On the Media; 1996-11-03; Part 2; It'll Never Be Over: Richard Jewell, Privacy & the Press; St. Petersburg, Race & the Media

I'd like to jump in here, my station did not ask me to go into the neighborhood, and that was something that I volunteered to do. We volunteered to do it because we thought somebody needs to bring a different perspective to what's going on and why it's going on now. If they would have asked me to do it. I may have felt differently about it because I would have felt that they were asking me because I'm a black reporter and they would be assuming that I would necessarily have an opportunity to get more. But I like the fact that we just decided to do it ourselves. And then we had the support of our station and I felt that we were more effective at getting the perspective of the people that live there. Thanks, Kelly. I should add that that that Kelly's colleague, Dean Staley, a white man who was also on the scene, I thought did a good job of reminding people early in that story as they were alive before everybody else came out with a new show later in the evening that this story had context, that he reminded people that there was context to what was happening. And it wasn't just what you were watching on TV at that moment.

And I think that was an important. Diane, thank you for your call. Thank you for your call. Interesting point. What do you are listeners? Let me ask you, what do you feel about the way the media covers the issue of race? How do you feel about that? Do you think that the St. Petersburg coverage that you saw was good coverage? Generally, I know that you saw it from a distance. What do you think? Let's see. David in Brooklyn, New York, you're on the air. Yes, hi. I think really the key problem is that it takes an event like this, whether you want to call a disturbance or write whatever word you want to use, it takes something like this to try to really to get the the media particularly broadcast and to a lesser extent newspapers to even to even, you know, deal with the very real issue of, you know, racial bitterness and tension. I mean, you know, with all due respect, you have your guests, you know, kind of patting themselves on the back for the kind of coverage they did. You know, we were there live and we did it in-depth and. Well, where were they before that? You know, where were they with all the simmering problems that led up to it?

You know, David, that's a very good question. Let me ask you, Keith Woods. I mean, this certainly, I think, shocked people in part because of where it happened as much as the fact that it happened at all. Why why was it such a surprise? Well, to whom was it a surprise, Alec? I think well, it certainly surprised me. I guess that's what I'm I mean, I'm asking is, what is this a fair thing to say? Or was it something that was indeed a surprise to people in St. Pete? Well, I think that that anybody who has the impression of a of a of a shuffle shuffleboard heaven of St. Petersburg would be surprised to learn that there is a an inner city black community that is living poor and and generally disconnected from the rest of the culture. But that if you know if you know America, if you know urban America, then you know that that everywhere. And if that's true and it ought not surprise anybody, it ought not surprise people that that kind of thing often erupts into something that is violent and very public. Well, you know, the St. Petersburg Times, which I know is the funding organization for

Poynter and is one of the best newspapers in the United States. Do you feel like that the St. Pete Times had done this story justice before it happened? No, I don't think that American media in general do this story justice. You know, we're preparing right now for a seminar and on covering race relations here at the institute. And it's difficult to find people out there who are working in the media and particularly in broadcast who are doing this consistently and who have a track record to bring to that kind of conversation. We are not covering this story the way that we are covering any any number of other continuing stories. I can tell you, Alex, what color underwear the baby boomers wear because we cover that story so much. But if you looked in me at a newspaper every day, I watch TV every night to try to find out what's happening in the thing that is undermining every social issue in our country right now, you would not find it on any consistent basis unless you hit the key word, right.

Leo Walensky, do you think that's a fair criticism? I guess it depends what papers you look at and what broadcast outlets. I know for us, certainly, I think we've done a much better, much better job since the riots. I think the riots in L.A., I'm surprised not just the media, it surprised public officials and even surprised community officials. We were very much in touch with them prior to the riots and they were weren't predicting this kind of thing. These things become spontaneous. You can't tell. Since that time, I think we were more introspective about it. We make much more of an effort to look at diversity as being sort of a defining characteristic of our market of Southern California is what defines partly what defines what Southern California is. And as a result, we put much more effort into that story all the time. Now, what has happened at the Los Angeles Times that to cover this issue and since since the riots? Well, a number of things. There is we had a lot of internal upset over what had happened with the riots, people were were upset with each other in the newsroom over this. We began after the riots to have diversity sex sessions among

