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158 15. Journalist of the Year In the February 4 City Sun, staff writer Phil Farai Makotsi reported that jury selection was about to begin for a trial in which four black journalists from the New York Daily News sued the nation’s largest-circulation metropolitan newspaper for racial discrimination. Through the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s,news outlets including the New York Times,ABC,Newsweek,and the Associated Press settled race and gender discrimination lawsuits out of court.1 The Daily News management offered a $500,000 settlement to the plaintiffs, but they rejected the deal.After that, the management was willing to wage a public fight in court. Observers speculated that the Tribune Company , owner of the Daily News, was gambling that the four black journalists would lose easily in the hostile, antiblack social climate of the Reagan era.2 Because of this unprecedented trial,the stakes for the newspaper industry were high.What was to follow in the next nine weeks was the legal equivalent of a bloody street brawl in which character flaws on both sides would be ripped open and exposed. Nevertheless plaintiffs David Hardy, a political reporter,StevenW.Duncan,an assistant news editor,Joan Shepard,Manhattan cultural affairs editor, and Causewell Vaughan, a copy editor, pressed on. They believed theirs was a compelling and righteous case. The foursome began their battle in 1980 when they alleged that the newspaper’s management discriminated against black journalists in salaries , promotions, and assignments and retaliated when the journalists complained.3 At the nation’s largest metropolitan newspaper (1.5 million circulation, and during its peak in the 1960s, 2.5 million) white editors casually referred to their employees of color as“niggers” and“spics.” Richard “Dick” Blood, a high-ranking editor, called Shepard a “streetwalker ,” or prostitute, when she returned from a walking tour with elected officials. Tony Marino, another white editor, routinely called black and Hispanic coworkers “banjos” and “bongos” and also called two women “nigger broads.” In other newsrooms, coworkers who trusted and respected each other sometimes accepted that kind of racial insult and crude humor. That was Journalist of the Year 159 not the case at the Daily News. The coarse words were not comedic license; the newsroom was a hostile environment for blacks. The black journalists were also seething because they found out during their research that the newspaper continued to employ a white editor who had killed a black teenager in a drunk-driving incident. In addition, economically, black and brown readers were a substantial piece of the Daily News’ customer base—45 percent in New York City—yet the management allegedly practiced crude employment discrimination in newsgathering and dissemination and muted the majority-minority reality of New York in the late 1980s.4 Andy Cooper and Utrice Leid committed Makotsi to cover the trial in its entirety. The Daily News had been one of Cooper’s four news clients when he operated Trans Urban News Service in late 1970s and early 1980s. The newspaper sometimes ran TNS stories almost word for word with Daily News reporters’ bylines on top. (In 1979, when a TNS intern asked why that was done, a Daily News staff writer explained it was a matter of “pride” at the unionized paper.) Cooper and Leid often said they were training men and women who would eventually report for the Daily News.Makotsi’s daily presence at the trial pleasantly surprised Daniel Alterman, the attorney for the Daily News four.It would be up to a judge and jury to determine whether the newspaper had caused egregious harm or the journalists’ complaints had little or no merit.Alterman talked regularly with Makotsi and his managing editor Leid.5 Elsewhere, the Amsterdam News’ coverage of the trial was indifferent compared to the City Sun’s fever-pitch interest. For weeks at a time during the nine-week trial, no mention appeared in the city’s largest blackowned weekly. There was speculation that the Amsterdam News owners did not want to antagonize the Tribune Company, since it also distributed the Amsterdam News.6 Other accounts in the trade journal Editor and Publisher, the Village Voice, and the Washington Post suggested sympathy toward the Daily News management’s cause and excoriated the plaintiffs. When the trial opened, lawyers for the Daily News attacked the professionalism and integrity of Duncan, Hardy, Shepard, and Vaughan. The foursome did not advance in their careers, said the respondents (this was a civil...

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