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201193 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.201193 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2025 280 pages Doctoral Dissertation Academic theses en Vera-Phillips, Kristina Gilpin, Dawn Silcock, B. William Thornton, Leslie-Jean Kim, Heewon Arizona State University Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2025 Field of study: Journalism and Mass Communication This qualitative study helps us understand how professional and personal identities shape the work of journalists and proposes a framework for thinking about the ways Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) journalists negotiate identity, fairness, and journalistic culture. The framework demonstrates how BIPOC journalists navigate journalistic culture and newsroom routines in their reporting and production of content. This fairness framework also shows the ways newsroom managers, newsroom routines, professional identity, and content exercise control over BIPOC journalists. In this framework, one also sees how BIPOC journalists resist control and challenge these forces with their definitions of fairness, defined by their identities, communities, and lived experiences. The fairness framework emerged from the analysis of qualitative interviews with 28 current and former broadcast journalists. These interviews not only led to definitions of fairness for news coverage but also highlighted how BIPOC journalists experienced different working conditions and journalistic culture compared to non-BIPOC colleagues and supervisors. This dissertation argues that American broadcast newsrooms need this fairness framework to understand journalists' experiences and working conditions. This study makes this argument through a review of journalism scholarship, an analysis of definitions of fairness from broadcast journalists, and an examination of interview findings. This dissertation explores the ways BIPOC journalists’ identities, along with their definitions of fairness, navigate American broadcast newsrooms. This study also examines the ways their identities and definitions of fairness inform their work in reporting and producing news stories and shows. This study utilized qualitative interviews to learn about journalists’ use of the news values and practices of objectivity, gatekeeping, and framing. This study also used these interviews to understand how journalists' identities may influence their reporting practices and whether their preferences and values align with or conflict with their newsrooms. This research study applies an approach grounded in postcolonialism and critical scholarship. These theoretical approaches offer a foundation for investigating how BIPOC journalists define, challenge, and operationalize fairness in American broadcast newsrooms. This theoretical foundation provides a starting point for learning how BIPOC journalists experience fairness in news coverage and working conditions. Journalism Broadcast Journalism fairness Identity newsroom routines Representation Redefining a Fairness Framework: How BIPOC Journalists Navigate Identity and Journalistic Culture in U.S. Broadcast Newsrooms