sandra's leadership, wisdom and experience as our new CDO will accelerate our progress," said Kenny. "Nielsen's entire executive team, Board and I remain highly focused on improving DE&I across Nielsen."

Sims-Williams joined  Nielsen in January 2020 as senior VP of diversity and inclusion. 

Before Nielsen, she was chief diversity officer at Publicis Group.

"I am thrilled to lead the next step in Nielsen's DE&I journey. To our people we are an employer of choice, to our clients and community we are a trusted and valued partner purposefully focused on DE&I," Sims-Williams said. "I look forward to continue building on our progress and delivering on our commitment to be a truly diverse and inclusive company."

Charter Communications’s efforts at promoting diversity and inclusion are led by its SVP and chief diversity officer, Rhonda Crichlow. By supporting an increasingly diverse workforce and by targeting investments in local businesses and communities within its service footprint, Charter hopes to create a more inclusive environment that better serves both its employees and customers of color.

Crichlow spoke with B+C senior content producer R. Thomas Umstead about
Charter’s diversity efforts at the March 16 CultureX Conversations conference. Their full discussion, along with other content from the event, can be viewed on-demand by registering at the event website, culturexevents.com. Here are highlights of the conversation. 

B+C: Why are diversity and inclusion so important to Charter Communications at this time?

Rhonda Crichlow: I think it’s really important to us because we feel that our customers really deserve the best products and services that we can afford. Our philosophy around diversity and inclusion really stems from our focus on our business. We really try to develop a strategy and an approach that is designed to enable stronger business success and business performance. We recognize that, as an organization, we have the benefit of serving a fairly large footprint in the U.S. We operate out of 41 states, with 96,000 employees and roughly 31 million residential and business customers. We also recognize, frankly, that all of those customers have very unique perspectives, needs and desires and the products and services that they receive.

B+C: At this point is, Charter satisfied with where the company is regarding diversity and inclusion efforts, and if not, how do you get to that point? 

RC: I would say we are satisfied with the progress that we’ve made to date, meaning that we have been able to accomplish a lot since introducing our strategy almost three years ago. We’ve seen significant progress in terms of our ability to engage with diverse suppliers;  we’ve introduced a number of new initiatives internally to continue to diversify our workforce externally to support communities across our footprint. Are we happy with our progress to date? Yes. Are we satisfied? No. I think we recognize that as an organization, we have more that we can and should do. We’re very proud of the fact that 48% of our workforce, for example, represents people of color. What we’d really like to do is continue to push forward with ensuring that level of diversity is also represented at every management level within our organization and continue to grow the diversity and inclusiveness of our leadership teams within the organization. 

B+C: What are you doing specifically to allow your employees to be part of the inclusion effort? 

RC: We have a number of programs that we’ve introduced over the course of the last few years, very similar to the way many other companies approach diversity and inclusion. We have network groups, which we refer to as business resource groups, [that] are open to employees of all backgrounds and experiences, irrespective of whether they have the affinity of the group. We also launched a speaker series — Charter’s version of a TED Talk, called Charter Inclusion Talks — where, to celebrate cultural and identity months, we will either invite external speakers in or tap into our employees to talk about some aspect of diversity and inclusion and or provide career advice for employees who attend those sessions. 

B+C: Did the events of last year and the racial reckoning that the country experienced affect some of the things that you’re looking to do going forward? 

RC: I would say it absolutely did. I think, writ large, one of the benefits of the experience that we had over the course of the last year is I do feel that it has raised a level of awareness outside of communities of color, of some of the very real and significant challenges that people still face in our country. I think there is also a recognition that people aren't able to necessarily divorce their experience and how they perceive their external environment from the way that they come into the office. So I think it’s required all of us in the diversity and inclusion space — and frankly leaders across all companies — to really think about what is it that we need to do to ensure that we’re creating inclusive and equitable workplaces for all employees, and what is it that we could do to continue to help people to understand that unique backgrounds and experiences of those employees.

We have a curriculum that we have been working on that we decided to make some tweaks to in light of what took place last year to make sure that we felt the content was very relevant to help our leaders and managers engage across lines of difference. We introduced a really interesting philanthropic initiative called the Spectrum Community Investment Loan Fund. Last year, we introduced that program about a month before the pandemic hit in February, and we started with a $10 million commitment designed to work with community development [and] financial institutions to provide loans and other resources to businesses and underserved communities, which we now recognize by virtue of the pandemic and some of the social unrest have been disproportionately impacted by the events of last year. 

I’m really proud to say this since we started that program, we’ve actually more than doubled the investment. We created a very unique partnership with the National Urban League and the National Action Network where $10 million of those funds will be invested specifically in programs and businesses in Black and Brown communities to really help revive those communities across our footprint.

B+C: Is upper management invested, and how are they participating in some of the things you’re working on? 

RC: I would say they’re incredibly invested. What I’m very pleased about is that our executive leadership team has been incredibly supportive and engaged since I joined the organization. I think they manifest their commitment to diversity and inclusion in a number of different ways. One, we do have an internal council that we call our executive steering committee for diversity and inclusion. It consists of our executive vice presidents, our head of communications, myself, inclusive of our CEO and president. We meet on a quarterly basis where we review our progress against diversity and inclusion. Our CEO is a regular presence at those meetings. We present annually to our board of directors. 

This year, we are really excited because we have started to really try to more deeply embed our strategy, particularly around our talent and inclusion objectives. We’re working hand in hand with every executive VP and their leadership teams on diversity action plans that they have created, which allow them to really look directly at their workforces, understand where they have areas of opportunity, understand where they have opportunities to perhaps facilitate a more inclusive work culture within their organizations. We’re working on developing specific plans with them and implementing those plans this year. 

If there’s one thing the global COVID-19 crisis has made plainly clear, it’s that the world is a better place when we are treated as equals. And while equality for all people is the law of the land, there is also compelling research which demonstrates that parity is the bedrock for becoming a better, stronger, more profitable company.

Women’s History Month and International Women's Day provide the perfect opportunity to remind corporate leaders of the benefits companies reap when they place a premium on workplace equality. As the oldest and largest organization dedicated to empowering and advancing women in the cable media industry, Women in Cable Telecommunications understands well that our industry is fueled by data. That is why WICT is passionate about highlighting the data that supports the business case for gender diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), placing it front and center in our communications. 

We’re in good company, because many experts believe that stronger DEI is vital to a faster economic recovery in the face of the ongoing pandemic.  Organizations that treat DEI as a business imperative will enjoy demonstrable benefits. 

A way to do that is to follow the Four Pluses of Parity — increased innovation, profitability, recruitment and employee retention. 

Front-Line Workers

In our industry, many women are on the front lines of this pandemic helping to fortify and galvanize workforces. Women must have a seat at the table, in good times as well as bad, for companies to innovate at a faster rate than homogenous companies. According to human-resources consultancy Bersin by Deloitte, inclusive companies with women in all their ranks are more than one and a half times more likely to be innovation leaders in their market. And Boston Consulting Group found that companies with above-average diversity within their management teams have innovation revenue of 45% versus 26% for those with below-average leadership diversity. 

To experience a significant jump in innovation revenue, leadership teams need to be at least 20% female. And that increase jumps even higher when the percentage of diverse leaders increases.

When it comes to profitability, as noted in the World Bank’s 2020 Women, Business and the Law report, “Equality of opportunity is good economics.” In fact, it is estimated that women’s lagging participation in employment and entrepreneurship costs the global economy about 15% of GDP. And on average, within the first 24 months of appointing female CFOs, companies see a 6% increase in profits and an 8% better stock return, per Bloomberg. Furthermore, research shows that company profits and share performance can be close to 50% higher when women are well represented at the top, according to McKinsey & Co.’s Diversity Matters report.

At a time when workforces have been reduced amidst dwindling returns, recruiting top talent is more crucial than ever before. Today’s job seekers have access to a remarkable amount of information at their fingertips when undergoing a job hunt or career pivot. Companies that demonstrate their commitment to DEI have a distinct recruiting advantage over companies that do not. In fact, a recent survey from Glassdoor found that 76% of job seekers said a diverse workforce was important when evaluating potential employers. 

In this age of social awakening, with the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements at the forefront, workforce parity has become a mandate. In order to fill that ever-important pipeline of women rising through the ranks in the industry, we must strive to be more inclusive than ever before.

