The First Amendment; Minorities in the Media: The Reporters

My name is Gwen Dillard I. Your program indicates that I'm the senior producer of public affairs at Channel 5. That was June until this summer I'm not with Channel 5 now although I was when the program was printed. I spend about 10 years in broadcast journalism and the remarks that I'm going to make apply only to broadcast journalism I've never practiced in print journalism. There's an awful lot that can be said about this subject but I'm going to make some relatively brief remarks. I notice John I mean my notes warning nice I'll keep them quite brief about one particular aspect of the media's trials and tribulations here in the city of Boston. Ordinarily I'm uncomfortable with the idea of talking about coverage of minority issues and I've been in the media long enough to have done a lot of conferences about minority issues and I always have a little. You know when I hear that phrase because I think ideally there should be no such thing

as minority issues and the media covers issues that covers events that are going on in our lives and tries to tell the public what's important about those events how they affect isn't what we ought to know about them. That is the ideal. In fact it really works out that way. Most television stations of left to their own devices but probably totally ignore the minority community not necessarily out of evilness or than Dick deafness. Just out of a kind of congenital blindness they just seem to look right through us and as we keep reminding them that we're there and reminding them that they have to pay attention to us and acknowledge our existence. But what I want to talk about is a situation here specifically in the city of Boston because I think that the media in Boston has simply the most difficult task in front of them and the problems of the media in Boston go way beyond ordinary coverage of what might be called minority

issues. Since I've been in Boston and I've been here I guess about seven years now it has struck me that. The most serious problem and this is going to come as no surprise to you the most serious problem that's facing the city is a racial problem. I can't think of any one story that I consider more important more crucial to the city. To be even more specific. The problem is racism. The problem is not bussing or desegregation or teenage gangs or turf. That word that I never heard before before I came to Boston turf or ethnic pride or tradition unless you consider racism a tradition. The media has been very hard put to come to grips with this problem. And I think it's been hard put to come to grips with it in several specific areas. First from the start of the school desegregation process it seems to me that the

media has very readily much to readily swallow the lie that the problem facing the city is school desegregation. That race relations in Boston were fine before the process of desegregation started that it was the intervention of the courts that started tearing the city apart and not longstanding deep seeded racial hostility that was leading the city to tear itself apart. Second and touching very briefly on each of these points because I I do want some feedback from you after all the Pallister have spoken. Second I think that the broadcast media radio and television particularly television is handicapped by the fact that it's very event oriented. The process of school desegregation of course was an overwhelming event from their point of view. Television news itself the television news broadcast progresses from event to event from story to story. And you know that the

broadcast is over when there are no more events or no more stories to tell you when the program ends. And if there are any connections between the separate events that you see in each broadcast or between the events of the broadcast last night or the events of the broadcast a month ago or a year ago the viewer is pretty much left on his own or her own to figure out what those connections are and what the underlying be Nation ships between those connections are. I make that criticism cautiously because I know the television is set up to broadcast events it's not The New Republic and it's not Harper's magazine but it's a weakness and reporting situation is complicated and it's flammable as the racial situation in Boston started. I think the media has failed. Obj. Lee to hold to the fire the theat certain public officials. For the moral climate that they have allowed even in some cases courage to develop in this city. Obviously I'm

thinking specifically of those politicians and officials whose careers have thrived through fanning racial flames. But I'm also thinking about a highly placed public official that I had occasion to talk with some months ago and he was outlining what his programme for the city of Boston is going to be. If we elected and he was re-elected over the next several years. But his priorities were. You know what he thought the city needed and he started by talking about several development type projects you know rebuilding type projects. He didn't say something about the racial climate in the city. He was asked specifically about that. And there's this long silence after the question. He squirmed a little bit on the couch and finally started talking very slowly about ethnic traditions and turf and word again about how difficult it is to change the habits of thinking that people have grown up in. And after a while he just kind of

trailed off and drifted onto a different subject and that was the end of his answer about how he intended to approach the racial climate in the city. This is unconscionable. And I think that any media that puts in officials public policy before the public also has to make it clear that public official is apparently completely unprepared to come to grips with what is apparently the city's most serious problem. Let us move with this batch from television in Boston because Back to do a print press perspective and a national perspective perhaps as well. Christians and when they do I recall when I set out to come here a meeting I had about three years ago with a managing editor of a San Francisco newspaper whom I knew fairly well who confided to me that he'd found a wonderful way of covering minority affairs in his city.

