Atlanta Paper Accused

Author Details Efforts to “Bowdlerize” Race Series

The reporter who uncovered a 60-year pattern of expelling African Americans from communities around the country and wrote a series about it last year says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the flagship of the newspaper company he works for, tried to undermine what he produced.

In a book scheduled to arrive in retail stores by March 5, Elliot Jaspin quotes his boss, the Cox Newspapers Washington bureau chief, Andy Alexander, speaking of Julia Wallace, editor of the Atlanta newspaper.

“Wallace’s refusal to run the series rankled Alexander,” Jaspin wrote. “‘I think we both know what’s going on here,’ he told me in frustration at one point. ‘They are afraid of angering white people.'”

The book, “Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America,” builds upon the four-part “Leave or Die” series Jaspin wrote last year.

The series was sponsored by Cox’s Austin American-Statesman in Texas, and also ran in the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union; the Journal-News in Hamilton, Ohio; the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post; the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News; the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer and the Middletown (Ohio) Journal.

Using computer-assisted reporting, Jaspin documented that, “Beginning in 1864 and continuing for approximately 60 years, whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions. They drove thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white,” as he wrote in the first installment.

One of those communities was Forsyth County, Ga., which is part of the Journal-Constitution’s circulation area. In 1987, the county drew national attention, including a tense visit by Oprah Winfrey for her television show, after whites attacked a biracial brotherhood march.

According to Jaspin, who still works in the Cox Washington bureau, the Journal-Constitution has consistently soft-pedaled the racism in Forsyth County in its reporting. For him, that soft-pedaling was part of the story.

The book quotes David Pasztor, an editor at the Austin American-Statesman who was among the team of Cox editors who oversaw the project: “Why are [we] pounding on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for being apologists who look at race relations in Forsyth County through rose colored glasses? The reason we are doing that is because the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have been apologists who look at the race relations in Forsyth County through rose colored glasses. It’s just true.”

Yet, in what the author calls a clear conflict of interest, the Journal-Constitution was allowed to vet the series before it ran.

“The stories I had written were edited to obscure the Atlanta newspaper’s lackadaisical coverage of race. Editors ignored clear conflicts of interest while editing the racial cleansing series. Procedures designed to protect the integrity of the reporting process were dispensed with. And finally the head of the company’s newspaper division overrode the judgment of editors in Austin and Washington and ordered that a different term be substituted for ‘racial cleansings.’ It is a cautionary tale about the lingering shame that trumps honest discussion of the full history of America’s racial cleansings,” Jaspin wrote.

The book discusses more palatable reasons put forward to explain the expulsion of blacks from Forsyth County, in which the land was not stolen from African Americans, but instead had been “purchased.” These are “legends” he said the Journal-Constitution passed along to readers.

“When members of the black community objected to this shoddy reporting, the newspaper did not respond,” Jaspin says of the paper’s coverage of the 1987 events in Forsyth.

Jaspin, 60, was co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for local specialized reporting in 1979, while at the Pottsville (Pa.) Republican. In 1989 he founded the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. He grew up in the all-white New York suburb of Baldwin, Long Island, and went to Colby College in nearly all-white Maine.

Copies of his series were sent to Hank Klibanoff, managing editor for news at the Atlanta paper, for his examination. “I do not for a minute wish we were doing it,” Klibanoff is quoted as remarking by e-mail.

After consultations involving Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin newspaper; Oppel’s managing editor, Fred Zipp; John Erickson, Dayton project editor, and others, a “bowdlerized” version of the series was produced, Jaspin writes.

“If all the deletions, revisions, and omissions were intended to mollify the Atlanta editors, they failed,” the book says. “In late May, Julia Wallace, the newspaper’s executive editor, told Alexander that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution would not publish a single word of the series. As Alexander explained it to me, Wallace felt that there was nothing new in what I had written. Alexander also said she had doubts about my credibility, raising the specter that I was a zealot.”

Neither Zipp, Alexander or Wallace responded to requests from Journal-isms for comment on Wednesday. However, Klibanoff, who is co-author of “The Race Beat,” a critically acclaimed book on reporting during the civil rights era, was asked last summer why the Journal-Constitution did not run the series. He said then that the paper had already reported the information over the years.

Erickson, whose Dayton paper did run parts of the series, said, “I thought what we ran was very interesting. Elliot is a good friend. He was very close to this story and I’m sorry to hear that he was unhappy with it — but these things happen in journalism.”

