Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 74
In 2018, a gunman shot and killed 11 Jewish
worshippers.24
his comments on Twitter on such issues as journalism and
race.29 He is now a CBS News correspondent.
Unlike other newspapers whose editors apologized,
responded or resigned, the Post-Gazette dug in. Executive
Editor Keith Burris appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox
News program to defend the paper against the so-called
“Twitter mob.”25 He also claimed in a column that he was
simply upholding journalism ethics.26
The view that whiteness is the default objective neutral —
or normal — has also been the unwritten but understood
focus of noncommercial public broadcasters. It’s why
major public-broadcasting stations are also facing their
own newsroom reckonings.30
Burris hardly has any credibility on this front: In 2018,
when he was the editorial-page editor, he wrote a column
defending Trump’s racist comments after the president
questioned why the United States should allow immigrants
from “shithole countries“ like El Salvador and Haiti to
enter the country. Burris argued that “calling someone a
racist is the new McCarthyism.”27
Black journalists have long been accused of bias and the
inability to “objectively” cover their own communities.
White news-media companies have sought to protect a
white-racial hierarchy by demanding objectivity that by
default centers whiteness.
“Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago
from an openly partisan press to a model of professed
objectivity, the mainstream has allowed what it considers
objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white
reporters and their mostly white bosses,” wrote Wesley
Lowery, a Black journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize at The
Washington Post in 2016 for his investigative reporting on
police killings.
Lowery continued:
[T]hose selective truths have been
calibrated to avoid offending the
sensibilities of white readers. On opinion
pages, the contours of acceptable public
debate have largely been determined
through the gaze of white editors.
The views and inclinations of whiteness
are accepted as the objective neutral.
When black and brown reporters and
editors challenge those conventions, it’s
not uncommon for them to be pushed
out, reprimanded or robbed of new
opportunities.”28
Lowery left the Post after repeated run-ins with Executive
Editor Marty Baron that placed his job in jeopardy over
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Julie Drizin, executive director of Current — a nonprofit
news outlet covering public media — wrote in late June:
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
Public media has a whiteness problem. You
know this. Everybody knows it, especially
people of color. The vast majority of our
stations and organizations fail to adequately
reflect their communities or the country.
We lack representation of people of color in
our leadership, staffing, newsrooms, voices
on air, sources, coverage and — no surprise
here — audiences.31
New York’s WNYC — the most listened-to public-radio
station in the country — is one of the outlets that’s
struggling to reflect the communities they serve. The
New York Times reported in July that more than 145
staffers at WNYC signed an open letter to the station’s
top management and board of trustees calling for a more
diverse staff and for the immediate hiring of two Black
reporters and two Black producers. The letter came in
response to WNYC’s decision to hire Audrey Cooper — a
white woman and the former editor-in-chief of The San
Francisco Chronicle — as its new editor-in-chief.32
Last year, The New York Times reported that WNYC’s
staffers had urged the station’s leadership to hire a person
of color who understood the city and had public-radio
experience. But instead, the station hired Cooper — who
lacked public-radio experience and did not meet the staff
request that the station hire someone who understood the
city (Cooper grew up in Kansas and worked and lived in
California).33
In 2017, WNYC let go three hosts following accusations of
sexual harassment and discrimination. This included John
Hockenberry, host of The Takeaway.
During his WNYC tenure, several employees and a guest
on his show said that Hockenberry had sexually harassed
them. He also bullied and made sexist and racist remarks
to Black women who were his colleagues, such as Rebecca
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