Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 73
We are in a crisis and it is not new. Those
of us who have been here since the tumult
of 1992 say history is repeating itself. We
don’t have enough Black journalists — or,
more broadly, journalists of color — to
cover our overwhelmingly diverse city,
state and nation with appropriate insight
and sensitivity. And most of us who do
work here are often ignored, marginalized,
under-valued and left to drift along career
paths that leave little opportunity for
advancement. Meanwhile, we’re hearing the
same empty promises and seeing the same
foot-dragging from management.”13
Among its demands, the Black Caucus urged the paper to
issue a public apology — “not just for the Black journalists
on staff, but for the communities that The Times has
maligned over the years with tone-deaf coverage that has
often inflamed racial tensions.”14
Additional demands included hiring 18 more Black
journalists over three years to reach parity with the
county’s Black population, rectifying pay disparities,
and improving coverage to capture the “nuance and
complexity” of communities of color — “in particular …
the Black community,” which the company admitted was
an “untapped base of potential subscribers.” The “framing
and selection” of stories, the letter noted, were often
“designed mostly with a white audience in mind at the
expense of communities of color.”15
In an email to the staff in early June, Times Executive
Editor Norman Pearlstine wrote that as “protesters
are pushing America to examine how systemic racism
has shaped our institutions, we would be remiss in
not examining our own institution as well.”16 He also
acknowledged the paper’s history of harm:
The Los Angeles Times has a long, welldocumented history of fueling the racism
and cruelty that accompanied our city’s
becoming a metropolis. This publication
fomented the hysteria that led to Japanese
American incarceration, the Zoot Suit Riots,
redlining and racial covenants, and it turned
a blind eye to generations of police abuses
against minority communities. At its worst,
our coverage didn’t simply ignore people of
color — it actively dehumanized them. More
recently, we can be faulted for focusing on
a white subscriber base even as the city
became majority non-white. Our paper’s
history of addressing the concerns of people
of color in the newsroom has been equally
checkered. Our failures have caused pain for
staff past and present.17
The Los Angeles Times is hardly alone when it comes to
ignoring the Black community and other communities of
color — and in catering to white readers who are regarded
as a more desirable demographic for advertisers to target.18
This is an issue that deserves greater attention since it
shows the history of discriminatory business practices
of many news outlets that have refused to deliver their
papers to poor communities and communities of color.19
In 1996, The Washington Post’s Geneva Overholser wrote
that many newspapers had “essentially adopted redlining: They simply cease to serve areas of little interest to
advertisers.”20 It should come as no surprise that this kind
of prejudice would also extend to how Black journalists
are treated within their newsrooms and questioned about
their ability to objectively cover their own communities.
In 2020, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s managing editor
told two Black journalists — reporter Alexis Johnson and
Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Michael Santiago —
that they could no longer cover the local uprisings due to
tweets each had posted.
Johnson posted a sarcastic tweet on May 31 that included
a picture of a parking lot filled with trash. It read:
“Horrifying scenes and aftermath from selfish LOOTERS
who don’t care about this city!!!!! .... oh wait sorry. No,
these are pictures from a Kenny Chesney concert tailgate.
Whoops.”21
Following this tweet, the managing editor told Johnson
she couldn’t cover the uprisings. The paper also pulled
Santiago from covering the protests after he tweeted his
support of Johnson. Since then, he has taken a buyout and
left the paper.22
A lawsuit Johnson filed accused the Post-Gazette of
violating her civil rights and noted that reporters at the
paper “who spoke out publicly against discrimination and
hate after the 2018 shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue
— which did not involve actions by police directed at
African Americans — were not removed from covering
that story.”23
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