Cox lawyers called Basic Books, Jaspin’s publisher, to question whether it had the right to use material he had gathered without a formal agreement, Jaspin wrote.

“My guess that Cox would use its legal staff to attack the book now seemed prescient,” Jaspin said.

“As if to underscore the company’s point, the next day Alexander told me after fourteen years as an editor I was being demoted to reporter.”

Jaspin’s book calls Cox Newspapers a “good corporate citizen” with racial diversity a corporation-wide goal.

But, he writes, “The failure here runs deeper than a breakdown in institutional checks and balances. The failure is one that mirrors a larger problem of American society. Despite the company’s good-faith efforts over a period of years to promote diversity, it is striking that everyone involved in the key decisions regarding the series was white.

“A century earlier, segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial cleansings had established a white man’s country. And one of the legacies of this white hegemony was an all-white group of managers who, in un-self-conscious irony, now grappled with how to talk about America’s history of racial cleansing. It is not that the people in Cox Newspapers are racists. They are not. But it is hard not to wonder if these same people would have reached the same conclusions if one among them had been black.

“What diversity brings to the table is more than the self-congratulatory affirmation that we are all equal. It brings people who can speak with an authority informed by a different past to challenge the conventional wisdom. Would it have made any difference in this case? We have no way of knowing. Yet it leads to another question: Having recounted the entire history of burnings, killings, and terror, could any white person in good faith tell any black person that these were not racial cleansings?”

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Two Editors Reply to Author’s Allegations

Julia Wallace, editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Andy Alexander, Washington bureau chief of Cox Newspapers, responded on Thursday to Elliot Jaspin’s book chapter on the handling of his series.

Wallace said:

“This is a topic that is familiar to us at the Atlanta Journal- Constitution. There have been protests, reparations discussions and state investigations of the tragic issue of blacks being forced from their land at the turn of the century.

“We read the series, questioning what new ground would be paved in this story. As we went through the editing process, we had more fundamental questions about selective use of facts and interpretations. In the end, we didn’t believe the series answered enough of the questions we raised. Those are the kinds of decisions we make every day on whether to publish stories. To suggest we are afraid of tackling the tough subjects flies in the face of the work we do.

“At the time we are accused of hiding Forsyth County’s past, we were reporting on discriminatory lending practices against minorities and exposing a long-forgotten murder of two black couples 46 years earlier. To suggest the decision not to run the series was made by white executives is untrue. I asked a diverse group of my top editors to review the series before I decided not to publish.

“Every day, we make judgment calls on what we print and what we don’t print. This series did not meet our standards because of questions we didn’t believe were answered adequately.”

Alexander said:

“I should not have said there were concerns about angering white readers. Often, things are said in the heat of the editing process that are untrue. Julia long ago gave me her reasons for not running the project and I accept them.

“I find the charges in Jaspin’s book sad and very difficult to understand. The Washington bureau of Cox Newspapers made a huge commitment for Jaspin to spend more than five years on the project. It was published in our ‘partnering’ newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, at extraordinary length, filling roughly 16 full pages on consecutive Sundays spanning a month last summer. It was supplemented with an ambitious Website where anyone can still read every word of the series (http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/news/interactives/lod/index.html).

“In the end, we were disappointed that Jaspin, then hard at work on his book, rejected our efforts to give the series even more exposure.

“Jaspin didn’t like the editing process. That’s our job as editors, to challenge every fact and theory to see how to best write a story. After more than five years of work, our readers would expect no less. Ultimately, other Cox newspapers ran portions of the series but Atlanta passed. It is a rare occurrence when all newspapers in a chain publish the same material. Every newspaper makes its own decisions about what to run.” [Added Feb. 22]

• Elliot Jaspin rejects editors’ response [Added Feb. 22]

[The Cox Newspaper Response

[Posted by Elliot Jaspin on Feb 22, 2007

[The responses by Julia Wallace and Andrew Alexander do not dispute a single fact in my book. Wallace claims she did not print the series on racial cleansing because of factual problems. What these problems are she never says. Alexander, on the other hand, argues that Cox spent a lot of time and money on the newspaper series, a fact that is absolutely true and completely beside the point.

[The uncontested facts are that the Cox editors openly discussed among themselves the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s shoddy reporting but would not print what they knew. The AJC editors were told repeatedly that their coverage of the Forsyth racial cleansing contained numerous errors but to this day they have refused to correct the public record. Cox editors, who edited the series, had serious conflicts of interests, which they ignored. The top management could not bring itself to use the term “racial cleansing.”

