-Caveat Lector- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 15:34:31 EDT From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: Konformist: Within the Veil -------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> Free @Backup service! Click here for your free trial of @Backup. @Backup is the most convenient way to securely protect and access your files online. Try it now and receive 300 MyPoints. http://click.egroups.com/1/6348/6/_/1406/_/970342824/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------_-> Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com http://www.popandpolitics.com/articles/within_veil.html Within the Veil By Pamela Newkirk Editor's Note: Pamela Newkirk is a Professor of Journalism at New York University who won a Pulitzer Prize for her daily news reporting and now writes regularly for The Nation magazine. Her penetrating new book Within the Veil gives us an insider's view of America's newsrooms. We get to hear the discussions and debates between key players, and hear why race rarely fades into the background of the coverage we see. This is a subject dear to my heart, given that I published a statistics-heavy book on race and the media called Don't Believe the Hype, excerpted elsewhere on this site. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Within the Veil (New York University Press), by Pamela Newkirk "Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses, -- the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls." - W.E.B. DuBois, 1903 In 1994, Time correspondent Sylvester Monroe proposed a story on Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan whose appeal he argued was far more complex than the media had portrayed. Monroe noted Farrakhan's popularity among blacks across class and ideological lines, drawn to his passionate brew of rage and pride, and his prescription for economic self-sufficiency, discipline, and family values. But despite the controversy Farrakhan's racial rhetoric often provoked, Monroe noted that none of the national news magazines had ever provided for readers an in-depth profile that pierced the surface of his racially-charged sound-bites. However Monroe, who hoped to infuse the story with his intimate grasp of black America, did not anticipate how difficult it would be to filter so unconventional and controversial a black figure as Farrakhan through the prism of white interest that is the mainstream news media. Nor did he predict the emotional white backlash within Time as word spread that Farrakhan would appear on the cover. "People in the bureaus were demanding to know why we were putting him on the cover," recalled Monroe, who had earned journalistic acclaim for "Brothers," his moving portrait of the black men he had grown up with in a Chicago housing project that had been a Newsweek cover story, and later a book. "They said he doesn't deserve this kind of attention. A researcher came to me and said 'This is shameful.' I later heard she was in tears. My response was 'we're journalists here. What we think of him should have nothing to do with it. We put Adolph Hitler and Khomeni on the cover.' It was the most disingenuous argument for not doing a story that I had ever heard." For many of Monroe's white colleagues, a cover story on Farrakhan was an affront. Since Farrakhan's role in the black community was, to whites, largely inconsequential, they could not fathom raising his stature merely on the basis of the aspect of him they cared about: his virulent racial views. It's one thing to present a one-dimensional sketch to remind people he was anti-Semitic, but quite another to suggest his importance and complexity by dedicating a cover story to him. This argument is similar to one made by critics of the media's intense coverage that same year of The Bell Curve, a book by the late Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray that theorized that blacks were genetically inferior to whites. All three major newsweeklies and The New York Times magazine, seriously entertained the notion of black inferiority by devoting cover stories to a question that their coverage left unanswered. The preposterousness of race -- a loose social construct, which, in our society is determined less by genes than by appearance -- having the ability to determine intelligence was hardly explored. Scientists and anthropologists have long maintained that race is not a biologically valid scientific concept. The American Association of Physical Anthropologists has declared that pure races do not exist, and maybe never had. How the theory in The Bell Curve could be seriously considered in spite of centuries of interracial mixing underscored the predisposition of many whites -- including those in the media -- to at least consider innate black inferiority as a way of explaining, or even justifying, the plight of blacks. Rather than explore what the immense public interest in the best-selling book suggested about our society's view of blacks, many in the news media framed the notion of black intellectual inferiority as a legitimate debate, even while scientists such as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a Stanford University geneticist, dismissed race as a "useless" biological and genetic concept. The media continues to perpetuate a debate on black inferiority, perhaps because it mirrors the dominant culture's own view of the status of blacks in the racial hierarchy. Some theorize that the primary means by which whites have sustained and legitimated their domination is by communicating the dominant white ideology on the assumptions of black inferiority (and white superiority) through the mass media. Some blame the continuing debate on the scientific community's silence. Still, the media did, in some instances, raise doubts about the credibility of the data and the conservative agenda of the Bell Curve authors who used their purported findings to argue against affirmative action and for the end of welfare in order to reduce the births of low-IQ babies. Near the end of Newsweek's 2,600-word feature story, it noted the contradictions in the work and quoted a Yale psychologist who dismissed some of the scholarship as "pathetic." Newsweek nonetheless devoted another 2,800 words to a defense of the authors' premise. Written by Geoffrey Cowley, it concluded this way: "It's also clear that whatever mental ability is made of -- dense neural circuitry, highly charge synapses or sheer brain mass -- we didn't all get equal shares." A 867-word rebuttal from Ellis Cose, a black journalist, argued that the advancement of these theories undermine black achievement by fueling self-doubt. Readers were then left to decide if blacks belonged, as many had already suspected, to an inferior race. Black supremacists who theorize black genetic superiority have all been dismissed in the media as racist crackpots. In New York, City University's professor of history Leonard Jeffries has built a following behind his sun-people, ice-people theory, arguing that blacks, the African-derived sun people, are innately good, and whites, products of cold European climates, are by nature cold and ruthless. Supporters of his theory believe it helps explain slavery, the colonization of Africa, the near extinction of Native Americans and other atrocities against people of color by whites world-wide. Frances Cress Welsing, a Washington, D.C.