Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 70
XV. Upending White Supremacy in Newsrooms
JOURNALISTS OF COLOR LEAD THE WAY
Black journalists at The New York Times took to Twitter
on June 3 to denounce an editorial by Sen. Tom Cotton
(R–Arkansas) the paper had published that day. Cotton’s
Op-Ed, “Send in the Troops,” advocated for military force
to put down the nationwide uprisings and trample people’s
constitutional right to protest — a fascist stance that
directly endangered Black lives.1
read it before it was published. Soon after the meeting, he
resigned.5
Times staffers tweeted a screenshot of the column’s
headline with the message “Running this puts Black
@NYTimes staff in danger.”2
Meanwhile, journalists of color at The Philadelphia Inquirer
revolted after the paper ran a June 2 headline that read
“Buildings Matter, Too” for a story about buildings
damaged during the demonstrations. The paper faced an
immediate internal backlash against this co-opting of the
term “Black Lives Matter.”
More than 1,000 Times staffers signed a letter denouncing
the column’s misinformation and the paper’s decision to
publish the piece.3
The paper’s editorial-page editor, James Bennet, initially
defended the decision, stating on Twitter that “Times
Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counterarguments, particularly those made by people in a position
to set policy.”
He added “[We] understand that many readers find
Senator Cotton’s argument painful, even dangerous. We
believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and
debate.”4
But during a staff meeting, it emerged that the editorial
page had solicited Cotton’s Op-Ed and that Bennet had not
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On June 5, the Times placed an editorial note on the online
version of the column that read “we have concluded that
the essay fell short of our standards and should not have
been published.“6
The next day, journalists of color at the Inquirer published
an open letter to the editor that spoke of the anger and
frustrations they’d experienced at the paper:
We’re tired of hasty apologies and silent corrections
when someone screws up. We’re tired of workshops
and worksheets and diversity panels. We’re tired of
working for months and years to gain the trust of our
communities — communities that have long had good
reason to not trust our profession — only to see that
trust eroded in an instant by careless, unempathetic
decisions.
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