Metro Seven: What the Media Were Saying

Also see:

• The Washington Post’s Metro 7
• The Washington Post’s Metro Seven (con’t) — the documents

Media coverage of the 1972 complaint filed by young black reporters against the Washington Post before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

first column: whites too) and started his own newspaper.

No matter how much is done or not done . . .

second column: columns are another matter, of course. Too many younger journalists get so involved with their own in- . . .

third column: These blacks complain of “The lack of black participation in shaping of the news reported by one of America’s most prestigious newspapers, is to us an insult to the black community of this city and an insult to black Americans around the country.” I have always thought that it was a newspaper’s duty to report the facts, not to shape the news. There is too much shaping now. What would the blacks do? Have no adverse black news and all hate-whitey propaganda?

OTIS McCORMICK.

last paragraph: To achieve full employment or abolish the need for it takes more fundamental measures than the equitable distribution of a.sufficient number of jobs.  But consideration of that comes later. Now we have to fear that workers will cut each other up and short-sighted managements will egg them on to do it.

second column: so many black newsmen are feeling. We’ve known that . . . 

>

interrupted paragraph: I’m not sure of all the reasons why I was fired because I never got very straight answers to my questions, but I’m reasonably sure that my being black had little to do with it, but that my being openly radical in my politics had a good deal to do with it.

There is the possibility that I was not as good a journalist as I thought, but . . .

Paul W. Valentine, Washington Post: “Post Bias In Hiring Charged” (Nov. 7, 1972) (PDF)

148220001_1

Stephen Green, Washington Post: “Post Rebuts Charge of Racial Bias” (Nov. 28, 1972) (PDF)

148294577_1 (1)