Articles Feature

Trump Forces Debate Over Nature of Racism

by richard06032

On vacation

Media Labeling of Tweets Seems Unprecedented

How Nixon Helped Finance Black Enterprise

Owners Can’t Sell Univision Fast Enough

Media Outlets Ignoring English-Speaking Latinos

No Clear Winner Yet for Ebony Photo Archives

D.C.’s Tucker Backed ‘Good’ Quotas for Newsrooms

When the Company Doesn’t Pay for the Convention

April Ryan to Moderate NAACP Candidates Debate

Short Takes

 

 

Trump supporters chant "Send her back" at a Trump rally in Greensboro, N.C. , on Wednesday night. The chant was directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. (Credit: White House via Twitter)
Trump supporters chant “Send her back” at a Trump rally in Greensboro, N.C. , on Wednesday night. The chant was directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. (Credit: White House via Twitter)

Media Labeling of Tweets Seems Unprecedented

“Tonight’s top searches, in order:, racism, socialism, fascism, concentration camp, xenophobia, bigot,” the Merriam-Webster dictionary reported on Twitter Wednesday.

We owe that to Donald J. Trump. In what might be unprecedented, media organizations are characterizing as “racist” the president’s Sunday “go back” Twitter attack on four female members of Congress who are of color.

To some, the media are abandoning their objectivity. To others, they are finally being straightforward. Either way, it is stunning to hear repeatedly such terminology from mainstream journalists.

In his weekend tweet, Trump targeted four women elected in the 2018 “blue wave” — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. — saying they should “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came.” All four are U.S. citizens and three were born in this country.

Rather than apologize, Trump attacked Omar again at a rally Wednesday in Greensboro, N.C., and basked in the supportive chants of “send her back.”

Was he being racist?

Keith Woods (Credit: Capital Times)
Keith Woods (Credit: Capital Times)

At NPR, Mark Memmott, standards and practices editor, and Keith Woods, vice president of diversity and training, debated whether journalists should make that call. The network had decided that Trump’s tweets were indeed racism.

Merriam-Webster’s first definition of “racism” is “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”

“It’s a heavy word, it’s not one that we use on very many occasions,” (audio) Memmott said on the NPR podcast he made with Woods. “We use it sparingly. In fact, this is one of the first times we’ve used it in this context. . . .

“I think the difference this time was it was a tweet aimed at four specific individuals, four women of color, using a old racist trope, ‘Go back to your home country,’ very blatantly, and we wanted just to be clear that it wasn’t just ‘racially charged,’ ‘racially inflamed,’ whatever,” said Memmott, who is white. “We wanted to make clear that that is an old racist phrase that was reused. . . .”

Woods, who is African American, disagreed. He replied, “If you were applying the standards that we applied to what the president said Sunday, I can’t think of how many times we ought to have referred to the language as racist, using that standard, and my overall problem is that we don’t really have a standard.

“Even what Mark articulated just now is very specific to this event and I don’t know if we had a policy that said when a thing is directed at specific human beings, who are people of color, and it borrows from an old racist trope, that that’s the moment that we call it racist;  I could live with a policy that said something as specific as that.

“But journalism has been both the perpetrator of racist language itself and covered matters of race that could easily have been called racist by my standards of racism for decades. I think that the problem here is that words like ‘racist’ come with human judgment, they’re not just descriptive; there’s a moral judgment that sits behind them, and we do not, as a society or as a medium apply them evenly with any logic at all.

“I’m not arguing this because we’re inconsistent. I’m arguing this because we sit on a very fragile credibility as a profession, different from every other profession out there. And that credibility rests in part on the view of the public that we are maintaining some distance — our judgments, our morals — some distance from the things that we’re covering.”

Memmott replied that journalists make judgments all the time.


Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, left, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, all progressive Democrats, hold a news conference Monday after being attacked by President Trump. (video)

Erik Wemple, Washington Post media critic, echoed Memmott after Fox News media commentator Howard Kurtz argued, like Woods, that journalists should leave the characterizations to others.

“My view is that readers and viewers are smart, especially when the president uses language that closely mirrors the historic ‘go back to Africa’ taunts against blacks,” Kurtz contended.

“Cover the story aggressively, lay things out, and they can make up their own minds. Don’t act like the opposition party. . . .” However, once Trump and Republican loyalists put forth an alternative explanation for Trump’s tweets, that they were about ideology, not race, Trump supporters followed suit.

