Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media

Preface

P R E F A C E Since my first by-line in the high school newspaper I have been enthralled with journalism because of the opportunity it gave me to effect change and increase understanding. Many of the people I most admired throughout my formative years were crusading reporters in the print and broadcast news media, and landing my first newspaper job at a small afternoon paper in Albany, New York, was the realization of a dream that was years in the making. As a daily journalist at four different news organizations I was, on occasion deeply satisfied with the extent to which I could shed light on compelling issues affecting the communities I covered. But when it came to writing about African Americans, I often encountered difficulty filling out the puzzle that is race in this country because my editors resisted perspectives that were foreign to the white cultural mainstream. They found it easier to exclude or malign alien viewpoints than to attempt to understand ideas that did not mesh with their own. My experience is echoed daily by black journalists around the country who say their stories and ideas are often viewed with suspicion and alarm, seen as a threat rather than part of the answer to racial accord. So cautious must African American journalists be about confronting antiquated attitudes about blacks—so tense are discussions of race in the newsroom —that many become, in time, too battle-weary to try. This is the experience of both the fresh-faced neophytes who are only now entering the profession and of successful veterans like Bryant Gumbel and Charlayne Hunter Gault. It is not that African Americans cannot attain success in the industry. But it is precisely because of the prominence and high pay accorded a handful of highly visible African American journalists that a discussion of racial misinterpretation, mistrust and apprehension is so difficult to engage . Our failure to effectively communicate across the racial divide in the very media we entrust to advance communication is confounding| xvii | and, at the dawn of a new century, wholly unacceptable. The news media are perfectly positioned to improve race relations. But first, we must learn each other’s language, come to appreciate our different vantage points and be prepared to shed our denial, animosity and deceit. I have, without a doubt, fulfilled my childhood fantasy to work in the news industry. I was assigned to South Africa to cover the dismantling of apartheid, and have had the opportunity to witness firsthand numerous historic events in the life of this nation from Capitol Hill, New York’s state capital, and the streets of New York City. I have written and continue to write for some of the country’s leading publications, and, from the hallowed halls of academia, enjoy a modicum of success that some might assume would preclude my writing a critical book about the news media, or about race. But my criticism stems both from a deep and abiding respect for an institution that has the greatest potential to stir our best impulses, as well as deepening our disappointment with its unfulfilled promise. Many African Americans of my generation were drawn to the news media after witnessing its imposing impact on the civil rights movement and, later, Watergate. It should, by now, go without saying that the media’s role in moving us to action and shaping our perceptions is profound , as is their potential for changing those perceptions. Even as public regard for the media ebbs, rises, and ebbs again, journalism remains, at its height, a noble profession. But too many African Americans have found their contributions undervalued or outright ignored, as news organizations time after time miss the opportunity to bridge the racial chasm that threatens to engulf us. Blacks are still, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, still viewed as secondary people, a steady diet of slights fueling resentment in them that lurks barely beneath the surface. Meanwhile whites, unable to see what they don’t experience, continue to cling to some of the most damning views of black people, as the mass media routinely highlight the exceptions in black life—criminality, celebrity, and buffoonery—offering them as the norm. In an increasingly sensationalized media climate, the prospect for the news media to offer even more damaging images of blacks increases. At the close of the twentieth-century there was a resurgence of demeaning images of black people in the mass media. Television shows such...