Finally, organizations that develop diverse teams and inclusive workplaces tend to be better at retaining their people. Retention is an important issue for companies due to the significant cost of replacing and retraining employees. 

Crisis Leaders

As we continue to navigate the pandemic, we hear many success stories of women leading skillfully during times of crises. These aren’t merely anecdotal accounts. New research from Harvard Business Review shows that having women leaders in a company’s ranks gives employees a greater sense of teamwork and higher workplace morale. The research found that the engagement level of those working for female leaders is significantly higher than average, showing that female leaders express more awareness of fears that subordinates might be feeling, show concern for well-being and demonstrate confidence in their path forward.

Our industry is in rare air and deserves a resounding shout-out for allowing WICT and our diversity partners at NAMIC to measure and benchmark workplace demographics and diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Not many industries are that forthcoming. Participation in the WICT/NAMIC PAR (Pay Equity, Advancement Opportunities and Resources for Work/Life Integration) and AIM (Advancement Investment Measurement) surveys demonstrates a commitment to transparency and a dedication to improvement. And because as we all know, what gets measured gets done, there is no better time than now to get it done. 

Maria E. Brennan, CAE, is president and CEO of Women In Cable Telecommunications.

The entertainment industry is examining its diversity and inclusion efforts as it continues to make inroads in recognizing the business rationale for greater representation on-air, behind the camera and in the C-suites. Future’s CultureX Conversations on Tuesday, March 16, will build on the dialogue through a series of keynotes, fireside chats, panels and awards that celebrate the industry’s inclusion efforts while searching for ways to improve both the mindset and the impact of decision makers to foster a more inclusive industry.

Allen Media Group/Entertainment Studios chairman and CEO Byron Allen will serve as opening keynote speaker of the virtual conference, leading a roster of top industry executives, chief diversity officers, on-air talent and showrunners set to discuss the need for more diversity within all aspects of the industry, while revealing the strategies behind building a successful, diverse workforce. The conference is produced in partnership with The Walter Kaitz Foundation.

Warner Bros. Digital Networks SVP and general manager Diana Mogollon will headline a panel on the impact of diverse shows casts on programming acquisition and distribution, while WarnerMedia Inclusion SVPs Karen Horne and Samata Narra share some internal research and insights on implementing the inclusion process within a “merging” corporate culture.

Also Read: Michelle Ray Keeps Inclusion Efforts Top of Mind

Walter Kaitz Foundation CEO Michelle Ray will host a panel featuring diversity officers such as AMC Networks chief diversity officer Aisha Thomas-Petit and executive search executive Ann Carlsen of Carlsen Resources discussing their experiences and tips for ensuring equitable results in recruitment practices and hiring procedures.

Regarding on-screen diversity, GLAAD chief communications officer Rich Ferraro will release the organization’s latest report on LGBT characters and storylines on TV, while AARP VP of multicultural marketing Yvette Pena will discuss the impact of content targeting the multicultural maturing audience. 

A highlight of the conference is the CultureX Awards, given to individuals, organizations and programs for their outstanding commitment to inspiring cultural inclusion within the television industry. The ceremony is hosted by 2020’s CultureX award recipient, Julio Vaqueiro, the anchor of Noticias Telemundo Edicion Especial. This year’s award recipients include: Juanjo Duran, Head of Entertainment & Multicultural, Google; Juan Williams, Fox News Political analyst, co-host of Fox News Channel’s The Five; and Starz, for commitment to ensuring diversity and inclusion in the cast and storyline of many of its most popular series including Power, P-Valley and Outlander, plus upcoming series including Run The World, Blindspotting, Black Mafia Family, Shining Vale, Serpent Queen and the sequel to Power, Power Book II: Ghost. The award will be accepted by Starz president and CEO Jeffrey Hirsch.

For more information, or to register, visit the CultureX Conversations website.

AMC Networks said it hired Aisha Thomas-Petit to be its first chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer.

Thomas-Petit, previously head of diversity, inclusion & corporate social responsibility at ADP, will report to AMC Networks CEO Josh Sapan. 

In her new post, she will help set strategy and define ways to measure success as AMC builds a diverse and inclusive “community of talent” in the company’s workforce, as well as on-screen and behind the camera.

Related: AMC Puts Severance Costs at $20-25 Million

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are more than business imperatives that spur creativity and drive innovation; they are at the heart of who we aspire to be and are interwoven into the very fabric of the company,” said Sapan. “Aisha’s successful track record and passion for integrating business strategy and diverse talent management to drive growth is a great fit for our company, particularly as we continue to shift our business to become more digitally focused. This role will bring a new level of focus integral to our evolution and we look forward to Aisha’s leadership and partnership as we continue to build a more diverse, equitable and inclusive culture in our workplace and in the stories we tell.”

Before rising through the ranks at ADP, Thomas-Petit worked at Barclays Capital where she became HR director for global operations. She also held posts at JP Morgan Chase, including VP, human resources for shared technology & operations.

“AMC Networks and its portfolio of respected entertainment brands has a long history of bringing audiences new stories that surprise and delight,” said Thomas-Petit. “I am proud to join the company’s leadership team and look forward to building on AMC Networks’ commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace and to being a home for authentic stories that resonate; stories created in an inclusive environment that reflect the rich diversity of our audiences.”

The cable industry’s annual Diversity Week gatherings took place virtually last month, as major media companies continue their efforts to create a more inclusive and equitable environment both on-screen and in the employment ranks. 

Recent diversity initiatives such as the CBS Studios/NAACP content production partnership, which tapped industry veteran Sheila Ducksworth as its president, and the partnership between ESPN and the Alliance for Women in Media, which will award $10,000 scholarships for Black females pursuing careers in sports media, have kept diversity and inclusion themes at the forefront of the industry.

Michelle Ray, executive director of leading diversity advocacy group The Walter Kaitz Foundation, addressed those recent efforts in an interview with Multichannel News. Here’s an edited version of that conversation. 

MCN: NAMIC and WICT drew more attendees for their virtual events this year than they did for their traditional events last year. Is that a positive sign that the industry remains committed to its diversity and inclusion efforts?

Michelle Ray: Given that [diversity and inclusion] has been front and center and in the spotlight, I think people largely wanted to understand and see what these organizations were talking about and what they were doing to change the game. I think there was that aspect of people who normally would not come to a Diversity Week in New York because their companies wouldn’t approve travel. It allowed everybody to peek into these conferences without having to spend copious amounts of money. Even though we didn’t have our traditional dinner, the issues of diversity and inclusion still remain on the front burner for the industry.

MCN: With recent moves toward fostering diversity from ViacomCBS and others in the industry, are you encouraged companies will continue the diversity discussion both on-screen and in the employment ranks beyond Diversity Week?

MR: Yes. I think particularly now, when we’re hurting financially — remember, studios aren’t fully shooting new content — it's important that we find ways to pivot in terms of content curation. When we get back to some sort of normalcy, these [diversity and inclusion] initiatives will already be in place. Take the [CBS] scenario: they’re looking to align with some third-party organizations like the NAACP. So with a lot of our companies it’s about how they help to lean into this conversation as people who know diversity and civil rights. They know the issue of the day and can work with the content creators. 

I’m so glad that these companies are leaning even more towards diversity and inclusion because they’re really the barometers of the communities that they serve. So I like that the fact that this industry is showing up in this special time of need, and I’m so optimistic that at the end of the day, any one company or organization can tackle any of these prevailing issues, whether it's around race, gender, sexual health. I don’t think any one organization or person can own that narrative, I think we all have to lean into it individually and then come together collectively to collaborate when we need to amplify that voice. 

MCN: What does ‘normal’ look like in 2021 for the industry’s diversity initiatives? 

MR: I want to be optimistic, but it’s going to be a long runway with this. For me, it’s about being really intentional about the work and what we’re trying to do to achieve and to reshuffle the decks. It’s about having impact and collaborating with organizations that focus on benchmarking and tracking so that we know where we’re at, particularly in terms of employment. We’re getting ready to work on the [NAMIC
and WICT AIM/PAR Workforce Survey], and for us, it’s about scrutinizing
and questioning every­thing. 

Nielsen is telling clients it is going to start measuring how many people watch TV commercials in a new way, a move that will mean big changes in the way $70 billion in national TV advertising is bought and sold.