“Characterizing statements and positions is a core responsibility of journalists. Using plain language to do so is imperative,” Wemple wrote. “And the media does that all the time, only with less inflammatory terms: When a politician proposes substituting government-run programs for market programs, those are socialist ideas. When a candidate proposes cutting taxes and hoping that the benefits trickle down through social classes, those are supply-side ideas. When a candidate proposes a border wall and says Mexicans must pay for it, those are hard-line immigration ideas. . . .”

Wemple also referred to a statement from Post editor Martin Baron. “The Post traditionally has been cautious in the terminology it uses to characterize individuals’ statements, because a news organization’s job is to inform its readers as dispassionately as possible. Decisions about the terminology we use are made only after a thorough discussion among senior editors.

“We had that discussion today about President Trump’s use of a longstanding slur against African Americans and other minorities. The ‘go back’ trope is deeply rooted in the history of racism in the United States. Therefore, we have concluded that ‘racist’ is the proper term to apply to the language he used Sunday.”

Ibram X. Kendi
Ibram X. Kendi

On NPR Thursday, Ibram X. Kendi, author of the forthcoming “How to Be an Antiracist,” contended, “Racist is a descriptive term. It’s a term that identifies someone based on what they’re saying or doing. And so if you’re saying something that’s racist, if you’re supporting policies that are racist, then you’re being a racist.”

As for Trump, “what makes the [‘go back’] statement racist is it conveys this idea that America, that the American is essentially white, that people of color are essentially illegal aliens.

“And any idea that suggests that American normality is white and that ‘the other’ is people of color is a racist idea because it creates this hierarchy — the true all-American is white, and other people are not. And so therefore, they have another country to go back to, while America is a white man’s country. . . . I would say, why is it that white people rarely, if ever, are told to go back to their country? . . .”

For all the talk about what speech is racist, it might help news consumers and purveyors alike to pay more attention to actions, including budget cuts and policies that have racist consequences.

On “PBS NewsHour” Thursday, Jenae Addison reported on the U.S. opioid epidemic.

It “has largely centered on white Americans, who account for roughly 80 percent of opioid overdose victims,” Addison said. “But the national attention on white victims has pushed minorities to the sidelines, even as the number of opioid-related deaths among non-whites is on the rise.

“Non-whites make up 20 percent of deaths involving prescription and non-prescription opioids in the U.S. According to recent government figures, the number is growing.

“And some experts believe the number would be even higher if minorities had the same access to health care as whites — highlighting the complex underlying racial disparities in the U.S. health care system. . . .”

How Nixon Helped Finance Black Enterprise

Robert J. Brown
Robert J. Brown

Given that Earl G. Graves Sr. was an aide to Robert F. Kennedy, one of the most prominent Democrats of the 1960s, it might be difficult to believe that Graves financed his Black Enterprise magazine with the help of Richard M. Nixon, Republican president and Kennedy family antagonist.

But that’s what happened, according to a new book by Robert J. Brown, a businessman who became Nixon’s go-to man on black affairs.

Black Enterprise was founded in 1970, the same year as Essence magazine. Both were firsts. Black Enterprise became the pre-eminent magazine about black business, and Essence the same for black women.

In “You Can’t Go Wrong Doing Right: How a Child of Poverty Rose to the White House and Helped Change the World,” Brown, 84, writes, “We took a lot of flak from Democrats and other skeptics who claimed Nixon didn’t care about black America.

“Still, even some die-hard Democrats knew that blacks inside the Nixon administration were quietly pushing the agenda endorsed by Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.]. One of those in the know was my old friend Earl G. Graves, who was a leading black Democrat at the forefront of pushing for black entrepreneurship and economic growth. He saw that with the OMBE [Office of Minority Business Enterprise], Nixon was reaching out with a program unlike any others.

“This was also a personal issue for Earl. In August of 1970, he launched his own nonprofit Black Enterprise institute. Its goals were much the same as mine. Earl had long wanted to create a magazine to champion black business development and wealth-building in the black community, but he had not been able to raise the capital. He was about $100,000 short of his goal.

Earl Graves Sr. , left, in 2013, with Wayne Sutton. (Credit: Wayne Sutton/Flickr)
Earl Graves Sr., right, in 2013, with Wayne Sutton. (Credit: Wayne Sutton/Flickr)

“I encouraged him to apply for one of the first OMBE grants.

“When word got out that Earl Graves, a big Democrat and a frequent critic of Nixon, had applied for the grant, there was heated opposition from partisan Republican operatives who didn’t want it approved.

“I argued forcefully that Earl wanted the same things we wanted for black America, and that if we helped him develop his business, he would support economic development in the black community.