-based psychologist, maintains that white supremacy stems from the genetic inferiority of whites and their concomitant fear of racial obliteration. But neither Jeffries nor Welsing have found a neutral forum for their black supremacist ideas in the mainstream media, even though their theories are no less credible than that offered by Herrnstein and Murray. Jeffries was widely vilified in New York newspapers for linking Jews to the slave trade. Many papers published the transcripts of a speech in which he made the remarks, and ran a series of editorials calling for his ouster. In March of 1992, Jeffries was removed as chair of the black studies department at City College of New York, a position he had held for two decades. The rap group Public Enemy was assailed in 1990 for promoting the Cress Theory -- Welsing's 15-page hypothesis on white supremacy -- in the album "Fear of a Black Planet." But the media's tolerance for white extremism is not accorded to blacks who similarly hold similar radical views on race. While Jeffries and Farrakhan captured prominent headlines, the revelation in 1999 that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was associated with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group, received scant attention. When an executive board member of the group said that Lott was an honorary member The New York Times ran a story on page A9, and many papers ignored the story altogether. Time's coverage of Farrakhan illuminates the kind of intolerance shown by whites in the media towards black extremism that served to undermine Monroe's attempt to present Farrakhan objectively. Monroe's uphill and emotional battle to bring an objective portrait of Farrakhan to the public illustrates the challenge blacks who began integrating America's newsrooms in the 1960s still face in their attempts to present the complexities of black life in the mainstream media. More than thirty years after the National Commission on Civil Disorders chastised the news media for reporting news "from the standpoint of a white man's world,"and for reporting on blacks "as if they don't read the newspapers, marry, die and attend PTA meetings," the news continues to be firmly rooted in white ideology, which fosters a racial hierarchy that places blacks, and other minorities, below whites. This dominant view persists in spite of the growing non-white population and the infusion of thousands of journalists of color in America's newsrooms, followed, in recent years, by the industry's much trumpeted embrace of diversity. As late as 1997, members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors reaffirmed its commitment to more culturally and racially diverse newsrooms despite attacks on affirmative action and their newsroom diversity efforts. But progress has been glacial. In 1968, blacks accounted for roughly one percent of newsroom jobs. Near the close of the century, blacks comprise five percent of the newspaper and 10 percent of the television news workforce. Nationally, in 1999, people of color held 11.5 percent of newspaper jobs -- representing about one-third of their proportion of the population -- and 21 percent of broadcasting jobs, with the percentages significantly higher in urban markets. Still, nearly 45 percent of the nation's daily newspapers remain lily white. Behind the obvious, albeit small, numerical gains, a wide and deep racial and cultural chasm divides blacks and whites in the newsroom. Despite their heightened visibility, African American journalists and their minority counterparts, woefully underrepresented in the industry and in news management, are far from integrated into the newsroom culture, largely because of status quo assumptions about race. While black journalists occasionally succeed in conveying the richness and complexity of black life, they are often left, as was Monroe, restricted by the narrow scope of the media, which tends primarily to exploit those fragments of African American life that have meaning for, and resonate with, whites. For while the media has allowed the complexion of its newsrooms to better reflect society, the target audience of the major media has changed little. News continues to be constructed for a primarily white audience. As such, Farrakhan is primarily covered by the media in proportion to the controversial comments he makes about whites, particularly Jews. As Monroe tried to take readers behind Farrakhan's disturbing rhetoric to explain why his message resonates across a large swath of black America, his editors were intent on focusing on remarks they deemed anti-Semitic and racist, which Monroe agreed could not be ignored. But he said centering a story around them distorted the reason for his wide appeal across black America. Nonetheless, the measured, unemotional tone that defined The Bell Curve coverage was replaced with white hot emotionalism in Time's Farrakhan cover story. Monroe's attempt to present a balanced, unfiltered portrait was overshadowed by intemperate headlines and captions which conveyed unequivocal abhorrence for Farrakhan and his views. The first cover dummy bore an image of Farrakhan with the headline "Ministry of Hate." Monroe urged Steve Kemp, the national affairs editor, to tone it down, saying It failed to capture his appeal to many African Americans, who would take umbrage at the characterization. However, Kemp appeared concerned about the magazine appearing too soft on Farrakhan. The magazine sought to distance itself from views the top editors found repulsive. Their concern