Did Time's story say anything about the Post's history of overt racism directed at the black communities of New York?

Sharpton et. al. did a splendid job in their vicious poke at the Post but that’s all it was, a poke. I wish it had been the sharp point of a spear starting a rally.

Snickering, chortling, that’s what I thought that the writer of the “apology” or the person or persons who penned the words — the Boss himself? I think not — was/were doing as the response was being drafted: Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of people and I now better understand the hurt this cartoon has caused. I wonder to whom he spoke for his insight. Hurt? No one was hurt, but many were whipped into serious snit by a masterful conjurer who, knowing the Post’s history of denigrating and mocking the black communities of New York, spun a cartoon into a call for action, limited as it was.

Now, if the conjurer extraordinaire could have brought forth soul shaking outrage, like that inspired by Rosa Parks, a myriad would have descended on the Post building at 1211 Sixth Avenue, catalyzing opportunities. That’s how I perceived all this.

Yes, there were reports that the Post switch board was inundated with phone calls. And I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of Post reporters of any color who have to trek into New York’s black communities in the near future, not so much because of possible violence but the derision could be scathing.

Hurt? How condescending.

A boycott? Nope.

A complaint to the FCC? Maybe a visit. Maybe just lunch. But no action here.

Murdoch started it all, and, as the insufferably powerful SOB he is, brought this episode to a close. He started it all? Yep, the buck stops with him for all those years of the Post mocking and denigrating the black communities of New York. The stench of the compost heap where the Post’s reputation resides, at least as far as the black communities of New York are concerned, is irrefutable, emanating from the buck at Murdoch’s door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Footnotes

[The Original Before Murdoch Showed Up
And Stole the Show]
 

 

 

Here are footnotes for a big picture I can’t grasp. Several days ago, in the evening and night, for example, the TV news media, as it had for several days, reported from outside the New York Post at 1211 Avenue of the Americas that irate demonstrators and the Reverend Al Sharpton, eventually joined by filmmaker Spike Lee (wearing a very snazzy winter jacket), were marching and shouting for a boycott, that the vile publication should be shut down; that the NAACP was in town and was planning to ask certain businesses not to advertise in the Post; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So, what?

The Reverend Al Sharpton said he was planning to contact the Federal Communication’s Commission.

So, what?

The marchers as much as viewers, if any of my students of one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse colleges in the CUNY system are any indication of public sentiment in this rich Big Apple milieu of race and gender and class, enjoyed the Post bashing. But there were also those who didn’t. I don’t know how or if the action at 1211 will galvanize any progressive action beyond the few days of hearing broadcasters using the words “racist New York Post” in their deliveries, merely repeating what the demonstrators had been saying, certainly not expressing an opinion but, nevertheless, delivering a pleasureable melody to the ears of many in New York’s black communities.

However, is “racist New York Post” about to be no more than a cliché and not a rallying cry for something more significant.

More Footnotes

As for the NAACP: A lion that has lost its roar. Despite the mainstream broadcasters’ standup deliveries of Guest-Who’s-Coming-to-Town and Guess-What-They Are-Going-to-Do and Guess-What-the-Reverend Al-Is-Up-to-Now, I have to ask, So what? The Post and its hundreds of thousands of admiring readers are suppose trembleing in fear that its poison is about to be diminished?

With all the community activists of color in this five-borough metropolis, the best that can be served up is threat of a lion that cannot roar? Strike fear? Rend flesh (editorial, of course)?

The President of the National Association of Black Journalists criticized the Post in a TV interview snippet for its racist cartoon. I wished she had also denounced the death penalty. The NABJ has refused to sign on with opponents of the death penalty seeking their participation in various actions. When I was interviewing and researching a project about kids on death row, people of color reportedly made up more than 60 percent of death row inmates. In Texas, they are 70 percent.

She could have also sneak in a denouncement of the NYPD for what the New York Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights have shown is its mass harassment of people of color with its stop and frisk policies.

I don’t have time to locate the Village Voice’s Press Clips column of many years ago describing how the Post and the News provided the Reverend Sharpton the tantamount of unlimited, favorable news coverage albeit short stories about various initiatives planned by his National Action Network. Many of the initiatives never found fruit – and most reporters covering NAA press conferences correctly suspected that they wouldn’t – but that, according to the Voice, didn’t seem to bother the News and Post. The Voice insinuated that the two tabloids perceived the Reverend Sharpton as amusing and colorful and preferred him over serious black activists who couldn’t get the equivalent of a teaspoon of coverage for real initiatives.