[In the end, the AJC did not print a single word from my series about racial cleansings in America even though the Forsyth County expulsion occurred on the newspaper’s doorstep.

[The public was ill-served.]

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Movie Version of Series Heading for Theaters, PBS

The story uncovered by Elliot Jaspin is compelling not only as investigative reporting, but also because “the power of this historical story . . . really had not been told,” Oriana Zill de Granados, productions director at the Center for Investigative Reporting told Journal-isms last year. The center helped Jaspin land his contract with Basic Books, and it coproduced a 90-minute documentary based on his findings, “Banished,” which debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival.

“Reaching across different platforms” — newspapers, books, film — “really magnifies the power of the story,” Zill said.

The documentary is directed by Marco Williams, who produced and directed the 2003 award-winning “Two Towns of Jasper,” about the 1998 racially motivated murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas.

“It will appear at the True/False Film Festival (St. Louis) and the Miami International Film Festival in early March,” Zill told Journal-isms on Wednesday.

“We are hoping to have a limited release in some theatres over the summer and the film will be on PBS in the fall 2007 or winter 2008, presented by ITVS, the Independent Television Service. An aggressive outreach campaign is currently being planned to get the film into communities and foster discussions about the issues of reconciliation and reparations.”

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A “Cinderella Story” Behind George Polk Awards

“This year’s George Polk Awards includes a Cinderella story,” Mark Fitzgerald wrote Tuesday in Editor & Publisher.

“Among the elite newspapers, broadcast news organizations and documentary-makers honored with the highly coveted journalism honor is the Lakefront Outlook, an eight-year-old weekly given out free in the historic Chicago African American neighborhood of Bronzeville.

“While other Polk awardees count their newsroom by the dozens and hundreds, the Outlook staff consists of Editor Brian Wellner — who divides his time also putting out the long-established Hyde Park Herald — plus four reporters and a sightless intern who proved invaluable in nailing down critical points in the winning investigative articles. The 11,000-distribution paper hardly has the mass audience of Spike Lee, the film maker whose HBO series ‘When The Levees Broke’ won a Polk for television documentary.

“The Outlook won the Polk Award for local reporting for a three-part series that extensively documented how a powerful long-time Chicago alderman had turned a cultural center meant to symbolize the rebirth of Bronzeville into a rarely-used venue that bleeds money while serving mostly as a source of jobs and contracts for her family and political friends.

“‘The (Outlook) team exposed the (Harold Washington Cultural Center) as a money-losing operation that was staffed by (Third Ward Alderman Dorothy) Tillman’s family, friends and political cronies,” the Polk Award announcement noted.

“Since the series ran in December, it has transformed the political dynamics. Tillman, who has been on the Chicago City Council for more than 20 years, is in the political fight of her life in the Feb. 27 non-partisan aldermanic elections.”

Among the other winners were former Los Angeles Times staffer Usha Lee McFarling who, with Kenneth R. Weiss, wrote a five-part report in the Times, “Altered Oceans,” exposing the effects of pollution.

McFarling is a 1989 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists.

• List of winners and links to winning stories

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Detroit Reporter Relates to Obama’s Lineage

If anyone can relate to Barack Obama’s parentage and the debate it has inspired, it is Alex P. Kellogg, reporter for the Detroit Free Press.

“My mother is white American and my father Ethiopian,” Kellogg told Free Press readers in a column on Tuesday.

“A lot of hot air is being blown over whether presidential hopeful Barack Obama is African American. As Obama’s father was Kenyan and his mother white American, he is literally African American. . . . Like Obama, I started to identify as African American as an adolescent — years after the decision had already been made for me by the rest of the world.”

Kellogg told Journal-isms he writes regularly for the American Prospect and his work has appeared in other publications, including an upcoming anthology. “I also worked as a journalist in East Africa for three years, mostly in Kenya. The irony is there I was essentially considered white because I was defined there by what I was not (full black in a mostly black country). Here, of course, it was the opposite, but for much the same reasons,” he said.

“There’s no more accepting community than the African American community in the U.S. though, and this faux debate over Barack’s racial background is just a smokescreen being blown by opportunists looking to peddle a negative perspective. It’s ironic that some of those who’ve said Barack isn’t black — Stanley Crouch for example — have been labeled Uncle Toms time and again. You’d think they wouldn’t want to welcome such hairsplitting having heard the ‘you’re not black’ accusation themselves.

