------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the May 29, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
EDITORIAL: INVENTING THE "NEWS"
ob Herbert, the only Black col um nist at the New York Times, wrote on May 19: "I've seen drunks, incompetents and out-and-out lunatics in the newsrooms I've passed through over the years. I've seen plagiarizers, fiction writers and reporters who felt it was beneath them to show up for work at all. ... Most of these rogues, scoundrels and miscreants were white because most of the staffers in America's mainstream newsrooms are white. What I haven't seen in all these years was the suggestion that any of these individuals fouled up--or were put into positions where they could foul up--because they were white."
He was commenting on the firing of Jayson Blair, a reporter who had invented much of the material he wrote. Herbert and other African Americans working for the newspaper are near the boiling point because of the suggestion that Blair's misdeeds were condoned or overlooked by editors because he is Black.
"So let's be real," wrote Herbert. "Discrimination in the newsroom--in hiring, in the quality of assignments and in promotions--is a much more pervasive problem than Jayson Blair's aberrant behavior. A Black reporter told me angrily last week, 'After hundreds of years in America, we are still on probation.'"
The Times management provoked this response from its own employees when it broke the Blair story in an unprecedented 14,000-word article that took up an entire page. The implication was that Blair's actions were extraordinary and had sullied the sterling reputation of the newspaper.
Extraordinary? Reporters and editors don't make up the news? We beg to differ. Here are two examples from the New York Times itself.
The first was a memorable front-page article about the arrival of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold at Ndola airport in the Congo's break-away province of Katanga on Sept. 17, 1961. The reporter vividly described the scene: African dancers welcoming the diplomat as representatives of Moise Tshombe, the president, formally greeted him.
The article was pulled in the second edition. Why? Because Hammarskjold never arrived. His plane had crashed en route and he was dead. The article had been written and sent in to the newspaper hours before the event it pretended to chronicle. After that embarrassing incident, the Times said that its procedures on when stories could be filed would be changed.
Now for the second, more recent, example. Last Oct. 26, the ANSWER coalition held an anti-war demon stra tion in Washington, D.C. It took out permits for 20,000 marchers. A huge crowd turned out, estimated between 100,000 and 200,000. The next day the New York Times ran a short report on page eight saying that just "thousands" had marched, "fewer people ... than organizers had said they hoped for."
Other newspapers, like the Wash ing ton Post and Los Angeles Times, reported 100,000 marchers. People who had been in Washington flooded the New York Times with calls of complaint. Finally, without admitting that its first story was wrong, the newspaper printed a second article on Oct. 30 that said the protest "drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House."
Was the original reporter to blame? Or the higher-ups? Lynette Clemetson, who wrote the first article, called Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman to explain. "She told us she had pitched a broader story on the protests, and had predicted it would be a big march, a turning point in the anti-war coverage," recalled Good man. "She said she arrived at the protest in the early morning, when the number of people there was still low. The editors pulled her off the story to work on a story on the Washington-area sniper. In the afternoon, as the numbers of protesters swelled, she called in a corrected estimate to her editor. That correction never made it into the article. She said she received numerous calls from people angry about the coverage, which she referred to the editors. She said she is glad people called to complain." (Quoted in the December 2002 issue of Extra!Update, the bimonthly newsletter of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)
Keep those complaints coming.
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