The new currency was one of a number of sweeping initiatives Nielsen unveiled at its national client meeting last month that cover the demand for advanced advertising, the increase in streaming and the growing importance of diversity to programmers and advertisers.

At the meeting, conducted virtually, Scott N. Brown, general manager of audience measurement at Nielsen, said the company will launch a new ad metric that uses not only the panel information from people meters in Nielsen families’ homes but adds “big data,” specifically return-path data from millions of cable set-top-boxes and  automatic content recognition data from smart TVs. 

Related: Nielsen Unifying Audience Measurement Under Brown

Nielsen will continue to use its panel in addition to big data. A research executive at one of the TV programmers noted that the panel data was essential for confirming human viewing behaviors, including co-viewing. Co-viewing occurs when more than one person in a household watches a particular device at the same time. Co-viewing accounts for about 30% of video impressions, making incorporating it essential for the industry. 

In another major change, the new service will provide audiences for individual commercials, rather than the average commercial minute ratings within a program -- C3 and C7 -- now used as currency by Madison Avenue. 

Nielsen will continue to calculate C3 and C7 for clients that want to transact using those metrics.

“The integration of return-path data and ACR into the Nielsen process is long overdue,” said one Nielsen client who attended the virtual presentation but asked not to be named. Adding commercial specific ratings “is a pretty dramatic thing”  because it would open the door to estimating audiences and negotiating ad prices based on where a spot will be placed in a commercial break, with the first and last ad.spots being most viewed and most valuable. “It has the potential to completely upend the way we currently do business.”

It was unclear when this new metric would be available to be used commercially. Historically Nielsen has run test data for a year to allow buyers and sellers a chance to figure out how they’ll be affected by the new numbers and how to best use the new metrics.

Nielsen said it will be able to measure addressable campaigns, designed to reach only specifically targeted viewers, such as dog owners, recent car buyers or Democratic voters. Nielsen said it will be able meet industry demand for reports on both the targeted impressions delivered by addressable campaigns and the under-addressable audience watching a different linear ad delivered in the same program. 

The list of data providers involved in measuring addressable is being finalized. The data will be integrated during the fourth quarter and initial measurement of non-C3 eligible minutes and the initial data coming from a combination of Nielsen's panel plus smart TV and set-top data are expected during the first  half of 2021.

Nielsen also told clients it will be expanding its measurement of streaming services. The data will be available in Nielsen’s nPower system on a daily basis starting this month. The data had previously been available quarterly.

The number of streaming services covered will expand from five to 11. Those will include some of the the advertising-supported streaming services owned by the big media companies, including Fox’s Tubi and ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV as well as Comcast’s Xfinity app and Charter’s Spectrum app and Roku. The Nielsen stamp will make it easier for those services to sell commercials.

In phase one, streaming video ratings will be based on 4,500 streaming viewer panelists. Nielsen said it will increase the size of the streaming panel and include more streaming sources and devices. 

Subscribers to Nielsen’s streaming video ratings will be able to run ratings, reach-and-frequency, duplication and segmentation reports as well as detailed data.

A service from Nielsen’s Gracenote that determines the diversity and inclusion offered by content is being rolled out by Nielsen as well. Nielsen said that representation metrics across programming “are essential to accelerating industry-wide transformation."

Nielsen said its first report covering the fourth quarter of 2020 will be available free and that metrics will be updated twice a year.

Nielsen declined to comment for this story.

Related: Nielsen: Streaming Grows to 25% of TV Usage in 2Q

All of the changes are designed to address a new TV ecosystem fragmented by people watching more content on demand as they shift from traditional pay TV to streaming. In its presentation, Nielsen noted that consumers spent 123 billion minutes streaming video content during one week alone in July 2020. It estimated that the connected-TV ad spend will increase 115% between 2020 and 2024 and that there will 210 million subscription OTT viewers by 2024.

The increase in streaming is caused in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is also adding urgency among advertisers to have better measurement of their ad campaigns on both traditional TV and streaming.

In that environment, Brown said at the virtual gathering that the biggest challenges were a lack of standard measurement and a need to de-duplicate audiences, which means making sure that when advertisers measure the reach of their campaigns that an individual who sees a commercial on broadcast and over-the-top media isn’t counted twice.

Nielsen aims to help the marketplace by measuring reach with one total audience number, offering unique demographic profiles by channel and providing clarity on frequency. It will provide simple answers to questions such as who am I reaching on each platform, where do audiences overlap, how do I maximize efficiency and effectiveness to drive business outcomes?

Brown said these issues need to be solved now and that Nielsen was intent on moving measurement into the future, with metrics that offer resiliency, coverage and comparability.

Nielsen said its new Digital In TV Ratings (DTVR) will work without cookies. It will use raw census impressions for relevant digital viewing volumetrics, use Nielsen proprietary data to identify DTVR viewing demographics and take into account co-viewing. Nielsen is also taking steps to ensure that it continues to meet privacy regulations.

Nielsen is the leader in the TV ratings. Since it started its Total Measurement strategy, revenues for its media measurement business revenues were rising until COVID-19 hit. Audience measurement revenue was down 3.1% during the second quarter in which the company reported a new loss of $30 million..

Related: Nielsen Laying off 3,500 in New Cost Cutting Plan

Nielsen has been under pressure from investors. The company conducted a strategic review and last year decided to focus on its media measurement business and spin off its Global Connect business. On Sunday Nielsen sold Global Connect for $2.7 billion.

A number of start-up companies have been taking the big data approach to grab pieces of the TV measurement business. Nielsen’s biggest competitor is Comscore, which also conducted a strategic review and has an uncertain future. The company faced fraud charges, spent nearly three years on a costly and distracting re-audit of its books and went through several CEOs.

Under current CEO Bill Livek, Comscore has announced an aggressive vision for how to solve the industry’s cross-platform measurement issues and some of the products it says will be available soon sound similar to what Nielsen is planning to do.

Last week, Comscore announced  it is launching or enhancing an array of substantial offerings in 2021, including: Comscore TV, a national ratings product that adds information from 10 million Comcast set top boxes to its measurement footprint. Comscore also said it would be  addressing privacy-focused solutions for a world without cookies and outcome-based attribution products that measure the results of ad campaigns.

Comscore said it has spent the second half of 2020 working on bringing national programmer's minutes together with the largest MVPDs and connected-TV providers to provide measurement of national addressable inventory.

Comscore said its approach enables measurement for more than 50 million households, which is the largest footprint of addressable households. Comscore expects to be fully enabled and operationalized in 2021 to bring the first independently-measured national addressable advertising service to buyers and sellers, allowing clients to use television at the impression-level for national addressable inventory and to reconcile with the non-addressed minutes.

Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts unveiled a plan by the cable giant on Monday to invest $100 million over the next three years to combat racism and advance social justice and equality in addition to the commitments the company has made to thousands of organizations to help underrepresented communities.

Roberts outlined details of the plan in a letter to employees Monday, adding that Comcast EVP and chief diversity officer Craig Robinson will be spearheading the efforts along with the chairman himself on the corporate level and will coordinate with executives across its business units -- including Comcast, NBCUniversal and Sky -- to allocate resources and partner with national and local organizations to drive meaningful change.

“Each of our companies will create sustainable programs within their businesses and will be proactively soliciting ideas from employees so that we can build this effort together,” Roberts said in the letter, adding that more details will be shared in the weeks ahead.

[embed]https://twitter.com/comcast/status/1269996893544894465[/embed]

The initiatives will be focused on several key areas:

Social Justice: Comcast will partner with and provide significant grants to organizations working to eradicate injustice and inequity. Organizations will include but not be limited to: the National Urban League, the Equal Justice Initiative, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Action Network and the Community Justice Action Fund.

Employees: Comcast will accelerate its efforts in diversity and inclusion, including advancement, hiring and training, and will educate employees across the company to better understand race-related issues, including Town Halls, speaker series and mandatory anti-racism and anti-bias training. Comcast also pledged to provide financial support to its Employee Resource Groups and invest in its diverse talent, providing them with visibility, opportunity and sponsorship, while continuing to strengthen our diversity recruiting strategy. 