“They told me I was nuts not to mention naive and probably numb-skulled too. My final response was, ‘Process his damn application!’ . . . ”

While Nixon is best known for the Watergate scandal that forced him to resign, he also championed “black capitalism” and affirmative action. His “Philadelphia Plan,” created by Arthur Fletcher, an African American assistant secretary of labor, required the government to enforce timetables and goals in the hiring of workers of color and became the framework for affirmative action.

Black Enterprise is no longer a member of the Alliance of Audited Media and has a lower profile than in past years, but in 2014 it had an audited circulation of 517,920. The more general-circulation Ebony had 1,268,373 and Essence, 1,075,873.

Owners Can’t Sell Univision Fast Enough

“When Haim Saban and billionaire-led private equity firms acquired Univision Communications for $13.7 billion in early 2007, they figured the nation’s largest Spanish-language media company would be a sure bet,” Meg James wrote Monday for the Los Angeles Times.

“The U.S. economy and Latino population were booming. Advertisers were reaching out to Mexican immigrants who gravitated toward soccer matches and Univision’s news and trademark telenovelas — the Mexican-produced Cinderella love stories that reminded viewers of home.

“But the world changed.

“After holding out for a big payday, Saban and his partners now are eager to sell the company — even at a discount, according to three people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment publicly. Unloading what has become a fixer-upper for $8 billion to $10 billion would mark a rare blunder for the Los Angeles investor and his private equity partners. But years of boardroom bickering and missteps, including a disastrous foray into English-language media [such as the African American website The Root], as well as rising competition from rival Telemundo and shifting demographics, have taken a toll.

“Interviews with nearly a dozen former and current executives depict a dysfunctional organization, hobbled by clashes between Latino managers and older white executives who worked at NBC in its glory days and seemed stuck in the past. They didn’t speak Spanish and were derisively called ‘gringos’ behind their backs. At the board level, private equity captains soured on their investment, browbeat management and starved key Univision properties, including such local stations as KMEX-TV Channel 34 in Los Angeles, so they could pay down the company’s $10-billion debt. . . .”

Media Outlets Ignoring English-Speaking Latinos

“English speaking Latinos born in the United States are effectively being ignored by media outlets, according to a report released by the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York City,” Vicki Adame reported June 10 for CTLatinoNews.com.

“The State of the Latino News Media report, released during the Latino Media Summit held at the school in late June, found that 77.56 percent of Latino news media outlets deliver the news in Spanish. Yet according to the census, the majority of the country’s 60 million Latinos are U.S. born and English dominant.

“Of the 624 media outlets catering to a Latino audience, the report found that only 45 are English only and of these, only nine are digital only — including CTLatinoNews.com. . . .”

No Clear Winner Yet for Ebony Photo Archives

“An auction to sell bankrupt Johnson Publishing’s historic Ebony photo archives has been continued until Monday after producing ‘multiple bidders’ but no clear winner,” Robert Channick reported Thursday for the Chicago Tribune.

“The bidding Wednesday at a Chicago law office featured ‘robust action’ throughout the day, according to a news release from Hilco Streambank, which is conducting the auction on behalf of the Johnson Publishing bankruptcy trustee. The participating bidders, all of whom had to offer a qualifying bid of at least $12.5 million, were not disclosed.

“Johnson Publishing filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in April. The auction is seeking to recover at least $13.6 million owed to secured creditors George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, whose company, Capital V Holdings, issued a $12 million loan to a struggling Johnson Publishing in 2015. . . .”

D.C.’s Tucker Backed ‘Good’ Quotas for Newsrooms

March 26, 1972 , op-ed (Click to enlarge)
March 26, 1972 , op-ed (Click to enlarge)

Sterling Tucker, the first elected chair of the District of Columbia Council and longtime leader of the Washington Urban League, died Sunday at age 95, the Washington Post reported this week.

Three days after the seven black reporters for the Post known as the Metro Seven filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1972, charging discrimination in hiring and promotions, Tucker wrote a piece about the case. It ran in the old Washington Star.

The Seven sought goals and timetables (not “quotas”) for progress, which the Post rejected.

Regardless, in the op-ed, Tucker defended the idea of quotas, saying he used to feel otherwise but that one needs means to measure progress. There are good quotas and bad quotas, he said.

He began perhaps prophetically by writing of the Metro Seven, “If they have reported the Post’s position correctly, I see no early solution to the problems the reporters set forth.”

Executive Editor Ben Bradlee told the Seven, “The only quota appropriate for this newspaper is a quota on quality,” but Tucker wrote, “A major fallacy of the Post controversy is the assumption that you can’t have quality and quotas at the same time.”

