Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist's Story of Reporting and Reinvention - EXCERPT

Excerpt from Amy Alexander's new book "Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist's Story of Reporting and Reinvention." Copyright 2011, Beacon Press

My name on a news story—my byline—had become a defining part of my professional identity, and I wanted it to represent good work, not the work of a hack or a partisan or a dilettante. I wanted readers to know that when they saw my name above a news story or a feature, they could rest assured that they were receiving accurate information that was delivered in compelling language. Above all, I wanted readers to trust that when they saw my name on a story, they would walk away with information that helped them better navigate their world—or at least gave meaningful context to their lives.

My life before I became a journalist had been positively informed and enriched by good bylines. Even before I knew what it took to deliver high-quality reporting and writing, day in and day out, I recognized that some reporters in my hometown newspapers always seemed to produce stories that were satisfying, while some others just seemed to be phoning it in. I wanted to be a reporter who delivered substance, consistently.

Coming of age in Northern California had been ideal preparation for this line of work, especially the genus known as “run-and-gun” journalism. By the time I parachuted into the thick of the looting, shooting, and burning of South Central Los Angeles in late April 1992, I had already witnessed plenty of strange, harrowing events.

Growing up during the 1960s and ’70s, I came to see journalists, like cops and teachers, as professionals who fulfilled sacred civic duties in cities across the United States: preserving and protecting democracy.

Was I naive in this understanding?

Idealistic?

Oh, yes.

But consider this partial list of events that I watched unfold during my formative years in San Francisco. I was born there in 1963, and by the age of five, I was absorbing the news events around me:

• 1968–1974: The DayGlo rise and slow death of hippie culture in Haight-Ashbury; student anti–Vietnam War protests (Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco); tear-gas-shrouded protests over the formation of ethnic studies departments at San Francisco State University; Black Panther rallies, shootouts, and arrests; the Zodiac serial killings; the kidnapping of local newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst by the radical Symbianese Liberation Army; the brainwashed Patty “Tania” Hearst caught on tape, wearing a wig and a trench coat, taking part in a bank stick-up in the Sunset District; other assorted bombings, street actions, and sit-ins.

• 1975–1981: The Jonestown Massacre of 914 former Bay Area residents in Guyana; the assassinations of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk; widespread riots protesting the light sentencing of Dan White, the former San Francisco supervisor convicted of killing Moscone and Milk; the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford at a San  Francisco hotel; and even more assorted bombings, sit-ins, and street actions.

It seemed to me that journalists were important people. In the pages of the two local daily newspapers—the morning San Francisco Chronicle and the afternoon San Francisco Examiner—and on the television airwaves, I came to see journalists as smart, dedicated, fearless investigators who worked important magic: using words and images to explain and lend context to happenings that were, let’s face it, quite insane.

By the time I graduated from high school in the summer of 1981, the prospect of using language to communicate with scores of readers in a handy, low-cost format such as newspapers seemed like a most excellent way to make a living. It did not occur to me that the world of journalism might not be open to people like me: a black woman from a working-class family who would not attend an Ivy League university. As a child of the post–civil rights era, a late-hour baby boomer, I believed that if I got a journalism education and worked hard at learning the trade, my opportunities for joining the ranks of working journalists were good.

Sure, I knew that black women were more likely than whites to face challenges in the media industry. I also knew at least a bit about the effects of corporate ownership on newspapers: one of the leading works of media industry analysis, Media Monopoly by veteran journalist and editor Ben Bagdikian, had been required reading in my college journalism department. Still, in the 1980s, after completing the magazine journalism program at San Francisco State University, I enthusiastically embarked on a reporting career, first wearing proudly the badge of “cub reporter” at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner.

The fact that I was, for nearly two years, the only black female reporter on the Metropolitan staff at that midsize afternoon paper did not initially concern me. Yet several years later, I realized that my time working at my hometown paper marked the beginning of a long, Conradian journey through the heart of darkness of American news organizations.

The value of my byline, I learned over the years, was to editors and newsroom managers highly subjective; few managers shared my belief that my byline was more than an ephemeral presence. For many of them, the expectation was that the newspaper’s reputation for quality and accuracy was to be protected, but reporters’ bylines were interchangeable, the backgrounds and the insights we carried with us into the newsroom each day only marginally relevant to the work we produced.

The longer I stayed in journalism, the clearer it became that I am the only one who can safeguard the essential integrity of my journalistic identity. Much more than just safeguarding my individual reputation, though, my efforts on this front also must be focused on achieving high standards of fairness, accuracy, and ethics as part of a broader effort to defend journalism. This mission is now more crucial than ever, as the Internet expands, carrying bits and pieces of information farther and faster than we journalists could have imagined twenty years ago.

There is this, too: the Internet allows anyone to hang out a journalist’s shingle—a development that is rich with promise and peril, especially in terms of its implications for news coverage of race and

class issues in America.

First, a look at why this is proving perilous for coverage of race and class:

At a time when America is becoming ever more economically and ethnically diverse, financial challenges in the news business are diminishing the numbers of talented, experienced reporters and editors of color. Layoffs, buyouts, and a general contracting of the number of editorial workers in the nation’s news organizations have been particularly devastating to the small population of black, Latino, and

Asian journalists—professionals who entered news organizations in measurable numbers only in the mid-twentieth century. And, at least as of the beginning of the second decade of the 2000s, the emerging online organizations—including traditional print news outlets that have increased their online presences—have not made the recruitment, hiring, and retention of qualified journalists of color a top priority.

This in turn means that as populations grapple with the inevitable clashes (and mergings) that will occur in a multiethnic nation, news organizations will not be equipped to cover the interactions— whether positive, negative, or indifferent—even as these interactions accumulate. The 2008 presidential race—which featured our first viable African American candidate, Barack Hussein Obama, and the first electable female candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, vying for the Democratic nomination—exposed a national political press corps ill equipped to comprehensively and accurately inform audiences of the many complicated elements that had brought those two individuals into the forefront of presidential politics. Too often, rather than informing accurately, calmly, and with authority, news organizations—led predominantly by white males from middle-class backgrounds—deliver coverage that inflames audience’s fears about a

multicultural America.

At the same time, the Internet also is fertile ground for enterprising journalists of all races, ages, and class backgrounds to chart their own path and to deliver reporting and opinion that is fully contextualized. The growth of online-only journals, news websites, and socially conscious publications has been explosive, with writers, editors, and activists of color seizing the opportunity to cover and disseminate news and information that resonates with those populations. “Controlling your own narrative” has become as commonplace as it once was to order a subscription to your local daily newspaper.

There is a big drawback, however, in that the one-stop-shopping aspect of Old Media did, at least, come with a degree of professionalism baked in. The New Media landscape is more like the Wild West, with social media and independent news and opinion sites barreling along at breakneck speed while lumbering Old Media outlets chug along behind, desperate to keep up but seemingly incapable of stopping the Internet train from speeding out of sight. This would be completely exhilarating, except that there are two damsels tied to the tracks in the distance: journalists of color, and the increasingly frustrated audiences of ethnic citizens in the United States who see the train coming and suspect it will not stop for them.

Amy Alexander is an award-winning content producer. The 2008 Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, she has contributed to many prominent publications, including the Miami Herald, Boston Globe, Village Voice, Washington Post, and the Nation. She has also written for Salon.com and TheRoot.com, and was associate producer of NPR's Tell Me More, with Michel Martin. Her three previous books include Lay My Burden Down, coauthored with Alvin Poussaint, MD. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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