Awareness & Education: Comcast pledged to use its vast media resources behind highlighting Black voices and Black stories and educating its viewers on diverse and inclusive cultures, perspectives and experiences. NBC News will host a series of Town Halls, similar to their Can You Hear Us Now special and pledged the use of its X1, Flex, Peacock and Sky platforms to promote multicultural content.

In addition, Roberts said Comcast will deepen its commitment to narrowing the digital gap in lower-income communities, continuing with its Internet Essentials low-cost broadband service and increasing its commitment to provide digital skills training. Comcast also pledged to provide assistance to minority-owned small businesses that had to close up during the pandemic. For entrepreneurs of color, Comcast said it will create new LIFT Labs programs for Black founders, will invest in minority entrepreneurs via its Comcast Ventures program and will expand Catalyst program, aimed at investing in Black, Latinx and female businesses.

“I want to sincerely thank those of you who have reached out and courageously shared your experiences and fears,” Roberts said in the letter. "We look forward to hearing more of your insightful ideas for our path ahead to a better future. Together we are facing a painful yet powerful moment – one that presents us with a renewed opportunity to do better, and to create substantive and sustainable change."

Although women comprise more than half the U.S. population, they still comprise less than one-third of speaking characters in films and fill fewer than 20% of the above-the-line production roles.

The statistics are equally grim to worse for people of color, who in 2017 were cast in just 29.3% of speaking roles, with even lower representation behind the camera.

"The rhetoric in Hollywood may be changing when it comes to inclusion, but the numbers are not," USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism said in a statement about the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative's annual report, released July 31.

The 2018 report, "Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT & Disability from 2007 to 2017," analyzed diversity and inclusion trends in the top 100 films of each year from 2007 to 2017. 

Of the 48,757 characters in the 1,100 films included, only 30.6% were female speaking roles. Behind the camera, of the 1,223 directors who helmed those films, 43 were women, only seven of whom were women of color. Among all the directors, just 5.2% were Black or African-American, and 3.1% Asian or Asian-American.

2017's Top 100

Among the top 100 films of 2017, the report found that of a total of 4,454 speaking characters, 31.8% were female. Of characters with an ascertainable race/ethnicity, 70.7% were White; 12.1%, Black; 6.2%, Hispanic/Latino; 4.8%, Asian; 3.9%, Mixed Race or Other; and 1.7%, Middle Eastern. American Indian/Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiians each comprised fewer than 1% of speaking roles.

LGBT characters and characters with disabilities also remained underrepresented in 2017, the report said. Of the top 100 films, a whopping 81 had no LGBT characters, while 41 lacked any characters with disabilities.

“Those expecting a banner year for inclusion will be disappointed,” said Professor Stacy L. Smith, founding director of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and lead author of the report. “Hollywood has yet to move from talking about inclusion to meaningfully increasing on-screen representation for women, people of color, the LGBT community, or individuals with disabilities.”

On the production side in 2017, women held only 18.2% of the 1,584 above-the-line jobs: eight directors (7.3% of the total), 34 writers (10.1%) and 247 producers (21.7%), according to the report.

Diversity Study 2016 | TV's Bad, Film's Worse: USC’s Annenberg School Gives Disney, The CW Good Marks for Inclusion

Drill-Down | Women Onscreen

Younger female characters (13-20 years old) are as likely to be sexualized in films as adult female characters, and all female characters are significantly more likely than male characters to be depicted in sexy clothing or lacking clothing.

While women's numbers onscreen are disproportionately lower than their numbers in society, the onscreen numbers diminish further among women of color and LGBT women.

The report suggested filmmakers could even the playing field for women onscreen by adding just five female characters to scripts each year through 2020.

Read USC Annenberg's Overview |Happy to Fire, Reluctant to Hire: Hollywood Inclusion Remains Unchanged

Read the Full Report | Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films

Read More |MCN's Coverage of Diversity and Inclusion

NAMIC said after analyzing the 2017 NAMIC/WICT Cable Telecommunications Industry Workforce Diversity Survey it had determined the 2017 top companies in the industry for people of color. The Walter Kaitz Foundation funded the survey, by Mercer. Twenty-four organizations completed the survey, representing about 67.5% of the cable telecommunications industry workforce, NAMIC said. 

The survey captured organizational workforce demographics, diversity practices, non-traditional employee benefits, and other indicators of commitment to diversity and inclusion, NAMIC said. The survey also gathered information that enabled the creation of industry-wide Internal Labor Market (ILM) maps showing workforce dynamics – hires, promotions and retention – of people of color in the industry. These data were then used to generate projections of which strategies over the next five years potentially may have significant impact on the career trajectories of the targeted groups, per a NAMIC press release.

Alphabetically (not in ranking order) the companies cited by NAMIC as best in class are:

--Charter Communications, Comcast Corp., Cox Communications, Mediacom Communications and Midco Communications from the operator ranks.

--A+E Television Networks, Discovery Communications, Disney | ABC Television Group, NBCUniversal and Univision Communications among programmers.

RELATED: WICT, NAMIC Surveys Show Women, People of Color Make Gains in Workplace

“NAMIC congratulates each honoree designated as a Top Company for People of Color,” NAMIC president and CEO Eglon E. Simons said in the release. “The successful diversity and inclusion efforts of this group of operators and programmers help to strengthen at its core an industry in a state of constant change and reinvention.  At every organizational level, from call centers to creative teams to Board rooms, these Top Companies for People of Color grasp just how necessary a rich diversity of cultural perspectives is for harnessing innovation and for thriving amidst disruption.”

"Launched in 1999 as 'A Look Toward Advancement: Multi-ethnic Employment in the Communications Industry,' NAMIC’s initial employment survey offered a baseline of statistics and perceptions about the state of multi-ethnic diversity in the cable communications industry," NAMIC said. "Renamed 'The NAMIC AIM' (Advancement Investment Measurement) in 2011, the report continues to provide rich data utilized by companies to support goals for building and sustaining a robust pipeline of multi-ethnic talent."

The Directors Guild of America reported Tuesday that the number of minority and female directors increased during the 2016-17 television season.

According to the DGA 2016-17 Episodic TV Director Diversity Report, the percentage of episodes directed by ethnic minorities rose by 3 points to a record 22% of all episodes, while the share of episodes directed by women jumped 4 points to an all-time high of 21% of all episodes.

The increases comes as more content is being produced across the board. During the 2016-17 season more than 4,482 episodes were produced, an increase of 10% in total episodes compared with the 2015-16 season, and a 42% increase compared with five years ago, according to the report.

Related: New York Backs TV Production Tax Break for Hiring Diverse Writers, Directors

Among studios producing content, Twentieth Century Fox Cos. was the most diverse among the top 10 largest studios, with 45% of its content directed by women and minorities, the DGA found. Netflix finished 10th with only 20.5% of its shows helmed by a minority or female director.

"While this report, and our recent report on hiring of first-time TV directors, reflect some progress overall, there are stark disparities among the major studios that raise questions about how committed to inclusion some employers really are," said DGA president Thomas Schlamme. "We want to make sure that every talented individual has an equal shot, and a path forward. But for that to happen, employers must expand their hiring processes to discover the world of capable directors hiding in plain sight. Frankly, it’s hard to understand why they're not doing more. Even if all the right reasons are not enough for them, they should at least be motivated by the bottom line – inclusion just makes good business sense."

While cable is making positive strides with regard to hiring women and people of color for executive positions, an increase in the employee turnover rate – with many employees migrating to OTT and new media companies – must be addressed to keep future leaders within the industry, executives said during a Town Hall meeting Tuesday morning in New York. 

The Town Hall session featured the unveiling of the Women in Cable Telecommunications's PAR Cable Telecommunications Industry Diversity Survey and and the National Association of Multi-Ethnicity in Communications’s AIM (Advancement Investment Measurement) Workforce Study, which revealed increased percentages of women and people of color in executive positions since the last surveys in 2015.

Executives speaking at the Town Hall meeting said the challenge will be to continue those gains within an industry that’s also focused on evolving to better serve its customers and remain competitive against digital companies.

RELATED: WICT, NAMIC Surveys: Women, People of Color Make Gains at Senior Management, Executive Level

“In that [competitive] space there’s a lot of distraction, so making sure that we maintain diversity and inclusion in the forefront so we don’t experience slippage in our progress is a challenge,” ESPN vice president of diversity, inclusion and wellness Monica Diaz said. “The key is to make it part of the disruption that we want to get done.”