the staff. We created a diversity committee which brings forth issues of both journalistic quality and types of coverage and who covers what, as well as working conditions, things of that nature that come to the forefront, training for everybody. We've changed our beats around so that we do try to cover communities of color and different communities of interest like that out there. So and and to realize and everything that we do that we're dealing with a diverse group of people that you don't have diversity stories. You make sure there's diversity in every story that you do. Kelly Swoope, as an African-American and a journalist and a television person, do you think that television has a special, you know, failing here or do you think not? Oh, I agree 100 percent we do. And a lot of times we are reactive instead of proactive. Something happened. We have to cover it. Unfortunately, the night that it happened, it was covering the event, not what built up to the event. Has anything changed at WFTS?

I think that we've been more conscious in terms of actually going out to the neighborhoods and talking to people about problems of the past and what they see in terms of solutions, but how long that will go on and if they're going to be solutions, I can't say our number is one 800 three, four, three three three four two. That's one 800 three, four, three, three, three, four, two. We want to know what you think about the way the media cover the issue of race. We're interested in in your thoughts on this subject. David, thank you very much for your call. Norm, in Manhattan, you're on the air. Hi, this is Norm calling you. I'd like to read the ante a little bit here. But first, let me before my question, maybe just compliment you. I certainly agree with Alex Jones that more specific is better and that seeing what happened, building burned and so forth is much more descriptive and therefore more accurate and better writing than seeing this sort of buzzword riot, which in a sense is almost to conceal meaning rather than giving people more information.

And I don't want to see on the definition of a riot, it seemed like this that the dictionary definition of a riot. But I would like to refer back to an incident that happened in New York, which really disturbed me, which was the Crown Heights incident. And I want to ask you, I mean, in this case, it seemed like a failure to report really what was going on there, allowed it to go on for a number of days and allowed a lot more people to be hurt. And I also want to pose a question which was touched on a little bit earlier on the nature of an uprising. And that is I mean, I think it is our duty to get in there, as this last caller said, and report the context and report, for example, of police brutality is going on. It's our duty to find that out before it explodes into a riot. That's the that's a way in which the news media can really make a positive contribution to a community. But I cannot accept that this sort of violence

is justified by any kind of of a contextual reason. I don't think that we should, for one, back and allow allow ourselves to say, look, you know, this is the reason for it. Therefore, it's not violence and evil and bad. It's it's a justified uprising. I mean, it's not enough, right? Well, let me ask you let me ask, you know Keith Woods. Keith Woods teaches a course in in how to cover these sorts of things. Exactly. Keith, when you hear what Norm is saying, how do you how do you respond? Well, I think, again, it's a it's a it's a false choice to say that you either report on the on the violence and criminal behavior as violence and criminal behavior or you report on the context that I think that you were reporting on both of them. And and I don't think anybody in here, in this conversation is saying, let's not tell people that there's criminal behavior going on there. Do you think that that is something that that is a distinction that gets lost in the idea that you're just trying to soft pedal violence?

I think it gets it gets lost when you when you try to respond sensitively to a subject without thinking about what it is that you're responding to. And if you simply eliminate words because those words tend to rile people up without understanding what your mission is as a journalist in the first place, then you wind up with the stuff that they call politically correct. Well, now, how how much interest is there, Keith, in this in learning how to do this kind of reporting? I mean, how much interest from news organizations is there? Well, there's been a fair amount of interest in it in the seminar that we. We have coming up and I don't know I really don't know how to gauge, I allowed it to be much of a cage where we're an organization down here in St. Petersburg. I don't know what all the the factors are in determining whether people want to come here to study that or not. And I don't want to use that as an absolute cage. But the fact of the matter is that we are we tend to to not cover the issue of race relations as an ongoing piece of our reporting.

And I think that says as much about the interest that we have in learning this as anything does. And I think that you're quite right. Norm Thagard, I just one point. Yes, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say that you have an obligation to do a number of things, and I think you have an obligation to follow these through things through to the to the end product. To one thing we did after the L.A. riots and about a year later, it took us that long. We looked at every single person who was arrested during the disturbance and we went to their court cases and we tried to do a profile of who were these people. What we found out there were some who certainly were aggrieved at what had happened, but there were a large number, in fact, a majority who were arrested, who are actually opportunists in this case, who really didn't have a political viewpoint, who weren't out there to to right or wrong, but simply took advantage of a situation that was there. And that goes to the whole issue of it's not to put down the fact that their protest, but is it the protesters who really are the ones who caused the violence? And that's another question that has to be explored. What about the idea that it takes some special training to do this kind of reporting?

