The Media in Black and White

Everette E. Dennis, Everette Dennis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138536746
• eBook ISBN: 9781351303460
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The media's treatment of and interaction with race, like race itself, is one of the most sensitive areas hi American society. Whether hi its coverage and treatment of racial matters or racial connections inside media organizations themselves, mass communication is deeply involved with race. The Media in Black and White brings together twenty journalists and scholars, of various racial backgrounds, to grapple with a controversial issue: the role that media industries, from advertising to newspapers to the information superhighway, play in helping Americans understand race.

Contributors include Ellis Cose, a contributing editor for Newsweek; Manning Marable, chairman of Columbia University's African-American Research Center; William Wong, a columnist for the Oakland Tribune; Lisa Penaloza, a University of Illinois professor; and Melita Marie Garza, a Chicago Tribune reporter. Among the topics discussed are: the quality of reporting on immigrant issues; how sensationalism may be deepening the chasm of misunderstanding between the races; how the coverage of America's drug wars has been marked by racism; and whether politically correct language is interfering with coverage of vital issues and problems.

The contributors of The Media in Black and White hope to broaden the narrow vision of the United States and the world beyond with their contributions to the debate over race and the media. The commentary found hi this important work will be of interest to sociologists, communication specialists, and black studies scholars.

I

Reviewing the American Melting Pot

1

Seething in Silence—The News in Black and White

Ellis Cose

For reporters, race can be a treacherous subject, raising questions that go to the heart of the journalist’s craft. Is objectivity (or even fairness) possible when dealing with people from different racial groups and cultural backgrounds? Can any of us be trusted to make sense of lives essentially alien to our own? Does “getting it right” mean anything more virtuous than conforming to prevailing prejudice?

Journalists are inclined to believe that a good eye and an unbiased heart can ensure essential accuracy, regardless of the personal (or racial) baggage one brings to the table. Yet as Ben Bagdikian notes in his classic The Media Monopoly, “News, like all human observations, is not truly objective.... Human scenes described by different individuals are seen with differences.” Arguably, no differences loom larger than those connected with ethnicity and race.

Anyone doubting the polarizing potential of race in America (and be-yond) need look no farther than the typical American newsroom. Last year, in attempting to assess the impact of race on American lives, the Akron Beacon Journal also took a look at itself. With nine white and eight black journalists, the paper formed two separate focus groups. What it quickly discovered was that although all of the participants worked at the same institution, they saw it quite differently. The blacks, by and large, believed that the deck was stacked against them. Despite the fact that the publisher was an African American, many felt that the real control resided in the hands of whites who understood neither them nor their community.

In contrast, the white journalists at the Beacon Journal felt that blacks (and black issues) were receiving special treatment. As the paper’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning report observed, whites at the paper felt a “constant pressure... to bend over backward to embrace minority perspectives.” Indeed, anxiety among whites seemed even higher than among blacks. And practically everyone—regardless of race—seemed fearful of speaking their minds. Whites feared being censured as politically in-correct; blacks fretted over repercussions that might affect their careers if they dared to complain about racism.

Responses of focus groups comprised of ordinary citizens were strikingly similar to those of the journalists. The Beacon Journal found that while blacks saw racism as a constant in their lives, whites felt that racism (especially institutional racism) had largely been eliminated. The paper also discovered that people had a hard time talking honestly about race, and everyone—regardless of race—seemed troubled and frustrated by the pressures that race questions imposed on their lives. As the Beacon Journal report put it, “Whites are tired of hearing about it. Blacks wish it would go away. All seem powerless to move it.” The paper went on to observe, “The typical white American will go to great lengths simply to avoid the subject. And that skittishness may be getting in the way of solutions.”

Journalists, of course, are supposed to be different from ordinary citizens, at least when it comes to confronting difficult truths. But race, it seems, can make cowards of us all. It is not merely cowardice, however, that makes honest racial dialogue difficult. The difficulty also derives from the fact that perceptions vary radically as a function of race—or, more accurately, as a function of the very different experiences members of various racial groups have endured.

In the past two years (since the massive riots in Los Angeles), a number of major newspapers have produced impressive in-depth reports on race relations in America. The narratives are uniformly somber and, in some respects, dispiriting. The Chicago Sun-Times focused on what it called the “great divide,” and presented an extensive poll documenting just how wide that divide has become. The Indianapolis Star, sounding a similar theme, quoted a local minister who said, “There are no race relations. We are two different communities in two different worlds that hardly have anything to do with each other.”

In its seven-month series, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans traced American (and its own city’s) race relations from slavery to modern times and concluded with a forceful and sober editorial:

We live separately. Worship separately. We stand apart, frozen that way by the mythical but overpowering thing called race, America’s arbitrary, color-coded system of defining, dividing and oppressing. It is a painful fact, so much so that we can scarcely talk about it. But we must.

During the past seven months, the Times-Picayune has tried to do that with its series “Together Apart: The Myth of Race.” We have done so with the abiding belief that our quality of life and the very future of our community depend on that dialogue.... Through two years of research, hundreds of interviews, dozens of stories and pictures and thousands of callers’ comments, this newspaper has tried to show that any meaningful solution we might propose... must begin with a simple, yet monumental conversation.

