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By Austin Long-Scott (view Biography) "Twenty-five years ago there were 25 or so minorities in all United States newsrooms – more than 1,700 daily newspapers. Three of those 25 – three – were in the city room of The Washington Post. That was 1962. ... " We had a unique role to play, the handful of us who were black and who managed in one way or another to crack the generally rigid color line in the mainstream U.S. media in the 1960s. To the editors courageous enough to defy hundreds of years of media tradition and hire us at last, we represented access to the growing militancy of the civil rights, black power and urban rebellion movements, movements that were becoming increasingly uncomfortable to white reporters and editors. We tended to be assigned much of the time to cover either the Southern Civil Rights Movement or its Northern counterpart, the push for economic justice. We saw our work in the media as one way to uncover some of the truths that the nation needed to confront. But to many of our white colleagues, we represented little more than novel and risky experiment – whether daring, foolhardy or fascinating depended on their political views. I will never forget being told in the summer of 1961 by a union official, shortly after I became the first black reporter ever hired full time by the Associated Press, that I had better join the Wire Service Guild for my own good. You're an experiment that's being watched, Leonard Milliman told me in the AP's San Francisco bureau, and you don't want to do anything that will piss people off. Similarly, three years later in the New York City bureau, my boss told me I could not go South to report on the exploding Mississippi Freedom Summer and other parts of the Civil Rights Movement. The bulk of AP members were in the South, he explained, and editors there were already complaining that AP's coverage was too favorable to civil rights forces, and sending me would simply confirm their accusations. Bridging the Gap Many of us tried to fill a yawning chasm in the nation's journalism that most of our colleagues didn't even see. We tried to describe the impact on our people of the latest games being played in the 350-year-old national struggle to control a people as despised for their color as they were prized for their economic indispensability. Our most successful stories performed the societally wrenching service that Stokely Carmichael called "heightening the contradictions." And our white employers had a difficult time with those contradictions. In most cases, the whole truth as we knew it was not welcome. Our employers ran scared from a gap between the national preaching and practice that threatened to explode out of control. We saw it played out in the streets every day, but they had trouble accepting anything close to its full reality. Although the media managers we worked for wouldn't admit it, they wanted only that small portion of the truth which they would digest in relative comfort, without having their faith in a just and compassionate America too badly shaken. There was much bitter controversy at the time over whether the media should be doing a better job. Editors tended to argue that they were doing as much as they should, simply because they were doing as much as they could bring themselves to do. Civil rights groups soft-pedaled much of their private criticism of media performance because they so desperately needed every bit of courage to cover them that the media could muster. They needed the media to do more, but the media could hurt them even worse by backing off and doing less. So the media got all the praise and encouragement the civil rights organizers could muster. One of the Civil Rights Movement's strengths was a rather incredible lack of bitterness about what the media should have done, but didn't. Even so, it was hardly the media's finest hour. Most media institutions were dragged kicking and screaming into covering civil rights in the South, their hands forced by the pressure of events. And in the North, where The Movement took on the cosmetically less appealing form of an often hostile confrontation over economic injustice, the media seemed at times powerless to come to grips with the basic underlying issues. There were a few insightful stories that raised the level of understanding about what was going on. But there were even more stories that preyed upon fears and played upon stereotypes and reinforced aggressive and opinionated ignorance. Captives of Cultural Assumptions I didn't understand in those days how desperately all of us – whites, blacks, Americans, Chinese, you name it – cling to the cultural assumptions that form us, even in the face of opposing truths. All people are to some extent captives of the cultures we grew up in, prisoners of what we decide that we know before we're old enough to know better. And the culture of journalism would rather be on time than in depth, likes being exciting more than being insightful. To be sure, we helped our employers print and broadcast a lot more truth than they had been willing to disseminate up to that time, and we took some pride in helping to expand their woefully limited horizons. But it was not as big a dose of truth as the nation needed. That is why the Kerner Commission could say in its blistering, 1968 criticism of the media's failure to report responsibly on the racial situation in America: "By failing to portray the Negro as a matter of routine and in the context of the total society, the news media have ... contributed to the black-white schism in this country." The mainstream media's discomfort with the truth has always made a huge contribution to racism in this country. And racism is not the only societal evil which the media, for the most part, quietly accepted as not worth commenting on. The second class status of women and the myth of a classless society are others. The mainstream media, for nearly all of its history, generally went along with the pervasive segregationist agenda of the white power structure, raising few penetrating questions about whether segregation was an appropriate policy for dealing with the descendants of black people brought to this land of the free in chains to provide free labor, and to guarantee better opportunities for whites. For much of my life as a reporter, I did not understand why the media so steadfastly refused to make as deep a commitment to truth as black people knew there had to be. Those of us who were black reporters, as well as supporters who were white and every other color, debated endlessly what the reason might be. The topic generated as much passionate discussion as sex, but we never seemed to come up with definitive reasons. It would be more than a quarter-century before I would see published analyses like those of J. Herbert Altschull, whose incisive 1984 book "Agents of Power" clearly shows how