Well, what do you think about that idea? Know, I think that the most important thing is to learn how to get out in the streets and be close to the community. And that does take some skill. It means you have to be a street reporter. Many reporters tend to sit in the office and talk to experts instead of getting out and talking to ordinary people on the streets. And that's a big mistake. That was our biggest mistake, I'd say, before what happened with Rodney King. And it taught us the lesson. We try to be much closer to the communities now, and that's something that can be gained from training, I think. Yeah. And Alex, I want to add one thing to that. Yassky, the the author, Studs Terkel, who has done a great deal of interviewing of people about this issue of race, will tell you it takes tremendous work and tremendous effort to get people to talk to you honestly about that issue. And we have to, as individuals understand it. This is this is a difficult thing for us individually to talk about and very difficult for people to talk to strangers and particularly to news people about.

And so that work that you're talking about doing has to be done over a long period of time or you wind up surprised not by the violence. You know, people who are opportunists and opportunists and people are young people who take advantage of the of the situation are not the people we're talking about. And that isn't really the surprise. It ought not surprise people that young people can be unruly, you know, in an unruly way or that or that that you can wind up with that kind of violence. What keeps surprising people is the degree of disconnect between people across race. And that surprises us because we don't talk about that very often in the media. We're going to be back with more questions and we're going to be back with more of your calls. So stay with us. Our number is one 800 three, four, three, three, three, four, two. This is on the media from National Public Radio. I'm Alex Jones, we're back with on the media talking about how the media covered the

disturbance, the riot, the the complex thing that happened down in St. Petersburg that was not just about looting and burning, but was also about responding to an incident of of violence by the police department on a teenager in in St. Petersburg. Now, you see, you can't say it very easily in a very pithy sort of phrase. It's hard. We're talking with Kelly Swoope, reporter for WFTS in Tampa, who was on the scene, Keith Woods, associate and ethics at the Poynter Institute. And Leo Walinski, metro editor of the Los Angeles Times. Kelly, Swoope, you heard Leo Walinski a few moments ago say that it was important to get people from the L.A. Times out of their offices, from behind their desk into the neighborhood doing street reporting. Is that something that TV reporters really have any prospect of doing? I guess from where I say that's something that we do every day. And you may not get into deep issues like race, but a lot I mean, that's part of the job every day, getting out and talking to people.

What I find is a lot of times that people have a sense of frustration about race issues. They'll talk about it. And it's not necessarily through a relationship that you have to build over years or a period of time. But there's a sense of a frustration on the behalf of people there that, you know, what's the point of talking about it? Nothing is going to be done about it. Mm hmm. Let me get some more callers in on this arena in Boston. You're on the air. Hi. Hi there. I wanted to talk about two things. The first is my personal response to seeing the L.A. riots on TV live in New York. I'm a white girl from the suburbs and, you know, Jewish. And when I saw I was in a laundromat, we were all standing around and we were watching MTV. And then the channel was changed and there it was live the L.A. riots. And in some ways, the way it was broadcast was similar to the MTV we had been watching before. And there was a feeling of there's just something about it that I could I could connect with, even though this was very different. My world is very different, but I felt I felt

the power of what was going on and I felt like I wanted to be part of it. I felt there was a strong statement being said. I think that's part of part of how the media presented it live. And part of what I was feeling, and this is a comment I want to make about calling it a riot or disturbance, was that this was this was a way of voicing this was a protest. This was like marching on Washington. But the problem is that in our culture, you have to buy time to speak. You have to buy, you have to have money to to get on the media. And people who don't have that money have to speak out in any way they can. So I know, you know, because you talk about whether this was justified, violence or not, but sometimes you have to take action. That's extreme. Well, let me ask you, Walinski, you were to respond to what you just heard. Leah, what do you think? Well, there are a couple of things there. First of all, on the whole issue of the media coverage and almost participatory journalism with with having televised live television right there, it does have that effect.

