The Tale of a Double Standard : Magazines: How the media cover--and fail to cover--the black community is the subject of an excellent article in The American Enterprise.
At least three times recently, young black people have attacked news reporters, photographers or cameramen covering events in predominantly black communities. Black politicians--including Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson--lash out at the media for an alleged double standard. Polls show black mayors think papers do a lousy job of covering the black community, and many black media professionals agree.
So what has happened since the days of the Civil Rights struggle, when the media and the black community were “de facto allies against Jim Crow?” In the July/August The American Enterprise, National Public Radio reporter and UC Berkeley journalism professor William J. Drummond presents a number of interesting explanations for the “complete about-face of prevailing sentiment” toward the media.
Black politicians, he writes, “no longer enjoy the shield of moral leadership once accorded them by the civil rights movement. They must take their lumps from the press like other politicians, and they find this an unwelcome surprise.”
At the same time, though, Drummond suggests, there is a tendency for the media to ignore black politicians on issues other than those directly related to their race. All of which is complicated by the fact that minority journalists assert their rights as professionals to cover any issue they choose. As a result, the reporters who presumably have the greatest insight into and empathy for the black community don’t want to be pigeonholed into covering it--not that the number of black journalists is even remotely representative of the population.
So, where does that leave us?
About where we were after the race riots of the mid-to-late ‘60s, when President Johnson’s Kerner Commission warned that the media “have not communicated to whites a feeling for the difficulties and frustrations of being a Negro in the United States.”
If Drummond’s excellent analysis has a weakness, it’s in his inability to reconcile two conflicting matters. On the one hand, he cites the growing demand that the white-dominated media stop focusing so intently on the misleading stereotypes of “black pathology”: drug addiction, crime and the like. On the other hand, he and others complain about the unwillingness of the media to shed light on the problems faced by black America. Hence the frustrating observation: “There is black pathology, but it is given more attention than white pathology, and it is less understood.”
Part of the problem may simply be, as he writes, that “some of the black anger at the media must be anger at the news itself. The news for black America is not good.”
The underlying criticism in his piece, never explicitly stated, seems to be that the media do a lousy job of covering almost any historically and culturally complex issue or community, regardless of race, creed or color.
REQUIRED READING
* Japan may be the world’s leading joho shakai (“information society”), and its johoshi (“information magazines”) are one way the Japanese get their minute-by-minute information fix. The August Egg examines Trendy, Box, Quark, Pumpkin, Lettuce Club, McSister, and others that fill Japanese newsstands, offering “an extended, open-ended set of instructions for life.” More than a look at magazines, this is an excellent study of where Japanese and American culture coincides and collides.
* First there was the “Mommy Track.” Then the “Daddy Track.” Now, the July 16 Newsweek tells us there’s the “Daughter Track.” Readers who can overcome their natural aversion to overly catchy news weekly trend labels will find an important examination of women’s demanding role as double caretakers, first of their kids and then of their ill and aging parents.
* Next year, construction begins on the Westside for a bicycle freeway. If the folks at Bicycle Magazine had their way, the city would turn that two-mile stretch over to automobiles and reserve the rest of L.A.’s hundreds of miles of freeway for bicycles. The August issue offers dozens of suggestions on how to make bicycle commuting more appealing until that freeway shift happens. The piece is aptly titled: “How the Bike Can Save L.A.”
NEW ON NEWSSTANDS
* In the old days, Rolling Stone was the cream of the rock rag crop and Creem was a sort of low-fat imitator. Now Creem is back as a large format bimonthly, looking a lot hipper than today’s Stone--which means it devotes itself to the surviving stars of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s rather than those of the ‘60s and Hollywood celebrities. (Judging from the first issue, it completely skips the socially redeeming stuff Stone still does so well.)
With big pictures and--for the most part--mere snatches of prose, the magazine seems to be catering to the shortened attention-span syndrome. But enough of the pictures are striking and enough of the prose is fun that it works. (Creem, $12, P.O. Box 3795, Jacksonville, FL 32206).