If you’re concerned about genuine racism, then it’s far less important to nitpick over the racial makeup of people hired decades ago than to examine whether non-white people were passed over in hiring. For that, we need to start by looking at the racial makeup of Canada at the time today’s columnists were hired. Let’s assume today’s typical 54-year-old big-city columnist launched his or her career in 1996 (a reasonable assumption if you check out their biographies). If so, then their current 88.7 percent white makeup is hardly surprising, for that year, Canada itself was still 86 percent white people. White people do not appear to be racially “over-represented” in the historical hiring of newspaper columnists at all, and the Malik-Fatah gap (never that impressive to begin with) appears to be an artifact of poor statistical analysis.

Even if you believe that Canada’s news media should numerically duplicate the nation’s ethnic makeup – and the age, experience and merit of individual practitioners be damned – focusing on columnists is still an odd way to test whether that’s happening. If the researchers were truly seeking accurate information about representation in hiring – if the journalism “professors” were doing actual journalism, in other words – they would try to find out whether there are racial barriers to those entering the trade.

The declining newspaper industry, granted, currently offers few entry-level jobs, and that would make for a small sample size. The hiring that has happened in recent years, however, looks fairly diverse. Scanning the masthead from when Torstar Corporation (publisher of the Toronto Star) revamped its StarMetro brand two years ago suggests a lineup of young reporters who appear more diverse than some of the cities they served. Half of StarMetro’s Edmonton reporters, for example, appeared to be non-white in a city that is two-thirds white. Malik and Fatah could have studied these kinds of positions just as easily as big-city daily opinion columnists. Then again, StarMetro has already stopped printing, so perhaps we shouldn’t focus on an apparently dying news media segment – newspapers – if we want to test the thesis that Canada’s media workforce doesn’t reflect Canada’s diversity.

Instead, we might look at the publicly-available data from the only place that still hires journalists in large numbers: the CBC. At the heavily subsidized Crown corporation, the ranks of visible minorities who are members of the Canadian Media Guild (CMG) union increased by 45 percent from 2015 to 2019. The ratio of visible minorities rose from 9.2 percent (319 out of 3,483 members) to 13.4 percent (345 out of 2,497). Noteworthy is that the absolute number of visible minority members rose substantially even as the overall membership plunged.

Among management (not including the top executives, who are excluded from the CMG data), the percentage of non-white people rose by 56 percent, from 13.5 percent (57 out of 422) to 21 percent (81 out of 386). Again, non-whites increased in absolute as well as relative terms as the overall total shrank. The trend was similarly upward for Indigenous people, with the ratio and the numbers in the CMG increasing, from 2.2 percent (77 out of 3,483) to 4.2 percent (106 out of 2,497). This suggests that visible minorities, including Indigenous people, are now far more likely to be favoured in hiring and far more likely to be protected from staffing cuts. If the CBC is discriminating based on race, it’s certainly not in favour of whites.

And even if one adopted the view of people like Malik and Roberts that columnists are particularly influential and that papers like the Globe and Mail should favour non-white people in their hiring, the results might not be as hoped for. They simply might not find many who are qualified. That’s because the combined pool of people from all races who are capable of being good columnists is extremely small. Further, the number of non-white Canadians who are interested in journalism jobs may actually be smaller than their share of the population.

The shallowness of the potential columnist pool became clear to me when I worked at Maclean’s from 2010 to 2014. Part of my job was to seek commentary from students for our post-secondary education section. I scoured student newspapers daily looking for talented writers, paying extra attention to apparently “non-white” names whom I could develop into freelance columnists. Non-white writers were particularly difficult to find.