Happy 2004!
Please feel free to share the below article widely to friends and
contacts...(also see version on insightmag.com and finalcall.com)
regards, Milton allimadi
Times Concocted 'Darkest Africa'
Posted Dec. 30, 2003
By Shayla Bennett
Allimadi has appointed himself unofficial ombudsman and takes the so-
called "newspaper of record" to task for what he deems to be a pattern of
distorted coverage of Africa.
The New York Times is under fire again for fabrications in its stories. This
time the accusations come from former Times metro stringer Milton Allimadi in
his book The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created a Racist Image of
Africa, in which he charges the newspaper with using racial stereotypes and
interjecting racially motivated fabrications into its coverage of Africa.
The allegations result from extensive research Allimadi performed for an
academic thesis while a student at the Columbia School of Journalism. The book
was released independently a month before the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal
and almost a year before the Times' latest reinvestigation of the Pulitzer
Prize awarded in 1932 to its correspondent Walter Duranty, who used his reports
to cover up the famine Josef Stalin created in the Ukraine to starve the kulaks
into submitting to collectivized agriculture [see "Duranty's Deception," July
22-Aug. 4].
In The Hearts of Darkness, Allimadi charges the late two-time Pulitzer Prize
reporter Homer Bigart, famous as a Times war correspondent, with "concocting"
pygmies to place into his reports from Ghana. Times editors also are alleged to
have inserted "fabricated tribal scenarios" into Lloyd M. Garrison's articles
on the Nigerian civil war, as well as "editorial insertions of stereotypes and
fabrications" into Joseph Lelyveld's articles from South Africa during the
1980s. The book probes into the paper's archives and examines correspondence
between reporters and editors assigned to coverage in Africa. Allimadi cites
memos from the Times archives as evidence for his claims against the paper.
Editor of the weekly Black Star, founded with support from actor Bill Cosby,
Allimadi is interested in the general racial consensus of various periods in
U.S. history, especially those ranging from the 1800s to 1950s, a time when the
United States either practiced slavery or enforced racial segregation. But he
has looked most closely at the correspondence of the Times from the 1980s to
the present - a time when the United States was more than 120 years removed
from the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and more than 30 years from when
Brown v. Board of Education overturned the 1896 separate-but-equal decision of
Plessy v. Ferguson.
After Times senior editor William Borders reviewed it he told Insight he
would "recommend [the book] to anyone interested in how the American press used
to cover Africa." And Allimadi tells Insight that he has a letter signed by
Borders and dated Sept. 29, admitting questionable language in the paper's
reporting on Africa. Responding to the paper's indiscriminate use of the words
tribe, tribesman and tribal, Borders wrote, "We should know better."
Allimadi reminds that, "People need to realize that past racist practices still
condition and influence contemporary reporting." In his chapter "The New York
Times as Apartheid's Apologists," Allimadi explains that when the media use the
word "tribal" in references to Africa it has "the implication that they are
irrational and have no logical or legitimate contributing factors" to explain
their behavior. In fact, he tells Insight, while researching the newspaper's
archives he came across a Times Style & Usage manual dated 1964 that
recommended against using the term.
Kwamina Panford, chairman of African-American studies at Northeastern
University in Boston, thinks that tribal explanations may just be laziness. He
tells Insight that continual reference to Africans as tribal is an "easy way to
describe conflict in the continent instead of doing a good job and reporting
the details." He says "tribal terms represent the incorrect exotic, dark and
disparaging view of Africa." In Allimadi's view, this becomes a clich�
as "reporters reference old articles from papers like the Times and books like
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness."
Allimadi sees The Hearts of Darkness as his rebuttal to Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, which Allimadi refers to as "just a collection of the most racist
depictions of Africa." He says, "My sense of frustration with the derogatory
terms used to describe Africans led me to choose this topic for my thesis. I
wanted to trace the origin of control that contemporary Western writers
followed."
Of course the Times is not the only establishment journal made to suffer
Allimadi's perp walk. But while Time, National Geographic and Newsweek are all
named among the offenders, the Times remains the focal point, referenced in
every chapter. As Allimadi explains, "Since I had access to their archives it
allowed me to delve deeper into their reporting, plus the Times is simply the
main example because it is so predominant in mainstream media. If they change
their practices it may penetrate down to other media - especially since so many
see the Times as holy writ."
Recently the Times named Daniel Okrent to the position of public editor, where
he functions as the newspaper's ombudsman. Okrent was appointed on Oct. 28 to
address questions and comments of readers about articles published in the
paper. Allimadi, on the other hand, has appointed himself an unofficial
ombudsman for the Times in the area of racism. As he puts it: "I believe the
New York Times owes its black readers an apology for its ugly African coverage
of the past and an apology for the concoctions by editors to create and
perpetuate the racist imagery, such as the case with Lloyd Garrison, the West
Africa correspondent when the Times manufactured 'tribal' scenes and inserted
them into stories."
It is unclear if Allimadi's claims will be addressed by the new Times public
editor. Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for the
Times, says that, "As a matter of public policy, we will not discuss what the
public editor is planning to write before he does so."
In a statement to Insight, senior editor Borders says, "I told Mr. Allimadi,
most of the sections of the book dealing with the New York Times report on
practices of three or four decades ago. Happily, we have improved our
sophistication and knowledge about Africa, improvements that are evident in our
coverage of the continent now."
While Allimadi acknowledges that many of his complaints are based on articles
from earlier days, he says he does not see why his complaints are any less
worthy than those about the 1930s reporting of Duranty. And he recognizes that
the Times has improved its coverage of Africa, crediting reporters such as Nori
Onishi, Somini Sengupta and Howard French. "He called our coverage in our pages
excellent, which pleased me very much, given the obvious depth of his knowledge
and interest," says Borders.
But Allimadi still believes the paper has a long way to go. As he notes, "The
Times has not published an apology for the distorted African coverage even
after I brought it to the attention of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., [the Times']
publisher. That means that the Times either does not care about its racist
depictions of Africa or that the apologies that accompanied the Blair scandal
were simply for PR purposes."
Shayla Bennett is an associate reporter for Insight magazine.
See www.insightmag.com
The book is available via amazon.com, Barnes & Noble books, or Black Star books
at 212-481-7745. The author is available for book signings and speaking
engagements through [EMAIL PROTECTED]