I mean, something that Marshall McLuhan had had predicted that would happen before. You know, you think about other things that have happened. Look at the O.J. Simpson case, the famous chase people out there with signs in the street responding to the live coverage. We're live in a different era now where where the coverage actually does become part of the story and there's nothing we can do about it. I think that's quite true on the issue of whether this this is something that's justified. I mean, it's very difficult to say that. I think that, you know, it is true that the people who can bring who can by the time on television are the people who have the money. But does that justify creating the kind of disturbance, that kind of destruction that had occurred during in L.A.? And certainly when you when you analyze it later, there wasn't any real conspiracy behind it. It wasn't a thing where we have to go and protest and do this. It was it was quite spontaneous. I'd have to say that I don't think that it was justified, but I thought that this was the way the people that were involved in instr felt that they could get the attention of the city leaders and the elected officials, and they did

get their attention. Well, I think that some of them were motivated by that. I don't know whether you were listening earlier, but Leo was saying that they they interviewed and profiled a number of people and some of them were that way and some of them were opportunists. Right. I agree with that 100 percent. But from some of the older individuals in the neighborhood that I talked to in the days that followed in terms of community reaction, their position was, no, they did not agree with the looting and the burning down of the neighborhood, but they felt that something had to be done to say, hey, enough is enough. We have to stop somewhere. Rita, thank you for your call. Interesting, interesting point. Peter in Salt Lake City, you're on the air as high as more or less want to make a comment that from what I've seen of the. The coverage, there was a lot of searching for reasons and justifications, and I understand that, and I guess that's part of the role of the media. But from my own experiences,

I grew up in like two different ghettos, basically, and from the majority of the violence I saw there that there was a lot there were no reasons. There were no justifications. It was often just violence. For violence sake. I could I could never find a reason for it. And it was. Do you think the media goes, you know, sort of reaches too far, I mean, in trying to find excuses rather than reasons? Is that what you're trying to say? I think at times, yeah. I'm actually I am a journalist and I understand you need to search for cause I mean, to just say, OK, there was this violent event, period. That's right. I mean, that's not enough. Well, let me let me ask Keith to respond to what you're saying. Well, I think that the game we're talking about either in or when that's not really the choices available to us, I think that it's important that all of the coverage contain the context and

that the coverage be conscious in every word. That use of the framing of the story that you're telling. If you if you're talking about the burning of the furniture store or the burning of the TV truck and the and the police car and the other and the other car that was burned, then you're talking about an act that is against the law. And you can talk about that act as being an act of against the law. But if you do it absent absent the context of of the protest, absent the context of attention, absent the context of the history, then you haven't told the whole story. Keith, let me ask you, do you think that there is a sort of a willful reluctance to address this particular thing in the media? Well, I think that we're afraid of it, Alex. I think that that the issue of race relations scares the hell out of us as as as individuals and as journalists for the most part. And I don't want to include every last human being in that I my experience is

that that across this country, journalists are very much afraid to talk about this issue in their newsrooms, and they are uncomfortable and feel very clumsy about discussing it in their news product because nobody feels that that level of great confidence, that they quite have it figured out. And the more we hear these kinds of conversations about the use of the word riot without the kind of thought that that would follow that kind of conversation, the more you wind up having people saying, well, I guess I shouldn't use that one now and just dismissing it and not giving it the kind of deep thought and and consideration that we should. Well, that's why we were trying to have something of a nuanced conversation about this today. Yeah, I hope that it will have accomplished something anyway. Peter, thank you for your call. I'm afraid we're out of time. Very interesting subject. I'm sure we'll be talking about it again. I want to thank my guests, Kelly Swoope, reporter for WFTS in Tampa, Keith Woods, associate and ethics at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. And Leo Walinski, metro editor of the Los Angeles Times.

The producer for On the Media is Judith Hepburn Blank with associate producer Jennifer Nix and assistant producer Kavita Menon. Production assistant Devora Clar. Our technical director is George Edwards with audio engineer Paul West. And we had additional help from Pablo Garcia. I'm Alex Jones. If you have questions or comments about on the media, call one 800 three, four, three three three four two. Funding for on the media is provided by the Johns and James L. Knight Foundation, the Edith and Henry Everett Foundation and the WNYC Foundation. This program is a production of WNYC New York Public Radio in association with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies at St. Petersburg, Florida, a school for professional journalists from across the country and around the world.

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