U.S. media are first and foremost "an instrument to help preserve the social order." I did not see clearly – in fact I had been taught not to believe – how the conventions of American journalism, including its nearly god-like praise of "objectivity," produce a subjective definition of news that largely exempts the society's fundamental institutions from serious criticism. The Culture of Journalism There were all kinds of reasons why this was difficult to see. The media do many truly wonderful stories, and these are always trotted out as examples to counter any substantive criticism. Journalists are taught to focus on interesting and powerful people, rather than on the systems that guide and limit those people. And so the economic forces that drive so many of our social and political attitudes get reduced to sound bites about who is the best person for the job. It took me a long time to see how individual journalists whose independence and individual commitment allows them to beat the system are overwhelmed by the ability of those in positions of political, economic and social power to masterfully manipulate the media for their own ends. For years my overriding goal was to be one of those "beat the system" reporters. And while I had some success at that, I did not understand how huge a giant I had chosen to fight. What the Robert Hutchins Commission wrote in an important 1947 report titled "A Free and Responsible Press" is still not adequately addressed by the media today: "Too much of the regular output of the press consists of a miscellaneous succession of stories and images which have no relation to the typical lives of real people anywhere. The result is a meaningless, flatness, distortion, and the perpetuations of misunderstanding. ...The press emphasizes the exceptional rather than the representative, the sensational rather than the significant. The press is preoccupied with these incidents to such an extent that the citizen is not supplied the information and discussion he needs to discharge his responsibilities to the community." There were so few blacks in the mainstream media in the 1960s that most of us either knew each other, or knew of each other. We used to laugh rather bitterly about how so many of our white colleagues called us by each other's names. But we were in fact quite different individuals, and we handled the difficult and frustrating parts of our jobs in very different ways. Some of us looked at the good we were achieving, focused on the positive, and tried harder. Even though the stories we told were exciting, and focused a lot on the cutting edge of social change, the situation was tough and frustrating for all of us. I like to say that people like Bob Maynard, Earl Caldwell, Dorothy Gilliam, me, Wally Terry, Tom Johnson, Paul Delaney, John Dotson, Claude Lewis and a number of others were the first generation of black reporters in mainstream media who had substantial support from other black reporters. There were a very few black reporters in mainstream media before us, people like Ted Poston, but not in the numbers required to build an effective support network. And most of us knew that we needed each other's support. Being black in the white media made it hard to stay sane, because the cultural assumptions that our view of events depended upon, cultural assumptions that were an integral part of life in black communities all over the nation, were constantly being openly challenged by white editors and reporters who refused to accept our perceptions. They either did not know, or refused to look at, the facts of black life. And they used their ignorance to construct a belief system that denied our experience because it was not their experience. Catching Hell It wasn't just that our editors were not ready to hear all that we had to say, although that was an important part of it. We caught hell from our white employers if we let too many of our thoughts and feelings show. They felt threatened when we pointed out the racism in their news coverage and in their personnel policies. They wrapped themselves in the cultures they grew up in and felt comfortable with, and felt threatened by other cultures, a bad attitude for journalists. They were visibly uncomfortable when we brought our cultures to work with us. I guess they expected us to leave our "natch'l" black individuality at home. We also caught hell from white strangers. I would pick up a ringing telephone at the New York City bureau of The Associated Press, and hear some white person who never dreamed that my articulate, soft, non-accented voice belonged to someone black, go off about the niggers. We caught hell from our white colleagues too. A quiet, gentle friend of mine, newly hired onto the night city desk of the Los Angeles Times in the 60s, had to listen to grizzled desk veterans sit around on quiet nights swapping racist jokes in loud voices to make sure he overheard. And we caught hell from blacks. When I covered many of the major Northern riots between 1964 and 1969, I always ran with the crowds of black people on the streets, while with very few exceptions, the white reporters stayed behind police lines. I figured that my way produced more truth. One day in Jersey City, N.J. after helmeted police advanced and pinned my crowd inside the cyclone fence around a housing project, three of us black reporters were cornered by an articulate young street dude who focused all his frustrations on us. You don't know what it's like here! Why are you traitors to your own people? Why don't you print the truth? We talked our way out of what could have been a nasty confrontation, but I knew the honest answer was not acceptable. Except under the rarest of conditions, journalism is at best a compromise. You get to put some of your perceptions in your stories, and your editors get to put some of their perceptions in your stories. My editors, and a lot of the AP member subscribers, weren't yet ready to print the truth. We also caught hell from ourselves. There were days when we were enormously proud of injecting into an important story a measure of truth and perspective that we knew would not have been there had it not been for us. And there were days when it seemed that nothing we could say or do would make any difference to an ignorant, insensitive media machine that steamrollered forward on its own self-serving agenda, regardless of what was really happening out there. A poet who spends part of her life living homeless on the streets of Berkeley talked once about why her poetry is able to reach people who are comfortably well off, and help them feel what it's like to live on the streets. "I'm in two worlds, that's what allows me to communicate out," she said. "When you're entirely in one world, you lose the ability to communicate with the other one." We black journalists were trying to bridge two worlds, and there were days when we got kicked in the teeth by both... |