Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media

Foreword

F O R E W O R D Derrick Bell The print media is in what many view as a death struggle with the more dramatic communication forums of television and now the Internet. The casualties include literally hundreds of papers and consolidation of many that remain. At present, a handful of publishing magnates control the great majority of newspapers and news magazines. Profit rather than professionalism has become priority number one. News is defined by its entertainment value. Scandal that titillates trumps substantive news. Stories about crime that frighten are favored over stories that inform. To this end, coverage is often full-blown where the victim is white and the perpetrator black or Hispanic. Similar crimes where neither victim nor assailant is white are often ignored. Features on celebrities, no matter how tawdry, once the metier of the tabloids, now receive prominent attention in the most sober dailies. Revelations about even the most intimate matters are rationalized under “the people’s right to know.” Journalistic conscience has gone the way of serious content. Editors not only permit but insist on favorable coverage of major advertisers, a policy rendered more effectively by loosening the traditional barrier between editorial and advertising departments. Editorial positions are not cabined with the editorial pages. The publisher’s political views influence how stories are written and what stories even find their way into print. If this criticism appears excessive, it is because the media maintains a selfrighteous stance of integrity based mainly on denial. This posturing is regularly punctured by small, little-read publications like Extra, the Nation , and the Progressive. Even without the facts available in these journals , the public is not fooled, regularly rating newspapers as deserving little more trust than that afforded used-car salesmen. Given the media’s commitment to commercialism, pity the poor journalist drawn to the profession by the desire to get at the truth in the story| ix | and to report all the facts both fully and objectively. Even given the necessity of compromise as a prerequisite to orderly life in a civilized society , the way of the journalist trying to do his or her job and maintain a measure of integrity must be tough. And if that journalist is a person of color, the task becomes a continuing challenge of truly awesome proportions . How can persons long excluded from the profession because of color barriers overcome the continuing suspicions of incompetence and disloyalty that burden the careers of those permitted to enter the media’s mainly white ranks? In Within the Veil, Professor Pamela Newkirk responds to this question with a richly textured account of truths about minority status in journalism. Relying on careful research and her years of journalistic experience , Newkirk’s work reflects an understanding about the difficulties of her profession that are heightened by a racial perspective that is much needed and not much available in today’s news outlets. Her careful review of the last three decades of black inroads in mainstream journalism reflects advances far more grudging and far less permanent than many of us would have predicted after the 1968 Kerner Commission’s hard-hitting criticism of the media’s all-white make-up. The plight of minority journalists, of course, can serve as a metaphor for all black professionals. Our predicament goes beyond our token status in most mainly white enterprises, a status in which we are rewarded most when we challenge least the paucity of our numbers or the difficulty of getting the assignments that can lead to promotion. Even being taken seriously requires major effort when our views differ from those who by reason of their majority status presume to know best. James Baldwin, the definitive chronicler on this subject put it well in “The Evidence of Things Not Seen.” [p. 44] It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know—which is the price of your performance and survival—you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you. We know that our struggle for standing in what is often an alien atmosphere does not prevent pointing to our presence as sufficient justification for inaction in adding to our numbers. Given the pressures for culDerrick Bell| x | tural conformity, it is nothing short of a miracle that...