for delineating the subject's views from their own, however, did not extend to the less emotional Bell Curve coverage. Monroe insisted he could not live with the cover line, and after a tense stand-off, they compromised on "Ministry of Rage." Monroe had little energy left by the time he learned what the subhead would be: "Louis Farrakhan Spews Racist Venom at Jews and all of White America." The publisher's letter in the newsmagazine's Oct. 24, 1994 issue went further, explaining why Time was profiling Farrakhan. On the page appeared a photograph of Monroe interviewing Farrakhan, with the caption "Vile views, moral conundrums: Correspondent Monroe interviewing Farrakhan last week at the black leader's home in Chicago." The Time caption under the photograph of Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray was more tempered. Said Time: "Breaking a taboo or propagating racism?" The caption under Murray's photograph in Newsweek read: "Embroiled in controversy, Murray poses placidly at his Maryland home." On the Bell Curve stories, the headlines were as dispassionate as the captions. "For Whom the Bell Curves," was the tepid headline on the Time story. Newsweek was even more equivocal: "The Battle Over IQ and Destiny: A Hard Look at a Controversial Book on Race, Class, and Success. Is it Destiny?" Monroe did manage to present the highlights of his six-hour interview in a question-and-answer format. "I really didn't care what he said," said Monroe. "I just didn't wan t us to paraphrase. For one of the first times in a magazine with the stature of Time, I wanted to let his voice come through. Don't just dismiss him by saying he's anti-Semitic. He's much more complex than that." While Monroe's portrait went far in presenting a side of the leader many had never seen -- including Farrakhan's role in ridding dangerous housing projects of crime and fear and reforming scores of drug addicts and criminals -- the attempt at neutrality failed, undermined by his editors' overt intolerance for Farrakhan. That is not to suggest that whites, or blacks for that matter, in or outside of the media do not have ample reason to be intolerant of some of the racial views espoused by Farrakhan. Rather it is to underscore how utterly subjective the awarding of neutrality and objectivity is in the news media, and how prominently race factors into that decision. And since so few blacks or other people of color are at the helm of major news organizations, much of the news coverage reflects the views of people who are typically white and male. Monroe, and other black journalists, then, are forced to compromise their own sense of fairness to satisfy the journalistic standards of news editors whose own objectivity is clouded by their own subconscious assumptions about race. This failure by the media to explore fully the complexity of black life not only limits the understanding by whites of black life, but crucially defies the ideals of balanced journalism which require a fair exploration of ideas that transcend the journalist's own experiences and belief system. While black reporters, like other members of the black middle class, must gain an intimate knowledge of cultures other than their own, few whites are required to grasp the intricacies of black culture, since their very survival does not depend on such an understanding. As such, many white journalists fail to suspend their prejudices long enough to fairly or accurately portray people unlike themselves. In some ways they operate at a disadvantage. Because their superiors often share the same ideology that colors their stories, white journalists are not as sensitive as Monroe and other black journalists are to words or sentiments that can be viewed as racially biased. The measured way in which the media explored The Bell Curve theory is as offensive to blacks as an equivocal portrait of Farrakhan's views on race, Judaism and Jews would have been to whites. On matters of respect and notions of human equality, some things are, or should be, beyond debate. So rather than argue for emotion-laden reporting on The Bell Curve to rival the conventional coverage of Farrakhan, or for equivocal reporting on Farrakhan that seriously examined whether his blatantly anti-Semitic remarks had merit, it would be more instructive for the media to treat both in a way which the ideas are contextualized less by white tolerance or intolerance, and more by reason. In any context, Farrakhan's sweeping portrayal of Jews as ruthless merchants has the hurtful and ugly ring of unbridled bigotry. But his views are no less vile than race inferiority theories cloaked under a veil of pseudo-science which debase our shared humanity. Just as The Bell Curve is more important for what it says about the slow evolution of this nation's racial attitudes, Farrakhan is newsworthy because of the resonance of his larger message in so much of black America. But what it is that resonates -- particularly his appeal to black pride and self-sufficiency and the way in which he has tapped into black pain -- was clouded in the Time profile by the fixation on his inflammatory words which were neither new nor illuminating. Many white readers don't care to go behind the rhetoric to learn why many blacks are drawn to Farrakhan, believing instead that blacks should throw out the baby with the bath water. But only a sober analysis of Farrakhan and his appeal across class and educational levels could guide readers over the chasm of hysteria and fear that further polarizes us all. Such a portrait would not further legitimize Farrakhan nor would it validate claims by some blacks that blacks and other minorities cannot be racist because they are not in positions of power. But whether Farrakhan is simply a racist demagogue, and why that matters, should be a function of clear-headed reporting, and not emotionally charged packaging that closes, rather than opens, avenues of understanding. The issue is less Farrakhan than it is the desperate quest by African Americans for self-reflection and improvement. Instead of offering light where there was heat, Time editors, despite Monroe's best efforts, chose to turn up the heat. In the process, they further removed white America from an understanding of black Americans, and all of us further away from a rational dialogue across color lines. If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist/ and sign up. Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