Comcast senior executive vice president and chief diversity officer David Cohen added that extending the commitment to diversity and inclusion beyond the human resources department and into a company’s full business operations is critical for success.

“When you define diversity that widely, it's actually easier to get executive and employee buy-in to the value of diversity as a business imperative,” Cohen said.

Related: New York Backs TV Production Tax Break for Hiring Diverse Writers, Directors

To attract and retain talent, Cox Communications executive vice president and chief human resources officer Karen Bennett said it's important for companies to positively project an image of inclusiveness for current and prospective employees to see.

“A lot of this starts with putting your image out there of who you are and then representing that to those who have joined the company so that they stay,” Bennett said.

Cohen added that millennials in particular value diversity and will be drawn more toward companies that foster inclusion and diversity.

“We are more diverse than Silicon Valley and the tech industry, and that gives us a competitive advantage in attracting millennials who would otherwise be inclined to go to tech companies.,” he said.

Related: Ryan Murphy’s Half Initiative Paves Way for Women and Minority Directors

Once they get women and people of color in the door, the industry has struggled to keep them within the cable ranks. The turnover rate for women is higher than for men at all levels, while the turnover rate for people of color is higher than their white counterparts, according to the WICT and NAMIC surveys.

Yet Adria Alpert Romm, chief HR and global diversity officer at Discovery Communications, said that even if women and people of color leave the industry, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t return at some point in their careers.

“If we do a great job of bringing talent into our expanded cable industry, and then they’re picked off by the Facebooks of the world, I don’t think that’s bad,” said Romm. “I think the key thing is that everyone – Hulu, Facebook, Netflix, etc. – learn from the cable industry and bring diversity into those organizations. Then the flow of candidates will move [back and forth], which is good for the industry.”

Related: NAMIC’s Annual Awards Now a Rite of Fall

Several executives pointed to the low number of companies actually participating in the PAR and AIM surveys. Only 24 of 80 companies contacted actually partook in the surveys, although that number represented some 67.5% of the total cable workforce.

“[The survey findings] are probably the result of a few [cable companies] that are carrying the perspective or perception of stronger diversity than there might actually be,” said Rhonda Crichlow, senior vice president and chief diversity officer for Charter Communications. “I can’t understand why the participation rate is so low… From my perspective as an industry, we might have more work to do in terms of helping people understand the importance of the work we want to do in terms of diversity and inclusion.”

Producer Ryan Murphy is behind Half, an initiative within Ryan Murphy Television that aims to make Hollywood more inclusive by creating more opportunities for women and minorities behind the camera.

Less than one year after launching Half, Ryan Murphy Television’s director slate hired 60% women directors, and 94% met the minority requirement.

In collaboration with FX Networks and its chief, John Landgraf, the director slate increased from 12% female/diverse directors in 2015 to 51% in 2016 for the network.

“I love looking around my company and empowering inclusion in all departments,” Murphy said. “I recently led a production meeting and was proud to see that more than half of the people sitting at the table were women and minorities. That’s the way it should be.”

Murphy’s productions include American Crime Story, American Horror Story and Feud.

Related: More coverage of TV industry public service initiatives

Half launched a Directing Mentorship Program in which every director on every Ryan Murphy Television production mentors emerging directors through pre-production to post-production, along with offering a significant stipend for their commitment.

The Directing Mentorship Program had 29 participants in 2016 and has added 30 participants in 2017, providing more than $200,000 in financial aid to help cover travel, lodging and daycare for working mothers. Three participants in the Directing Program became first time episodic directors.

Related: Murphy Produces 'Scream Queens' Flood PSA

Half also has collaborated with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to create an internship program for under-represented youth in conjunction with the California Film Commission. Murphy joined Garcetti’s Advisory Board on the Entertainment Inclusion Fund.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

The New York State legislature has passed a bill that would provide tax incentives for hiring diverse writers and directors for TV productions in New York, according to the unions that have been pushing the legislation.

The bill was backed by the Writers Guild of America, East (based in New York) and the Directors Guild of America.

Related > The Production Issue

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo still needs to approve the new tax credit, and it must be included in the state budget, but the passage was a milestone being hailed by WGAE and DGA.

"People in the TV industry have understood for years that enhancing the diversity of writing and directing improves the stories that appear on screen,” said Lowell Peterson, executive director of WGAE in a joint statement. “The missing link for policymakers has been putting money at the point of hire, and this legislation is an important step in that direction.”

Neil Dudich, eastern executive director of the DGA, said: "For years the DGA has pushed the industry to change their imbalanced hiring practices -- so that talent, and talent alone, is the defining factor. By encouraging studios, networks and producers to discover the talented New York TV directors and writers that are out there in abundance, this bill can be a meaningful step forward in establishing a level playing field for all."

Sometimes nice guys finish first.

FX Networks and FX Productions CEO John Landgraf is the son of a preacher with the persona of a professor, and he is a rarity in the TV industry: the closest thing to a regular amount of ego inside of a Hollywood TV executive. And humble at times though he is, these days he’s got reason to crow — loudly. Last year, his flagship channel, FX, swept the Emmy Awards with 18 wins — second only to HBO — won an industry-high four Golden Globe awards and notched the top three shows on television’s collective Best 2016 Series list — Atlanta, The People v. O.J Simpson: American Crime Story and The Americans.

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Landgraf, who took the reins at FX 14 years ago, has built a television empire in what’s arguably been the industry’s most challenging and content-rich period. FX has thrived on his watch, generating hit after hit, from veterans such as The Americans and The Strain — both set to soon end their runs — to recent breakouts such as Donald Glover’s Atlanta and the Marvel Comics-inspired Legion. The series surge continues this summer with the John Singleton-produced Snowfall, chronicling the early days of the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic.

The 55-year-old veteran proiducer also revitalized the once-dormant anthology/limited series genre with successful shows like the Emmy Award-winning American Horror Story, Fargo and American Crime Story. And he’s struck comedy gold with freshman Emmy winner Baskets, as well as venerable series such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer and You’re the Worst. Launched on FX, those shows now find their audience on comedy-centric sister channel FXX.

Related: HBO, FX Lead 2017 TCA Awards Nominations

All of Landgraf’s programming accolades have been achieved with a budget that’s a relative pittance compared with what deep-pocketed competitors like Netflix and Amazon spend on their scripted series.

With the Landgraf-coined “Peak TV” bubble of scripted series — now at more than 450 shows across broadcast, cable and digital streaming services — predicted to burst sometime over the next couple of years, Landgraf is playing the long game. His next move is repositioning linear channel FX into a multiplatform brand that can serve consumers’ changing viewing habits via digital video-on-demand service FX Now. Landgraf is also taking changing audience demographics into account — women and people of color comprise more than half of FX’s showrunners and producers.

In a conversation with Multichannel News editorial director Mark Robichaux and programming editor R.Thomas Umstead, Landgraf explained his Moneyball approach to production, the new dynamics of the TV business and how diversity drove FX to profit.

MCN: How would you rate the general health of the programming business today? Some people say this is just the downside of the cycle. Other people say it’s the edge of a cliff. You have famously called it a content bubble. What’s going on?
John Landgraf: The way I think about it is, there is a business model in television that has been successful for a long, long time, right? Sixty years, more. It’s called the channel. And it’s been an important organizing principle; it started with broadcast networks and then premium and basic cable networks, all built on the notion of a linear stream.

And these channels are still overwhelmingly how people who watch television consume their time. I think the reason that fact is often lost … I think if we dug into the data we’d find that still more than 80% of all time consuming television is on linear channels.

I think the amount of time spent watching linear television channels each year relative to the prior year and the percentage of the total consumption of television each year relative to the prior year is going down — very slowly going down.

And on the other side of the spectrum, there is an appreciating television asset, which we’d call, broadly speaking, nonlinear consumption, right? And I’m including in that VOD and TV Everywhere and FX Now and HBO Go and DVRs, as well as Hulu and Netflix and YouTube.

So it’s a vast bundle of nonlinear consumption. Mostly on-demand. Its main characteristic is it’s not that flowing linear stream.

Buzzfeed’s watermelon video thing was ludicrous because it’s not compelling to watch people put rubber bands around a watermelon relative to watching Silicon Valley or The Americans or the Super Bowl. It’s a tiny, tiny thing in terms of actual, concurrent streams or in hours of consumption relative to broadcast television.

