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4 Salvaging the “Savage” A Racial Frame that Refuses to Die Life on the City Desk before the Jogger I BEGAN WORKING for the city desk about a year after I started at the Daily News. After my transfer there from the business desk, I did a tour of duty at major bureaus in the city. The purpose of this rotation, according to the editor in chief, was to familiarize me with the network of offices that fed the main section of the paper. For a month or so, I spent time at the police headquarters bureau—called “the Shack”—and at one of the court bureaus; I also worked general assignment on the day shift for the city desk. The plan was to put me on the night shift after my initial tour of duty, where I would wait my turn like everyone else until I “earned” a position on the day shift, the space occupied by the city desk’s main reporters. The bylines of these individuals appeared regularly in the front section of the paper on or close to page one, which was referred to as “the wood.” My goal was to become one of those reporters. Wooden plaques displaying famous front pages lined the walls of the city room. My first assignment at the paper was on the business desk. Professionally I did well in that department. In my year there, I was given a weekly column that ran in the Sunday business section, I worked on another business column, and I produced daily stories. I had good sources for the subject because I had previously worked at The American Lawyer, a publication that covered attorneys in the top law firms and banks in the nation. Much of the work that consumed the attorneys I had covered was on Wall Street in mergers and acquisitions, an economic sector that pumped new capital into the city’s and the nation’s economy. This was the era of the “Go-Go ’80s,” a return to prominence for Wall Street,1 as the country dragged itself out of one of its most devastating recessions and New York City was working its way back from its near-bankruptcy of the 1970s. The financial sector (Wall Street) was one of the legs on which this recovery stood.2 76 Chapter 4 Signs that the recovery was not assured—such as the Wall Street crash of 1987— only added to the salience of business news during this period. The economic rebound from the 1970s was not only good for the city’s overall economic forecast; it was also good for the media. The media world was being transformed in the 1980s. Wall Street had discovered that many newspapers were cash cows as they transitioned from private hands to publicly traded companies (Bagdikian 1983; McChesney 2008). This discovery helped to fuel a never-before-seen consolidation of media companies that concentrated control of the companies into fewer and fewer hands. Commensurate with this and other growth in the business world, general-interest newspapers increased the number of pages devoted to the coverage of business news and more reporters were being hired to cover this area (Williams 1988). Business and government leaders, as well as their lieutenants, were sometimes regarded as celebrities, enjoying frequent coverage on the regular news pages and in the growing number of gossip columns in the local papers. During this period, real estate developer Donald Trump often made the front page of the Daily News. Fascination with this business figure/celebrity became so extreme that on the day after Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island on February 11, 1990, after twenty-seven years of incarceration,3 it was a story about Trump’s marital problems that dominated the front page in one edition of the Daily News. The other city papers made Mandela the biggest story of that news cycle.4 After spending a year on the business desk, I asked to be transferred to the city desk. The work in business could have sustained me professionally for a while, but the tension that existed with one of my coworkers there did not seem to be worth it when opportunities for advancement were already so limited. Although I found the idea of working on the city desk quite intimidating, I decided to attempt the move, because regardless of my comfort level with business news, being a reporter on the city desk was infinitely more prestigious. I approached the paper...

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