A recent conference in Atlanta took place over several days and attracted hundreds of people from around the country to discuss the “State of the Black World.”
Among other things, some high-profile speakers reminded the assembly that African-Americans have lived with terror for years while many white Americans have only recently begun to experience it.
The following week there was a news conference and rally that lasted only a few minutes by a handful of black ministers and political activists to show support for a former DeKalb County sheriff who had just been charged with murder. The leader of the rally offered his opinion that law enforcement officials were singling out black political leaders for prosecution.
The newspaper chose to skip most of the first event, sending a columnist there late one afternoon. In contrast, editors decided not only to cover the news conference and rally for the former sheriff, but also to advance it the day before it happened.
At a newspaper that is constantly accused of promoting a racial agenda, how could we cover one event and largely ignore the other? And what message were we trying to send with such decisions?
The answer is in the subjective world of news judgment, the expertise we pay news editors to have and to use on a daily basis.
But when the issue is race, there apparently is very little middle ground with many readers. Either the newspaper is promoting a racially divisive agenda so that more black people will buy the paper, or it is ignoring the issue so that white people won’t stop buying the paper. In short, racial issues sell, many of you think.
That’s the message I hear from readers day in and day out — readers who, among other things, count the number of pictures and stories about black people and compare them with stories and pictures about whites, or readers who keep track of city vs. suburban stories and assign racial classifications to them based solely on geography. Or readers such as the dozens among you who responded to a recent column about including racial statistics in stories with a charge that our goal is to exacerbate racial divisions.
Or, as is often the case, readers who want us to answer racial questions about news stories that many would never think to ask.
Questions such as: What if Michael Lasseter had been black? Lasseter, you’ll recall, ran the wrong way down the Hartsfield escalator and prompted authorities to shut down the airport for several hours. Depending on your point of view, we went easy on him because he is white, or we overcovered and caused abuse to be heaped upon him for the same reason.
Questions such as: What race was the middle school student who beat up the Fulton County school bus driver last month? Because we didn’t say, many readers apparently assumed he is black. “You won’t report that because you don’t want to deal with the racial issue,” one reader told me at the time. The truth is I don’t know what race the teenager is and we didn’t report it because it was not relevant to the story.
But it’s probably impossible to convince those of you who insist we have an agenda to follow that we make decisions based on what we think is newsworthy. I’ve learned that’s especially true when the subject is race.
I can’t promise we won’t make mistakes or make some wrongheaded decisions. I can’t even promise consistency.
I think, for instance, we should have done more with the State of the Black World conference and less with the Concerned Black Clergy and its support for Sidney Dorsey. Those are judgment calls that editors make every day, and I know the news demands they are up against when they make those decisions.
But if we wanted to choose a topic that would help sell more newspapers or get people to subscribe, race would not be it; not here and not in any market. In three decades in the business, I have yet to hear a circulation executive come to an editor and ask for more coverage of racial issues.
When the issue of race is in the paper, it’s because it’s news — not because it sells.