Content on these powerful linear streams is still watched vastly, vastly more, in terms of current viewership, than anywhere else. … They are still far and away the best place to start advertising, better than a bunch of tiny little bits of consumption in a system rife with fraud and bots and all kinds of things. Not to say there’s no value there, but just saying the level of value is vastly different.

MCN: Do you think traditional programmers are adapting fast enough?
JL: It’s an evolutionary process. I think one of the reasons that we actually began counting the number of original programs, which led to identifying this phenomenon called “peak TV” is ultimately you’ve got to accept the background radiation of the competition, right? You can’t put your head in the sand and think that major-league pitching hasn’t improved in 30 years and think that you’re going to pitch the same way you did 30 years ago with the same result. You have to basically tool yourself to the batters you’re facing in the current market.

We just have to be better, because the only thing that will allow us to rise as opposed to fall in this environment is we’ve just got to get better.

MCN: How is FX adapting to the new environment?
JL: We have actually managed to be pretty flat in the last four years. We took the FX network, we layered on the FXX network and the FX movie network, FXM. We layered three networks’ worth of consumption on top of one, all under one brand, and then we also layered on a significant amount of nonlinear consumption.

Our COO [Chuck Saftler], who has been the dominant buyer of movies in basic-cable network for a decade now, bought a year of linear term for our channel. Now, for a major blockbuster, we got a significant number of months of nonlinear term. And so we accumulated a very large nonlinear bundle of movies.

We also did something first that no other channel had done. When a series airs, it immediately goes into the TV Everywhere space, into FX Now, and essentially you can consume it, you can binge it on-demand from the first episode to the end. So we have made really significant strides and we’re at the point now where we generate about 10% as many nonlinear streams as linear streams, even given the fact that we are programming 24 hours a day on three channels.

In the long run, I don’t think there is a fundamental way to counteract the fact that there is going to be modest decline. No matter how well you program a linear channel, you can’t execute your way out of structural change.

If you want your business and your brand to be stronger tomorrow than they are today, there is only one answer, which is you have to lean into the appreciating asset, where there is growth in the marketplace, and where that growth lies is in nonlinear consumption, period.

MCN: How would you judge your performance?
JL: Our point of view is that we’re proud of what we have done to date, but it’s not comprehensive enough, it’s not radical enough. But knowing that, just as we know that if we didn’t step up our programming game we were going to recede rather than grow, is a good thing. I think knowing the truth is the first key. Knowing the trends and accepting the truth of the future is the first key to being successful in anything strategic, certainly in business.

So what you’ll see from us, and I can’t speak to our competitors, is more radical and more aggressive moves in the future to transform our business into what I would call a multiplatform brand. I wrote a memo — it might have been five or six years ago — to a number of key colleagues here, basically suggesting that if FX is going to thrive as a business and a brand over time, it must transform itself from a linear channel into a multiplatform brand. [Part of that] was the formation of FX Productions in 2005, when we started owning our own shows.

It’s not as if I haven’t seen the writing on the wall here for a long time. We’re figuring it out.

MCN: Wall Street is already punishing programming stocks. What do you think the business fallout will be of this disruption and competition? Will this content bubble pop?
JL: There are two sources of capital, which rely on different capital standards, that are funding this. One is the capital that flows in through traditional media companies that are still mostly oriented around brands that develop from linear channels or their film studios, right? The metric that the market uses to buy and judge that stock is profit. It takes a multiple of profit.

Then there are these other companies; the leading ones in it are Amazon and Netflix. Netflix has said they are going to run at negative $1.8 billion dollars in free cash flow this year. So even though they will declare an EBITDA, that will be because they are pushing down the amortization of programming costs into subsequent years. Their actual revenue will be $1.8 billion lower than their expenses this year, based on their own statement.

So their metric is not profit, it’s customer acquisition, I suppose. And essentially investors are willing to extend them capital at a loss in essence on the assumption that their growth and subscribers will keep up with that trailing amortization and ultimately overtake it, and they will be able to sustain and grow profitability over time. Similarly, Amazon is a very different retail business with $130-plus billion dollars in top-line revenue, so its programming costs are kind of a rounding error. So these are really different businesses.

I think what we’re going to find when we roll up all the scripted programming made in America this year … it will be more original scripted adult series this year than last year, but then, in the aggregate, premium television channels, basic-cable channels … and broadcast-television channels will make slightly less content this year than they did last. I’m talking in the range of 5% or less from peak.

I think we are probably past the peak, in terms of the total volume created by linear television channels and their associated brands, at least at this point.

MCN: What is driving this arms race?
JL: It’s this massive amount of capital flooding into the market through Netflix and Amazon, and to some extent Hulu or YouTube Red or Apple and a few other buyers. And it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, in the sense that it’s nonprofit expenditure. It does not drive profit. It actually drives loss, right? It drives growth in top-line revenue, but it drives loss.

So we’ve got to punch above our weight, and we’ve got to fight heavyweight fighters who are a lot bigger and have a longer reach than we do just in terms of physical gifts. You’ve got to be crafty and smart and have endurance.

MCN: On that note, you’ve largely been outgunned in terms of budget by some of these new entrants, namely Netflix and Amazon. Yet you’ve been exceptionally successful at picking hits. How?
JL: So you’re a coach. What you’re trying to do is create a winning environment. And in the case of television, every single TV show is made by a single individual person, or a couple or three individual people, who then accumulate around them hundreds of other individuals. It’s a personal thing, it’s a bespoke thing — it’s not done well, I don’t think, in a factory context. It’s not as if you create the machine that builds the machine, which is the Tesla factory, and then it builds these devices of uniform size and shape. Every single thing is a piece of art and business created by an individual artist/businessperson/ craftsperson.

And there is just no such thing as a one-size-fits-all formula. … I think a good coach, for example, is good at coaching players who have different styles and different needs and different quirks and different abilities. You’ve got to get good at doing that. Then what’s hard, I think in this business, is to stay singularly focused on that single thing because there are so many other things that are distracting.

You know the political maxim, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It’s like, “It’s the shows, stupid.”

The reason we built a studio is because we wanted to do all of it. We didn’t want to license it and do part of it — the marketing, the publicity — and leave the financial and business and production issues to someone else. We wanted to have a deep and abiding 360-degree creative/personal business relationship with the people that make television from top to bottom.

I built it as a former producer. I built an organization that said, “Well, if I were gonna make a decision about bringing a talented person, what would I want from the organization I brought that person to, to give that person the best chance at success and me the best chance at success?”

I think people do their best work here — it’s pretty simple. And then once they come here, they not only have the best experience of their career, they do the best work of their career, because they have a profound level of engagement and support from me and every person in this organization.

MCN:What’s your biggest fear for the business?
JL: I’m pretty bullish. I think this is a really exciting and dynamic moment in time and I think decisions are being made now that are gonna yield tremendous success and colossal failure because I think that it’s like doing what you did won’t get you where you wanna go, right?

But on the other hand, I think there is going to be a culling of the strongest businesses and the strongest brands. I think the strongest ones are going to emerge. It’s kind of like a forest fire, right? The strongest trees in the forest have more light and more room to grow in the aftermath of the forest fire. So you just have to be on the right side of surviving a transformation like this.

MCN: You’ve got the Emmy Awards coming up very soon. FX had a great, record-setting showing last year. What’s your expectation for this year? Can you repeat what you did last year?
JL: It’s crazy to me. I mean, I feel really proud of our entrants and I think it’s as strong a team as we have ever fielded.

I think a different metric would be that more than 80% of our shows that we programmed at FX made year-end top 10 or best lists. And I think for Netflix, that was in the 15% to 20% range. If you want to call that a batting average, it’s batting more than .800, relative to batting .150 to .200.

I think you’ve got to give a little bit of an advantage, maybe more than a little bit of an advantage, to the teams with the bigger payroll, because this is the Oakland A’s playing the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees in payroll terms, you know?

MCN: What is it that has helped you pick the right shows? Gut? Test audiences?
JL: One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve matured as a person is that a collective intelligence is always greater than an individual intelligence. So one of the things we do around here is that even though the final decision is mine, I really listen to this group of people that I’ve worked with for a long time and I really benefit from their individual intelligence. We can have a very agreeable disagreement and a very robust and honest debate, and I learn things through listening to those debates.