Both the Post and the News, however, did do follow-ups on a Newsday report about the Reverend Sharpton being a federal informant for the FBI and U.S. Attorney General’s Office. He tried to drop dimes on his political opponents who were black. Much later, of course, when Sharpton’s stature was being embossed by an impressive national image, Cornell West allowed him what I describe as a blessing and forgiveness.

In the countless stories reporting on the Tawana Brawley extravaganza, I recall Sharpton and activist attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason saying they were using that case to attack racism in the criminal justice system. I and many other black New Yorkers as well as mainstream and community journalists didn’t believe the accounts of her rape even as we imaginatively found ways to maintain respect for the activist trio.

In a war waged against a community, should one be concerned about the fairness of leaders and activists who use propagandistic tools to take on assassins attacking their people? The lack of truth can exact a terrible price. Which is not to say that the later disbarments of Maddox and Mason were related to the subterfuge in the Brawley case (though there are many who believed they were especially targeted because of their roles).

However, their actions did spark this: I watched New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams say in a television interview that racism was a problem in the state’s criminal justice system and that more needed to be done to address it. As a follow-up to that admission, to show that he was serious, it would have been have been so apropos if Abrams had spearheaded a movement for a reversal of the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. But he didn’t.

So, what now?

 

 

 

 

Snickering, Chortling?

 

As the Chairman of the New York Post, I am ultimately responsible for what is printed in its pages. The buck stops with me. 

Last week, we made a mistake. We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.

Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of people and I now better understand the hurt this cartoon has caused. At the same time, I have had conversations with Post editors about the situation and I can assure you – without a doubt – that the only intent of that cartoon was to mock a badly written piece of legislation. It was not meant to be racist, but unfortunately, it was interpreted by many as such.

We all hold the readers of the New York Post in high regard and I promise you that we will seek to be more attuned to the sensitivities of our community.

The organizers have obviously scored a hit but of what significance? I need time to process.

Selected: URLs: CNN. Rueters. NY Post. ]

It cannot be denied: Lots and lots and lots of New Yorkers who love the Post don

 

I’m in awe of the comeuppance, as I wrote earlier, though I wish the take down had been rooted more in assertions incontrovertible and irrefutable. The Post is not bloodied, and it most certainly is unbowed [plus it has been hiring people of color for news editorial positions]. So, what’s the toll?

Because of the protest and threats of a boycott, will circulation drop? – I doubt it. The call for a newspaper boycott may generate attention getting news but such boycotts in the pass have rarely been effective in other cities. There has always been talk but effective action was almost always ineffective regarding stated goals of the organizers.

Stocks drop? – Doubt it. Advertisers pull out? – Nope. The Post’s re-examining its animus for black communities? – Nope, otherwise it wouldn’t be the Post. But as I wrote earlier, the way it expresses its racist contempt has been modified though its history remains a big blip on the social radar of New York black communities. Is there a silver lining here? – Doubt it.

Will the organizers, drawing on the energy of their current protest, go after the bigotry in the rest of the New York mainstream news media? Nah. So, what will they do so that this New York Moment may continue to resonate? Is there a strategy about?

I don’t know.

The Reverend Al Sharpton, in an evening TV news snippet February 23, said that he was planning to contact the Federal Communications Commission about dual ownership, that is, big corporations like Murdoch’s News Corporation owning newspapers and broadcast news media in the same municipality. That was a hop topic several years ago, and Murdoch was in the bulls-eye for his dual ownerships in New York City and Boston. But even U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy, who had been the target of several Post articles, so-called investigative pieces (regarding the Chappaquiddick incident), op eds,  and editorials, supported the law allowing News Corporation and other media giants the right to their dual ownerships. So, I’m not inspired about the prospects of this FCC angle.

Because of the election of the first black President, race is certainly on everyone’s mind, elevated to a consciousness and public awareness in a way unheard of before November 4. Yes, the Civil Rights Movement made race and American racism and America’s omissions much harder to hide. Lots and lots and lots of us are watching and waiting, and, I hope, planning.

I sense this labyrinth but can’t make coherent sense of it. So, I’ll just list some footnotes because I can’t described the big picture in the making.

End, Part II of III.

In Part III: Footnotes for a big picture yet to be described.