Tucker concluded with his thoughts on “the white press” and the importance of black reporters.

Sterling Tucker
Sterling Tucker

“I don’t know that a black reporter can interpret me any better than a white reporter, but I would feel much better if there were enough around to check each other out on matters which concern all of us.

“It is not that I don’t think that white folks can understand me. It is just that they haven’t given themselves much opportunity to know about me.

“They write what they think they know, and sometimes, what they feel. Blacks do the same thing — it just so happens that some of what they know and feel about me is some of what they know and feel about themselves. I would feel just a little better if I felt the media was a little more responsive to me and maybe a little more responsible to me.”

When the Company Doesn’t Pay for the Convention

Journal-isms asked a veteran journalist this week whether he would be at the National Association of Black Journalists’ Miami convention, which takes place  Aug. 7-11.  The organization has said 4,000 are expected.

The journalist replied, “No. The company stopped paying for it. So, unless it’s somewhere close, I decided to sit it out.”

Journal-isms asked the three candidates for NABJ president, and current president Sarah J. Glover, how they would respond.

Sarah J. Glover

Sarah J. Glover
Sarah J. Glover

“I will be at the 2019 NABJ Convention in Miami and I am proud to be leading the convention activities as president. This will be my 24th NABJ Convention, as I’m heading into my 26th year of membership.

“The NABJ Convention provides valuable professional development and networking opportunities. I cannot afford not to go to NABJ every year. I hear far too many member stories in which all of their job prospects have some tie to NABJ networking.

“Attending the NABJ Convention should be like paying your taxes; budget for it and just do it. The return on your professional development investment pays for itself over and over in the numerous career and networking opportunities available. If you work in    media, you need to be at the NABJ Convention every year. ”

Gregory H. Lee Jr.
Gregory H. Lee Jr.

Gregory H. Lee Jr.

“This is not new as many companies have gone away from sending employees and NABJ has to do a better job of showing the education benefits of our convention.

“We need to do a better job of making our event more affordable. We need to provide compelling and timely programming to give people the time to consider attending and we need to strengthen our regionals,” referring to regional conferences.

Dorothy Tucker

Dorothy Tucker
Dorothy Tucker

“I think more should be done to help the seasoned journalist not only when the convention comes around but also during the year. We need to develop more programs and learning opportunities with our veteran members in mind and we need to talk with station managers. Many don’t understand how valuable the convention experience is for their employee and ultimately their newsrooms.

“And finally, we need to make it easier for members to get to the convention. Cutting convention costs is definitely something we need to look at.”

 

Marlon A. Walker

“My response to you would be to put me in touch with that person! . . .

Marlon A. Walker
Marlon A. Walker

“I believe we’re not offering enough to fulfill our members’ needs, which is why I’ve been working on the type of programming we offer members outside of the convention — which is where I can be more useful while I’m not president — to make sure up-and-coming, as well as veteran and entrepreneurial members have their fair share of activities that can appeal to them.

“This also helps companies to become more willing to invest in training, regardless of the fact that we’re a diversity group, so to speak.

“Too many people have told me their company is still paying to send people to the Online News Association Conference and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference because they see the training being worth it. That same statement should apply to NABJ. There are people in this organization who feel we do enough. But if the members are saying training isn’t the top reason why they come, we’ve got work to do.”

April Ryan to Moderate NAACP Candidates Debate

“American Urban Radio White House Correspondent and political analyst April Ryan will moderate the NAACP’s Presidential Candidates Forum at the 110th National Convention on Wednesday, July 24, at 9:30 a.m. in Detroit,” the city’s WDIV-TV reported Monday.

“The forum, which will take place at the COBO Center, offers candidates and convention attendees alike the opportunity to discuss solutions to some of the most critical issues we face as a nation. . . .”

Confirmed candidates include Democrats Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and Republican Bill Weld.

Meanwhile, CNN announced the lineup for the two-night Democratic primary debate in Detroit July 30 and 31. Ten candidates take the stage each night.

Short Takes

 

Helen Ubiñas of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News was the 2018 winner of the Vernon Jarrett Medal for Journalistic Excellence for a series of columns on gun violence and its impact on Philadelphia teenagers. (Credit: David Swanson/Philadelphia Inquirer)
Helen Ubiñas of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News was the 2018 winner of the Vernon Jarrett Medal for Journalistic Excellence for a series of columns on gun violence and its impact on Philadelphia teenagers. (Credit: David Swanson/Philadelphia Inquirer)

 

 

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