“I felt compelled to write about this because I’d seen very little response to Debra Dickerson and Crouch and other ‘black activists’ who were talking so much bull. . . basically. It’s sad to see black ‘leaders’ shoot themselves, and the race, in the foot. What good does it do to reject Barack? It doesn’t make him white of course either. And if he’s neither, he faces much the same existential dilemma Ellison fictionalized in his classic, ‘Invisible Man.’

“I think black people my age — 29 — think so much differently than these older black folks who are allegedly talking all this nonsense about Barack,” Kellogg continued. “Really, as far as I can tell, nobody is debating this at all though. Thus it’s just a media construction. It’s time to emphasize the many positive aspects of the African American community, like the living and breathing embrace so many receive from it. That’s what’s worth celebrating.”

• Claude Lewis, Philadelphia Inquirer: Obama represents a new generation
• Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: Authentic Obama
• Bennett Roth and Kristen Mack, Houston Chronicle: Obama faces an uphill fight for Houston’s black vote, too

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Short Takes

• “NBA All-Star Weekend in Vegas was an unmitigated failure, and any thoughts of taking the extravaganza to New Orleans in 2008 are total lunacy,” sports columnist Jason Whitlock wrote on AOL Sports. NBA Commissioner “David Stern seriously needs to consider moving the event out of the country for the next couple of years in hopes that young, hip-hop hoodlums would find another event to terrorize. Taking the game to Canada won’t do it. The game needs to be moved overseas, someplace where the Bloods and Crips and hookers and hoes can’t get to it without a passport and plane ticket.”
• The PBS premiere of the documentary alleging that hip-hop has been hijacked and degraded by commercial interests, “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” received “extremely positive” responses, Dennis Palmieri, spokesman for Independent Television Service and “Independent Lens,” told Journal-isms. About 100 PBS affiliates, or one-third, showed it on Tuesday, with others planning to show it later this week. Creator Byron Hurt continues to make media appearances, and the program is already available on DVD, Palmieri said.
• College students whose parties include offensive portayals of Latinos provide a teaching opportunity, Rafael Olmeda, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, said Tuesday on CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now.” “We actually analyze network news coverage and we find that year after year, the images that we see on the network news are not reflective of the whole of Latino culture. So it really shouldn’t surprise us all that much when we see people acting this way when they make fun of us. . . . in a lot of ways, they don’t know any other images of us. So it’s something that in the media we can do something about,” Olmeda said. The discussion was prompted by a “South of the Border” party at Santa Clara University.
• Barry Gewen, a longtime editor at the New York Times Book Review, said Tuesday that his publication isnâ??t â??doing the outreach they shouldâ?? in order to recruit more women and minorities to the staff, according to Malcom A. Glenn, writing Wednesday in the Harvard Crimson. Gewen said he didnâ??t want to pursue potential staffers strictly for diversityâ??s sake: â??’Looking for reviewers of a certain ethnicity simply because of an ethnicity makes me a little squeamish,’ Gewen, a 17-year veteran of the Book Review, said.”
• “Alternatives to the College Admissions Game,” a seven-part series airing Feb. 22-25 throughout NPR News programs, “features interviews with university presidents and deans from schools across the country and reports from NPR News journalists in Massachusetts, Tennessee, New York, Florida and Washington. Reporters Larry Abramson, Margot Adler, Audie Cornish, Wendy Kaufman and Tovia Smith talk with university presidents about the frenzy induced by college rankings and their attempts to curb it; and with African-American high school students in Nashville, TN, who are weighing whether or not to apply to historically black colleges and universities,” a news release said.
• “An image campaign breaking this week prescribes a daily dose of NBC Universal-owned Hispanic cable channel Mun2 to prevent bilingual, bicultural young Latinos from becoming too much like gringos. Like a lot of the irreverent work from highly creative U.S. Hispanic shop La Comunidad, Miami, the ads may offend some. Three humorous commercials ask the question ‘Are you becoming too gringo?’ and recommend Mun2’s music videos and TV shows as a cure,” Laurel Wentz reported on Tuesday in Advertising Age.
• “Let us bury Chief Illiniwek, not praise him,” Dawn Turner Trice wrote Monday in the Chicago Tribune. “As a University of Illinois alum, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see him go and the controversy along with him.” Tim Giago wrote Monday in his “Notes from Indian Country” column, “I will consider America grown up when it finally determines that to name a professional football team ‘Redskins’ after the color of a people’s skin is one of the last bastions of racial prejudice in this country.”