Shortly after Rupert Murdoch bought the Post, its Australian and British and American editors and reporters relished its “news stories” spiting African Americans. I recall one vile tongue-in-cheek about Stepin Fetchit who was dead at the time but none the less was described in a Post article as a gifted African American actor whom the black community should be proud.

This picture of Stepin Fetchit groveling in a typically degenerate manner was not the one used by the Post but matches the essence of that missing picture.

The Post, its villainy and malice veiled in a smug editorial impunity allowed by the First Amendment, published racist invective, though no reader ever once saw on its pages the word nigger that could be heard on certain shifts in the newsroom. The Post’s contempt for people of color was well known in the bars frequented by journalists. It was well known throughout the city. Its writers and editors and supporters made sure of that.

In one period in the early 1980s, it also had published stories bashing gays. However, hundreds of gays showed up one evening at 210 South Street, where it use to reside, threatening a ransacking, and they returned for several days as a menacing horde.

The upshot? The Post stopped bashing though no one would ever say its homophobia was on the back burner.

Blacks never showed up in mass threatening to sack the place though there were calls for boycotts, and the paper was denounced in churches and barbershops and restaurants and all makes and manner of collectives in New York’s black communities. In the middle of a plenary discussion of community activists and journalists of color, at a New York City conference organized by the National Alliance of Third World Journalists, I stood and identified myself as a Post reporter when discussion about racism in mainstream New York news media included comments about the Post. I believe I was hearing a call to action and said I was ready to be an undercover agent for any planned action by NATWJ.

Quote Marks for Effect: “We have so much to deal with that we have to deal with them later, brother, so just hold on to your job and try not to do any harm,” a community activist said. Nevertheless, there were heated moments in communities where I identified myself as a Post reporter there to get “news.” And I often defused the situations with, Quote Marks for Effect, “I don’t write those kind of stories” or “You’ve never seen my name on any of those stories.”

I was working part-time at the Post while I was trying to finish my first book, The Kids Next Door: Sons and Daughters Who Killed Their Parents (William Morrow & Company, and out of print), while trying to help a youth who had been wrongly convicted; while suing a weekly national news magazine in a federal discrimination suit (written up in the Columba Journalism Review) and trying to figure out how to purse a journalism career. Jimmy Breslin, at the New York Daily News then, wrote two columns about the racism of the Post.

His News had been sued in a federal discrimination lawsuit that it would eventually lose, the only big city daily ever to lose a suit like that, and Breslin’s pieces, in essence, rhetorically questioned how the News could be sued despite its employment of several black reporters and editors and copy editors, yet, the Post didn’t have one full-time black journalist (although it had two full-time Asian Americans, one an editor, another a reporter).

[ I wonder if anyone recalls the brouhaha at New York Newsday, when it was alive, over Breslin's newsroom racial rant about Asian Americans but that's another story. ]

Breslin’s first piece shocked the Post editors. I was there the day of the jaw-dropping surprise. I was not in the newsroom when Breslin followed with a second column that week jolting them into action. After ignoring all manner of subtle and direct entrées by Post editors, I was “pressured” to apply for a full-time position, though, after I was hired, I refused for many weeks to allow my byline on stories I had written – that was my ad hoc strategy for dealing with newsroom racism and I milked it for as long as I could.

I was riding on a Post elevator one day with members of the editorial page when two portly Australians (I say Australian because of the accents, and portly because they were portly, but they could have been British) were discussing the appropriateness of using “spear chuckers” as a reference to African American community activists whom the Post detested. Quote Marks for Effect: “They don’t like being called spear chuckers,” one, who was looking directly at me as I glared, said to the other.

In the newsroom, Post editors and reporters denounced other New York mainstream and broadcast news media as hypocrites that pretended that they weren’t racist when they shared the same opinions as the Post but were too chicken to let it all hang out as the Post did.

Post-ers said white liberals were as racist as they were. As far as they were concerned, there was no grey, only black and white.

This has to be stated: Well after I left to teach at the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the surly racist content was gradually being replaced by what the Post considered nuances and subtleties in its news stories, though the race sleaze was left to columnists. That occurred about the time the New York Times started citing and crediting Murdoch’s newspaper in NYT stories, something it had refused to do for years.

Nevertheless, the Post’s reputation for being a vile racist is written in stone, as far as many people of color are concerned, no matter its subtleties and nuance.

End, Part I of III.

In Part II: Should one be concerned about the fairness of a wronged community’s leaders and activists who take on an assassin that has been maliciously abusing its people?