The editorial went on to observe and confess: “It’s a queasy undertaking, talking about race. Especially when your own house is not in order.” Indeed, as the Times-Picayune worked through the questions raised by the series, it found its own staff to be a microcosm of the divisions it detailed in greater New Orleans. In order to help it resolve the difficult internal issues, the newspaper brought in outside “diversity” experts to work intensively with its newsroom staff. Sig Gissler, a Freedom Forum Media Studies Center senior fellow who examined the Times-Picayune case, likens the process to an organization going into exhaustive group psychotherapy.

Few news organizations are prepared to go to the trouble and expense of putting their staffs on the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch. Yet, without some artificial form of intervention, America’s newsrooms seem destined to remain divided along racial lines.

In an attempt to explore life across those lines, the Indianapolis Star sent several black and white reporters into places or situations where persons of their race were not normally found. Some reporters went on interracial “dates.” Some visited each other’s homes, an experience that led one white reporter, Bill Theobald, to admit, “My views about race have mostly been formed by thinking, by reading or by talking to whites. Talking to blacks about the subject is uncomfortable. I don’t know how to ask the questions; perhaps I am afraid of the answers.”

Such soul-searching was doubtlessly healthy for the Star, but the fact that it took a newspaper series to get veteran journalists to emerge from their cocoons is not exactly reassuring. Yet Theobald’s relative racial isolation appears to be the norm in the news business, and that isolation goes a long way toward explaining why the perspectives of black and white journalists are often very far apart.

The National Association of Black Journalists’ 1993 Muted Voices study was in large measure a testimonial to the existence of that perceptual gap. The survey of the NABJ members and white managers found that the two groups see the world from such different vantage points that it is difficult to believe they work in the same industry, much less in the same newsrooms. Seventy-three percent of the NABJ members polled thought blacks were less likely than other journalists to advance; only 2 percent of the white managers felt that way. Most of the black journalists surveyed thought blacks were forced to spend more time than whites in entry-level positions. Only 2 percent of the managers thought so. Question after question yielded similar results, and although the NABJ survey compared white management to black staffers, it’s a good bet that much the same would have been found if the researchers had polled whites and blacks of more equal status.

A 1991 Ohio University job-satisfaction survey found that white journalists, by and large, believed that whites were at a significant disadvantage in newsrooms. Two-thirds of the white respondents thought minorities received preferential treatment, and one-third believed that minorities received more opportunities than whites.

“At the present time, my newspaper discriminates on the basis of race and sex,” one respondent wrote. “White males need not apply or expect to be treated the same as others in the newsroom.”

As the poll clearly documents, the sense of disadvantage among white journalists is widespread, even as minority journalists continue to complain that they are the ones discriminated against—though these complaints, typically, are not voiced aloud. The NABJ survey found, for instance, that one-third of the black respondents were afraid to raise racial issues out of fear that to do so would damage their careers.

A decade ago, management consultant Edward W. Jones conducted a massive three-year research project looking at blacks in corporate America and published the results in a 1986 article in the Harvard Business Re- view. Like NABJ’s pollsters, Jones found an overwhelming sense among blacks that life, for them, was grossly unfair: 98 percent said that subtle prejudice pervaded their companies, and 90 percent reported a “climate of support” worse than that for their white peers. Eighty-four percent said that their race had worked to their disadvantage when it came to ratings, pay, assignments, recognition, appraisals and promotion. Fewer than 10 percent reported an atmosphere at work in which open discussion of racial issues was promoted. Conversely, when Jones talked to white management at the firms, he found that whites saw a markedly different picture: Indeed, they saw their firms as bastions of tolerance, places that were essentially color-blind.

Jones threw his hands up at the perceptual discrepancies, concluding that regardless of whose perceptions were correct “by some impossible objective standard,” the corporations had a serious problem. When I spoke with him in 1992 while conducting research for my book The Rage of a Privileged Class, he had concluded that the workplace race situation was worse than ever: Blacks in corporations were not only still suffering but “some of us are losing hope,” he said. “The psychological casualty rate is very high.”

It’s impossible to calculate the magnitude of any “psychological casualty rate.” What is obvious, however, is that muting expression carries a price, not only psychologically, but journalistically. Moreover, as management consultant Jones says, “How the heck do we solve something we can’t talk about?”

Yet, if the results of the myriad focus groups, surveys and private testimony that have been conducted on this issue are to be believed, journalists are fearful of honesty. The image of journalists as reticent, fearful communicators doesn’t easily square with the stereotype of loud-mouthed reporters unafraid of saying whatever pops into their head. Yet, if neither white nor black journalists feel comfortable talking about race, it’s unlikely that preconceptions will be seriously questioned in the press, and it’s inevitable that racial coverage will be driven largely by timorousness or hackneyed tradition.

In this age of political correctness, complaints of timid coverage are not difficult to find, whether it’s white journalists griping about having to cater to minorities in Akron, or conservatives accusing the New York Times of being overly respectful of gays. Yet, even if we assume the complaints are valid, the conventional approach to racial coverage is not a satisfactory alternative. For conventional coverage, as a number of researchers have shown, tends to disparage minorities.