And I never forget I’m betting on a person. Television is made by people and their character, their talent, their intellect, their intent, how dedicated they are to that intent, how much stamina they have — how strong is their ego, not only in terms of willingness to be stubborn and intractable when they need to be, but strong enough to take criticism and tough criticism, strong enough to work through failure.

I get to know these people individually, I sit in a room and talk to them, I ask them questions, I get a feel for who they are as people — I know I’m betting on them. Yes, I’m betting on their idea and yes I’m betting on a pilot story, but I am, more than anything else, I am betting on a person, or people if it’s a partnership. And I never forget that.

You can’t fake love. You either have it or you don’t. And I love this. I love this and I love the people who do it with passion and do it well. And I really try to be someone who cares about, thinks about, the players.

I certainly am a wonky guy who does everything I can to develop technique in myself or others, and I will use any piece of data and I can get very buttoned up on the numbers. I mean, I am not someone who is not analytical and doesn’t believe in analysis.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think you can get to the highest level if you’re coming from an analytical point of view. I think you have to come in with your heart. I think you have to bring your whole heart to the enterprise because I think people feel that — they feel a level of dedication, passion and caring, if it’s there, that’s different than analysis.

MCN: Continuing on that thought, you have been very public in stating that you have provided more opportunities for people of color and women behind the scenes and on camera. How important is that to the overall success of FX?
JL: What I have been trying to do here is have a brand that isn’t manufactured from the top down … it grows from the grass roots up. And I don’t think that that brand then is about a particular demographic. I don’t think it’s about a particular gender or a particular ethnicity. I think it’s about fearless points of view and fearless innovation and fearless pursuit of quality.

So it’s been really important to me that [FX’s programming] wasn’t only a white, male thing, you know? Famously, and this is a testament to the fact that you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelet, we developed Breaking Bad and I passed on it. So call that a really colossal mistake on my part, the beneficiary of which was AMC because we let it go. We had it, we owned it and then they wanted to make it, and we didn’t want to make it, so we let it go elsewhere.

But I made that decision because I didn’t want to put a fourth male anti-hero show on the air when we had three already — Nip/Tuck, The Shield and Rescue Me. We put Damages on the air instead — pretty good show, also nominated for an Emmy with Mad Men. It broke that glass ceiling, although Mad Men won and Damages didn’t. But that was a statement about the pathway we wanted to move forward, which was we wanted the best talent, not the best talent that wanted to write about white male anti-heroes — the best talent period, full stop.

The other thing I’ve said — and I mean it — is that as I’ve reflected with great gratitude on this tremendous opportunity that this career has given me, and the opportunity to run this wonderful brand and lead this team, I’ve thought about the mentors that had made that possible. A common theme in that list is white males. White, heterosexual males. And I’m a white, heterosexual male.

So how do I not recognize it as an unearned advantage that essentially I had some things that were tremendously in common with them in terms of my own gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation?

So I just said, “You know what, OK, so pay it forward.” And paying it forward for me doesn’t mean don’t hire a white man, because I do, but it means … work hard to overcome the tendency for that to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and really, really put your back into it, have your organization put its back into creating an outsized number of opportunities for women and people of color and people with different gender identities and sexual orientations. Act locally.

So we have been very, very aggressive at doing that. The last time we counted, 57% of our episodic directors [were] non-white males. And by the way, when we got called out by Variety, that was 12%. So we have gone from 88% white males to 43%. We halved that. And concurrently, we have increased the ratio of people who are non-white males directing by almost five times.

MCN: Why are you pushing back Katrina ? What’s happened with that show?
JL: After thinking about it long and hard, the [American Crime Story] creative people involved decided they wanted to focus the story in a slightly different way, and that required some rethinking of how we were going to tell it. And we already had Versace in production, and it’s going great. So in essence, we were like, “OK, well, we’ve got a little bit more time here to get Katrina exactly right.” And I’m even more excited about where we’re coming out on Katrina.

MCN: So will both appear in 2018? Katrina later in 2018 and Versace earlier?
JK: I would say that is likely, yes.

MCN: Is there anything you want to get off your chest?
JK: I think that analysts and investors and some of the people that write about our industry are counting us out, because they are looking at it as if we are and always will be linear television brands and channels, and therefore our potential as businesses only lies in how successful linear channels and brands will be in the future. And I think that’s a mistake. I think we are actually incredibly well-positioned to be profoundly successful nonlinear, multiplatform brands.

What’s on Tap This Summer
Networks set seasonal slate of studio-produced fare

The summer television season is upon us, and cable networks along with video streaming services are gearing up to launch new scripted series in programming genres ranging from comedy to horror and drama. Here’s a partial list of new original scripted series premieres from cable and digital subscription video-on-demand services from June 19 through Aug. 31.

JUNE 19
Loch Ness
Drama (Acorn TV)

JUNE 22
The Mist
Horror/drama (Spike)

JUNE 23
GLOW
Comedy (Netflix)
Free Rein
Drama (Netflix)

JUNE 25
Hotel Transylvania:
The Series
Animated (Disney Channel)

JUNE 27
Tales
Drama (BET)

JUNE 30
Gypsy
Drama (Netflix)
Little Witch Academia
Animated series (Netflix)
Danger & Eggs
Animated series (Amazon)

JULY 5
Snowfall
Drama (FX)

JULY 7
Castlevania
Animated series (Netflix)

JULY 10
Will
Drama (TNT)

JULY 11
The Bold Type
Drama (Freeform)
The Hollywood Puppet Sh!t Show
Comedy (Fuse)
American Ripper
Drama (History)

JULY 12
I’m Sorry
Comedy (TruTV)

JULY 14
Friends from College
Comedy (Netflix)

JULY 17
Loaded
Drama (AMC)

JULY 21
Raven’s Home
Comedy (Disney Channel)
Ozark
Drama (Netflix)

JULY 28
Room 104
Drama (HBO)

AUG. 2
The Sinner
Drama (USA Network)

AUG. 3
What Would Diplo Do?
Comedy (Viceland)

AUG. 9
Mr. Mercedes
Drama (Audience Network)

AUG. 13
Get Shorty
Comedy (Epix)

AUG. 18
Marvel’s The Defenders
Drama (Netflix)

AUG. 24
There’s … Johnny!
Comedy (Seeso)

AUG. 25
Disjointed
Comedy (Netflix)
The Tick
Comedy (Amazon)

Get complete coverage of the 2016 TCA Summer Tour.

Beverly Hills, Calif.—Eight panelists affiliated with shows on El Rey, Starz, TV One and WGN America tore into the multifaceted issues of TV diversity during a vibrant, insight-packed panel at the TCA summer press tour.

El Rey founder and chairman Robert Rodriguez delivered a brief introduction to the session. “Cable has made great strides,” he said. “There’s never been a more important time to build cultural understanding of people and working together.”

Panelists spent ample time talking about the positives — more shows with diverse casts on air, multiplying outlets, more people of color involved behind the scenes — but also brought to light the ongoing struggle to reflect America in full.

“The way the system is set up, in order to get a job or be able to vote on awards, it’s all just old practices that don’t suit us at all,” said Victoria Mahoney, a director with credits on feature films as well as TV series like Starz’s Survivor’s Remorse and OWN’s Queen Sugar.

“The old guard’s got to let go of their grip a little bit because that’s not the way the world looks,” said Jurnee Smollett-Bell, who stars on WGN America’s Underground. “Storytellers have a right to express what’s inside of them … and consumers and viewers have a right to see themselves.”

Mahoney noted that she is among the 4% of overall directors who are women of color, according to recent guild surveys. “I’ve never been in the bottom 4% of anything in my life,” she quipped.

D’Angela Proctor, senior vice president of original programming and production for TV One, said the executive suite is another area with a lot of room for improvement.

“We have to be at the table at every single level” for truly inclusive programming to permeate the TV business, she said.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

With the breadth and depth of media options available to consumers, it’s not surprising that U.S. households are increasing their overall daily media consumption. Multicultural viewers — and African-American viewers in particular — are at the forefront of that consumption, according to Nielsen’s most recent Total Audience Report.