He had of course started something like reporter to cover black affairs and move very quickly to Chicago reporter to cover Hispanic affairs and that had worked pretty well so he had a Chinese-American reporter to cover Chinatown a Japanese-American reporter to cover Japanese affairs and had ended this fairly long list there which went through Italian Americans and others. With a gay to cover gay affairs in San Francisco. I neglected to ask him I wish I had the time where I also had found a dead man to cover the obit or to write the obits. In a way this extreme use of minority persons to cover minority subjects. And they sound a bit absurd but it really is about where we are and have been stuck for a long time. In general American journalistic coverage and I guess one could make some pretty strong arguments for it. If you say that.

Who better than let's to take a relatively neutral subject a Chinese-American. Growing up in Chinatown in San Francisco or Boston or New York I could really understand all of the subtleties of political educational and social life in that community and you can by extension move from community to community and and make that argument. You can also quite readily I think make a counter argument that familiarity has its problems. That for every bit of extra interest and accurate reporting you got from someone who is steeped in and understanding of a community you also have to have a slight worry about the degree to which that reporter and his sources may expect a perhaps slightly less than hard digging story. At times I realize we may be moving beyond here just talking about the usual headline and opening six o'clock news subjects

of clashes in the community the kind of thing that was just talked about. But when you got down to really covering what goes on and what people are like and what they think you do need from those reporters who go out to cover such a community not only an ability to do some digging as well as explain the knowledge they have of their own community but I think you also need a quality of explaining to the great unwashed audience who has not grown up in that community does not understand it. What are the feelings and what the feelings are and what life is like in such a community. Thank you world. We might as well get a television for their day in court just like you. The title of the panel somewhat startled me a minute said

telling minority stories comma responsibly. Because as most of you know and working at Channel 7 producing and anchoring a program called black news you always challenge whether or not you told a story responsibly. And but I know what the makers of the panel meant when they said it but when you look at it from my context it's kind of a sensitive word. I probably will deal only with black news as a journalistic enterprise all of you know that I am a general assignment reporter at WNYC TV in Channel 7. I also have the opportunity to do a radio program and write an occasional newspaper article. So I'm all over the map. But I do spend a great deal of my professional time producing and anchoring a program called black news and black news is usually a challenge just being a ghetto being outside of the mainstream as being separatist.

We think that black news is necessary. We think that black programming on television is necessary. And we think the black news is a small very little and we use the term small and little because we're only on once a week for 24 to 26 minutes depending on the number of commercials that our large ratings have allowed us to put on the air. We think that if we think that that is a journalistic enterprise. That tries to tell. To white people. And black people. What black people are thinking feeling and doing and that's a very important bit of philosophy to us and guiding force to us. Because we know that our audience is black and white. And we think it is important that what black people are thinking feeling and doing be told. Black news is necessary maybe for two reasons you can't mainstream it because all of the Black

Stars if they were told all the important journalistic black stories if they were told on what we call regular news and I guess Channel 7 whose only place in the world that used the terms black news regular news what we call what we call regular news what would happen is that the regular news would become black also black news is and is an appendage to the regular news in the news room there is no separation. There is no segregation. There is no ghettoizing. We work in concert. We work out of the same assignment desk we work with the same news crews and many of the stores that you probably see on black news have by probably been then seen early in the week in a different way. One of the things about black news is that we always get calls and letters from people saying well why have black news why not have white news Korean Japanese news Jewish news and they go on with the many ethnic groups saying that if you got a black news you got to have another kind of

news we have. Black Programming and the black programming that's done and Channel 7 as is done in Channel 4 5 6 and 38 is done for the obvious reasons the Channel 7 shows the news format. Because it can give you a wider breadth of coverage and possibly a little more variety. Let me try and tell you what we do with black news we have been trying to change a name for days so maybe we can end our last bit of opposition. And my producer told me to tell him that we're considering the term bacon fat and applesauce. Maybe. That will help us get away from the so-called stigma attached to black news. Black people are human and they have their aspirations they have their points of view they have their desires and they don't all think the same we don't all think the same Bartley. Black community. Black community is human. Black community is not monolithic there's not one political point of