Robert Entman of Northwestern University, for instance, notes that a disproportionate share of TV news and reality-based programming depicts minorities in stereotypical ways. Large numbers of African Americans and Latinos, he says, are cast as victims or victimizers of society, but few (in contrast to whites) are pictured as productive citizens.

The preponderance of such images, argues Entman, may have serious effects. For, in a country that remains largely segregated, whites’ notions of what it means to be black and Latino are derived largely from what they see on television. And the picture they get, claims Entman, is of an inner city “dominated by dangerous and irresponsible minorities.” In his analysis of coverage in the Chicago area, Entman found that white victims of crime were given more airtime than black victims; yet black assailants were given more extensive coverage than their numbers merited. The result, says Entman, is a picture of a society “in which minorities, especially blacks and to a lesser extent Latinos, play a heavy role in causing violence but make little contribution toward helping society cope with it.”

Looking over Entman’s research took me back to my days as a young writer and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Late one Saturday night I was in the newsroom when word of a murder came from the reporter at police headquarters. Upon hearing the sketchy details, the man who was working the city desk slot hollered back to the rewrite man taking the reporter’s call, “Is it a good address?”

No one in the newsroom had to ask what that question meant. We all understood that a good address was one that was affluent and white— perhaps on Chicago’s Gold Coast, or in one of its ritzier suburbs. It went without saying that a tragedy in such a community was worth more ink than a tragedy in one that was not white and not wealthy. I don’t recall the answer to the slot man’s question, but the question itself has haunted me for some 20 years, for it sums up an essential part of conventional journalism’s point of view.

Today, though we live in a world (as we constantly remind ourselves) that is increasingly multicultural, much of conventional journalism remains fixated on the lives of the white and the wealthy. I was reminded of that in 1994, when one of my issues of New York magazine arrived. It featured an article that purported to identify the best places to find any number of products and services one might search for in New York City. I was struck by the fact that in a city that is a virtual United Nations—it is said that more than 119 languages and dialects are spoken in New York—practically every face attached to the magazine’s recommendations was white. Clearly, New York, as viewed by the magazine’s editors, remains a very white place.

The alternative to such one-sided coverage need not necessarily amount to twisting the news into a politically correct caricature of reality. But achieving better and more balanced journalism ultimately depends on having journalists who are wise enough and varied enough to see the world in its true complexity. Certainly, the news world is closer to that ideal than it was in, say, 1978. That was the year when the American Society of Newspaper Editors pledged that the industry’s newsroom demographics would mirror the country’s by the end of the century.

Every year since then, ASNE has compiled statistics that show slow progress toward that goal (albeit, not enough progress to provide much hope that it will be reached). Most recently, the percentage of minority journalists in U.S. newspaper newsrooms was computed at 10.49. (The U.S. population is approaching 25 percent minority.) At certain large papers, the percentage is considerably higher: Just over 17 percent of the newsroom work force at newspapers of over 500,000 daily circulation are members of minority groups, as were 24 percent of all first-time journalist hires and 39 percent of newsroom interns over the last year.

That some segments of the newspaper industry take the diversity effort seriously is apparent not only from the new hiring statistics, but from the high-profile involvement of the Newspaper Association of America. In January 1992, the American Newspaper Publishers Association (now the Newspaper Association of America) brought together the heads of several of the nation’s biggest newspaper companies. Summit conveners named a host of committees to work on various aspects of diversity. They also embraced (and broadened) ASNE’s hiring goals, encouraging newspapers to achieve “work force parity with respect to women and minorities within their markets, including all levels of management, by the year 2000 or sooner.”

As with ASNE, however, the NAA has been plagued by questions about the seriousness of its quest and about the odds of success. At a second summit meeting in December of 1992, James Batten, chairman of Knight-Ridder Inc., grappled with those questions. “I think we all understand that NAA is not in a position to compel anybody to do anything,” he said. “Our power, to the degree that we have power, comes from our ability to experiment, our ability to persuade. It comes from our ability to encourage, to educate, with maybe a touch of inspiration here and there.”

It was probably as good an answer as he could have given. For the fact is that, for all the activity around the summits, NAA and the other industry organizations don’t have the final word. What ultimately happens in newsrooms across America has much less to do with what NAA (or any trade organization) says than with what a myriad of individual editors and publishers decide. Setting industry goals is primarily an exercise in symbolism. This is not to say that taking such a stand doesn’t have an impact. It does. Among other things, it serves to legitimize the goal of newsroom integration. And, though newspapers are far from seeing the goals achieved, they are further along that route than the other major players in the news business. Television, outside major urban areas, is not a particularly integrated enterprise. And mainstream magazine staffs remain, for the most part, overwhelmingly white.

Yet, for all the attentio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I Reviewing the American Melting Pot
• Part II Covering America
• Part III Issues, Debates and Dilemmas
• Part IV A Media Industry Status Report
• Part V Books
• For Further Reading
• Index