Between first-quarter 2015 and Q1 of this year, TV households increased their total daily media consumption (via smartphones, Internet on PCs, terrestrial radio and live TV) by one hour, to 10 hours and 39 minutes. As a group, African-Americans were the most voracious media consumers, increasing their total consumption of such media by one hour and 13 minutes during the period to more than 13 hours a day, according to Nielsen.

Much has been made of the consistent drop in live TV viewing hours over the past few years, and while overall live viewing hours dropped by three minutes across all viewers year-to-year, African-American viewing actually increased by one minute on a year-to-year basis, according to the report. Live TV viewing also represents more than half of all daily media consumption by African-Americans, according to Nielsen.

Why is this relevant? It would behoove content creators and distributors looking to create the next big TV hit to consider creating more programming targeting the audience that’s most likely to seek out content on various distribution platforms. A good portion of those viewers and users would most likely be young and multicultural consumers who like to see their images and stories reflected on the screens they’re spending a lot of time with.

As the Horowitz Associates State of Cable and Digital Media Multicultural 2016 report confirmed, 64% of African- American viewers, 57% of Hispanic viewers and 50% of Asian-American viewers said content that keeps diverse audiences connected to their respective cultures drives their overall viewing decisions.

Get complete coverage of #INTX2016.

The National Association of Multi-ethnicity in Communications honored its Next Generation Leaders and Luminaries during its annual awards breakfast at the INTX show Wednesday morning, which also featured a trailer for History’s Roots reboot.

NAMIC recognized four Next Generation Leaders — emerging executives of color under the age of 45 who exemplify NAMIC’s mission of education, advocacy and empowerment to foster multiethnic diversity and inclusion in the cable industry — as well as 10 Luminaries who have demonstrated a high level of business acumen while fostering diversity and inclusion.

“They are trendsetters, thought leaders and change agents,” NAMIC president Eglon Simons said of the honorees. “They are spreading NAMIC’s vision for advocacy within their organizations.”

The diversity organization also honored Noticiero Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas with the organization’s 2016 Mickey Leland Humanitarian Achievement Award, given to an executive for their lifelong advocacy in social justice and equality for people around the world. Salinas said in her acceptance speech that as a member of the Spanish-language media, she felt a responsibility to go beyond the headlines in reporting the news.

“I always believed that there would have to be a social service component to our job,” Salinas said. “ After all, we do serve an audience that has additional needs and a community that depends on us for information that will help make their lives more manageable."

Actor LeVar Burton also addressed breakfast attendees as an executive producer of History’s eight-hour miniseries reboot of Alex Haley’s 1970s miniseries Roots about the journey of an African-American family through slavery.

Burton, who starred as Kunta Kinte in the original Roots, said he was at first skeptical of History’s plans to remake the classic 1970s miniseries, but was won over after Mark Wolper -- the son of original Roots executive producer David Wolper -- said that the nearly 40 year-old miniseries didn’t speak to his kids when they watched it.

“It is a reality that there is an entire generation of Americans who do not know this very important story,” Burton said.

Few television personalities are as versatile as George Lopez. For nearly two decades, the comedian-actor has starred in numerous television stand-up comedy specials, movies and series — as well as a late-night cable talk show. Lopez, who currently stars in TV Land’s original comedy series Lopez, spoke with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about his childhood love for cable TV, as well as adapting to the TV industry’s ever changing technological landscape. Edited highlights follow.

MCN:Growing up were you a big television viewer?

George Lopez: Listen, I’m an only child and I was kinda like a shut-in. So, the day that I got cable, I was living with my grandmother. Man, that day changed my life. From sports to the news, it was great. It must have been like when people heard radio for the first time. Before that you had four or five channels that would show Gilligan’s Island or maybe Gomer Pyle. Then when cable came, man, it exploded everything.

MCN:So much has changed since the early cable days. Have you kept up with the all the new distribution platforms?

GL: Now when you buy a TV, it comes with the apps and everything, and there’s a DVR in my cable. And to think that it keeps reinventing itself almost daily. They’re not really so wrapped up in ratings and numbers and demographics and minute-by-minute viewership. In network, there’s a lot more constriction than in cable.

MCN:Has TV Land given you more creative freedom forLopezthan you had when you didThe George Lopez Showon ABC?

GL: TV Land, with the new show Lopez, is probably the first place that allowed me to be creative and didn’t have negative comments or unsupportive things to say, not during the first episode or the 12th. Like, when I went to TV Land, [The] Jim Gaffigan [Show] was premiering last year, and they have Younger, Teachers, Impastor; they’ve got good shows. They still honor a little bit of the history with the Icon Awards, but they allow me to do a show that I couldn’t do at ABC. They are the best place I’ve ever been to create.

MCN:The landscape is changing so much in terms of what we see and how we watch it, particularly with the emergence of video on the Web. From your perspective, are we going in the right direction, or is technology actually hurting the entertainment business?

GL: I was telling Arsenio [Hall] that we came up in a time when if you wanted to get good, you had to leave the house. And now, you don’t really have to leave the house to get a following or to be known. You never have to leave your house. In a way it’s very impersonal. So it used to be cool to say, ‘I saw Bruce Springsteen’s last performance at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles.’ But now somebody can say, ‘Oh yeah, I downloaded the concert on YouTube.’ So that’s not a good direction, I would say.

MCN:At the same time though, some people say this is the Golden Age of Content, in that there are so many ways of getting content distributed. Do you see yourself taking advantage of the full landscape of distribution opportunities that digital affords you?

GL: Yeah, no question about that. But also I think that I’m fortunate enough to have a built-in audience already. I would not want to be an unknown trying to get a show off the ground. My first show’s still on TV from 2002, so I would not want to be a young comedian trying to get a show off the ground who does not have an audience. It seems like the whole weight of the Internet, cable and everything would be on you, because of the amount of options that you have to compete with.

MCN:WhenThe George Lopez Showcame out in the early 2000s, there were very few people of color starring in major shows. Have we made significant progress, or is there still progress to be made?

GL: Well, there’s still progress to be made in everything, but I think that it’s much more — you know, Jane the Virgin and Empire and shows like that. What we need to do is not entirely have a black show, but have a show that looks like the country looks. Like in this show, there’s people of all races in it because when I do my shows, I like them to look the way the world looks. Not like a Woody Allen movie or not like a show that’s entirely black. One of the things growing up, you would see a McDonald’s commercial, and [there] would be a white McDonald’s commercial, and [there] would be a black McDonald’s commercial, and then there’d be a commercial in Spanish that had all Latinos. And when you go to Mc- Donald’s, everybody’s eating at the same place at the same time. So definitely, when I did my shows, I had an eye to make [them] look as inclusive as the world is.

MCN:In terms of what you want to do going forward — I was reading a story where you may have some political aspirations down the line?

GL: I think maybe in Season 3 I run for mayor on the show. And then we spin off that, I actually do run for mayor. Because it’s based kind of like a Curb Your Enthusiasm, so if you floated it out there I think you would get a good feel of what the possibility would be. Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor — no political experience. Donald Trump is running for president — no political experience. Ronald Reagan became president — was an actor. So maybe it’s time.

MCN:What do you make of this whole political season?

GL: Well it’s not very political anymore, if you have a guy that has not revealed any plan other than just to divide people … and ‘my wife’s prettier than your wife’ thing. There’s no place in politics [for that]. Your wife’s a mail-order bride; you picked the right page. So, I’d like it to go back to the issues. The president was never un-presidential. Anybody that was running for president, you wanted them to look and sound like they could be president, not that they were doing it on a whim. It’s not even anywhere near November, and I don’t think we’ve seen the craziest things that are gonna happen yet.

Only 28% of speaking characters across 414 films and TV episodes in 2014-2015 were from “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups, which is close to 10% below the U.S. population norm, according to a new study.

The report, from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, examined 109 films and 305 TV series and found that neither has much to brag about in terms of putting minorities and women on either side of the camera.

“This is no mere diversity problem,” said Stacy L. Smith, survey author. “. This is an inclusion crisis. Over half of the content we examined features no Asian or Asian-American characters, and over 20% featured no African-American characters. It is clear that the ecosystem of entertainment is exclusionary.”

The study comes as the Academy Awards is being blasted for its lack of minorities among nominated films, spawning the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. The Oscars telecast airs on ABC Feb. 28.

Walt Disney Co. and The CW, along with SVOD players Hulu and Amazon, got decent marks for inclusion.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.