view there's not one idiology there's not one philosophy. So you see if you are a journalistic enterprise you have a responsibility to ferret all of that out if you possibly can. Let me deal with let me try and touch on six areas in the three minutes I have remaining that we tried to we see is our responsibility in telling to white people and black people but black people are thinking feeling and doing. We realize number one that our white audience is largely looking at the ratings since we know that rating services don't measure black audiences. We know that the size of our white audience is considerable. So we take that into account because we're interested in staying on the air so we're interested in maintaining ratings. One of the first thing we one of the first things we examined tried to examine is public policy. We tried to examine public policy as it affects opportunities for. Minorities as it affects access of minorities. Let me depart for a moment. Another important point is that if you look at black news black news is not a program just

for black people. We try to deal with the unheard. The Vietnamese the Haitians the Hispanics the Chinese the unheard in our viewing area the people that under this particular rubric become black. We try to deal with public policy and challenge public policy and look at the inconsistences in public policy that do not provide opportunity or access for black people and using the definition of black people that I just gave you. We try to provide a forum. For people that are not what we call media made leaders. If you think of a leader quite often you will think of maybe Jesse Jackson you might think of Andrew Young. You may think of some standard pat names that have been developed as leaders not that these people are not bona fide leaders and not that these people are not excellent articulators of the needs interests and aspirations of black

people but there are other people out there who are working and toiling diligently in that so-called Vin yard to provide opportunity access and freedom for black people. And we try to provide them a forum. One person called it called black news advocacy journalism in a sense he was correct because we do have other people out there who are advocates. Of equal intensity to a Jesse Jackson. We do try to provide new leaders and find new leadership. We don't rely on wires our newspapers or magazines for our stories. So we become an enterprise and that has been becoming an enterprise we've become an incubator for news. We are proud of that. We are proud to know that when our producer walks into the production sessions for the day and she hears that she has a producer of The Six O'Clock News say we're going to do this story let's do this story on Charles Town

housing. And our producer can smile and say well black newsmen doing that star for six weeks and the story get stories seem to get somebody and some credibility as they incubate for a while on black news. We have a responsibility to be fair. We have a responsibility to find all points of view and we try to carry out that responsibility despite our enslavement to a context a context of dealing only with black people. And notice my definition of black people have once again to refer. And let's hear from from one more. Media prison before we moved to a citizens group of great distinction Alan thank you my name is al lupo. I've been a reporter and an editor and writer and author on a broadcast for about 20 years work for The Baltimore Sun on the globe and work for Channel 4 and Channel 2 and over in a couple of books

and I'd like to just become an amateur historian here just to throw a little background into this discussion. And I think make a couple of points too for those of you who are going back into the community to try to influence the press in the media. At least I hope there's a few people out here like that because if there aren't we ought to close down now and who gets on the drink. On the presumption that there are such people out there I will now begin. After I'd been in newspaper business for a couple years I ended up at the Baltimore Sun. It was 1963 and used to come to work through the south side of Baltimore. Palmer and I used to see these elderly black fellows about three or four of them out in a big vacant lot. We used to lift these bricks and put them on for truck. Every morning I came by these guys lifting bricks and putting a month with truck which doesn't look like a hell of a

job to me. And I had a funny feeling that it was the only work they could get. And I had another funny feeling that they weren't getting a lot of money for it. So I got the bright idea to go to my managing editor and say to him Hey Phil I got an idea you know at that time I use the word negro because at that time there were no black reporters in the paper to tell us anything different. And there were none. And I said Hey Phil every time I come through town I see and I describe what I see and they don't look very happy. And the housing that's stuck on the fringes of the city doesn't look very good. And there seem to be a lot of white people living in that housing. It wouldn't be a good idea. You will hear some radicals who want to be a good idea. If we did a story a story on what it's like to be a Negro in Baltimore

for radicalized and he looked at me and said here. Now we hear you. You just. Do what you want to do that for. And I explained again why I thought it was a good idea. And he said Al you just go make them feel uncomfortable. You go you go and put them under a microscope. I mean you're a Jew how do you feel would you want to own the Jews in Baltimore. I said Hey Phil why don't we do one on the Jews. She didn't use the run Jewish wedding announcements either. Needless to say we didn't do any. By 1965 6 when I left the Baltimore Sun to come back to the city of my birth race central There was one black reporter on the Baltimore Sun. I came back to Boston and there

were no black reporters at the Globe at the time they were in-between tokens. I was immediately told that I was an urban affairs reporter on the presumption that if you're going to have an affair you might as well have been in the city. There's not much doing out and check up you know something. So I became an urban affairs reporter in 1967 in Roxbury. Some welfare mothers were making a protest about a valid issue and the cops shall we say overreacted and it turned into a confrontation I believe was the word they used which was a polite word for it wasn't just the blacks or assume that everybody in the area was rioting cops or blacks right. I was off one night when everything really got bad and figuring that I was the urban affairs reporter. I drove back into the city and I said gee why don't I go do some stories. And they said oh OK. And I

went down to Roxbury. I ended up on a street that happened to have on it a large. Police wagon which was literally overflowing with cops all of whom were white and all of them had big rifles. And they were running around a street they all jumped on a. Paddy wagon and they drove off and one of them yell to me Hey you better get out of here. Thank you he said and I looked across the street and I sorry small group of people mostly males mostly younger than I am was mostly in better shape and all of whom were black which seemed reasonable given there was a black neighborhood. And I walked across the street and I said I'd like to do a story here. Well two of them one in the coronary arrest. One of them said Let me see a press card because I was wearing a raincoat so we figured I was either a cop or a flasher. And he looked at the press guides and the others said OK go ahead and ask.

And I asked some questions and they gave some answers and I put the notebook in my pocket I said I got to get going I got to make a deadline. And at least two of them looked at me and smiled the way a look at a little kid and said hey this isn't going to get in the paper. Well I was going to show them I was working in a liberal newspaper in a liberal city. And I got my copy in on time and it didn't get in the paper. You were right. They were right. So we worked for a while with these anecdotes in the back of my mind. And we indeed improve the coverage of not just the black community but a number of communities. And I would like to suggest and I know some of you won't buy this but I believe that unless you're the president of a college or the president of a bank or the president of the United States or the president of an investment firm unless your kids went to prep school with the publisher's kids or unless you were in charge of natural disasters such as tornadoes or press

conferences you generally don't have the access to the media that you need and would like so therefore many of us are minorities in that respect. We work hard and I think we did a good job for a while covering different neighborhoods black neighborhoods Hispanic neighborhoods Italian neighborhoods Irish neighborhoods Jewish neighborhoods Oriental neighborhoods. But a funny thing happened on the way to this wonderful journalistic goal that we set up. It became one thousand seventy something reporters who had been doing this day after day year after year were getting exhausted because it's a brutal kind of beat to cover. And the media got bored. The newspapers got bored the TV stations got bored and by 1972 when I figured all these problems of sensitivity had been solved I was yet working for somewhere else called Channel 2 when I was down the North End which is not a black neighborhood but which is an

Italian neighborhood and they were picketing something and I looked around and I was lonely because I was the only reporter there for the first two or three days. It took them a long time to get their message across to the media and in the process of doing so one of them turned to me one night and said What do we have to do here. We got to burn down a whole neighborhood to get attention. And I don't remember what I said but what I wanted to say was Ralphie. That's exactly what you've got to do and I'm glad I didn't say it because I don't want to be involved in any kind of an arson scheme. But honest to god that was the only honest answer I could have given him. And I'm afraid it's the only honest answer. The fastest answer I could give him today because the press and the media have retreated visibly from what was the beginning of a commitment to cover of a rioting of minorities to cover the good and the bad of the neighborhoods and the issues that they were concerned with

today picketing or a demonstration of the threat of violence no longer assures coverage by the media. So what is the option. Briefly because I think I'm going over my time and I apologize. The option is for those of you who are involved in this kind of stuff is to organize organize groups be they based around the neighborhood be they based around issues that affect you. Give those groups names in each group. Make sure there is a spokes person of some sort. It makes you nervous the little fly flying. It doesn't have to be a trained public relations person. You can be somebody who can find a battered typewriter and some cheap typing paper and start dealing with the media on a one on one basis monitor the TV programs monitor the radio programs read the newspapers pick those by lines. And those reporters who seem to have some sensitivity and get them one at a

time down into the neighborhood and cultivate them as reporters and pretty soon they'll cultivate you as sources. It works both ways. I have coffee with them introduce them around tell them what you're into Tell them what you're about. And that's how the stories will resume after what has been a 10 year hiatus in the coverage of these kinds of issues in these kinds of people.