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John, I think this is a very good idea, because it is quite evident that many other metro areas do not have nearly the degree of racial divisiveness and identity group politics that exists here. Don't know if it would help; but it certainly would not hurt.

P.S. State-to-state comparisons may be helpful as well.

Lamp. Mirror. Do you want to be a Lamp - and show society what it can be by lighting the way, or do you want to be a Mirror - and reflect what society is in an honest and authentic way?

(pardon me for being slightly philosophical, but it fits)

Until we had something called a "commentator," news was always a mirror and showed what society was and what was going on with it. Now you are considering that it might be a lamp and guide a path for the community. Your newsman genes will force you to print opposing view forever but it can be done without egregious side-taking. But you've got to cross over that line every now and then a little bit.

Can you live with that? If yes, then great! The power of the pen is huge. It's about time you considered walking in the light of other cities lamps for a few steps and bringing the best sights and sounds of that path here.

Bravo. The applause sign is lighted.

I'm heeding Sue's applause sign.

Be a lamp, but continue to hold the mirror up so that our local leaders, both black and white, might someday look at themselves and view their inner 11 year-olds, the one that the rest of us see all too clearly and all too often.

There's got to be a better way. Find it.

Mr. Robinson, A lamp would be ever so productive and possible anywhere but Greensboro where we do not have a racial divide at all, but we do still have a whole lot of White Guilt and Black leaders who quite simply are indeed racist. I haven’t seen on tv or read about one White leader whom I could call a racist, not even Billy Yow. I believe he wouldn’t do what he does except for the bad behavior of the Blacks who frustrate him so. The White Guilt has accepted and thus allowed this situation to develop over the years, and to continue by pandering to these false oft repeated allegations. It will stop only when we get some new blood on the city council and the commission.
Your friend had some good points but he was also off on some too. A very serious breach was committed when the
Wray report was given to your paper. Someone did it and the commissioners desperately tried to find out who. As for believing a commissioner when they say something, well commissioners lie too. Ms. Bellamy-Small brought her troubles on herself and it had nothing to do with racism as the “declaration” rag stated. The other two black council women saw no problem with going beyond just speaking to swear to their truthfulness. We do in our courts have people put their hands on the Bible; perhaps this would have been better, and certainly cheaper, than the lie detector test.
And please DO NOT follow the lead of Greensboro’s blogosphere with the Kindley thing. An asinine statement by a brainless, bigoted and holier than thou man kindled all this debate when we have real problems that need discussion in the local area, the nation and the world. That post, and perhaps the entire blog, should have been simply ignored. The fact that it wasn’t perhaps speaks to the type of leaders the people of Greensboro tend to elect.
Finding communities outside of Greensboro to spotlight to show Greensboro how things should be will only backlash as the citizens, at least if blogland is in anyway representative, don’t want to be shown anything from the outside.
You might tho pick up on and highlight and even campaign for ideas that f originate from within the county limits. An example would be the excellent idea from Commissioner Arnold. He proposed that instead of giving these huge sums of money to wealthy companies and doing so on a random and unfair schedule that a property tax break for a number of years be given to ALL those who invest new capital into Greensboro and Guilford County. This to be given for a new home, small business and huge corporation alike. No pick and choose, but fairness to all tax payers. He proposed it and the others just let it lie on the table until it disappeared in the trash can. But, a lot of people heard and approved of such an idea. We would like to see the other commissioners at least give it a fair hearing. Throwing tax payer money at those who don’t need it is the peoples biggest grievance. But at least some of us feel Mr. Arnold’s plan merits some interest by the governing body. See what your reporters can do to get some of these ideas investigated and published. The lamp from within rather than without might just work.

I am still confused as to how Lex Alexander can be permitted to write news stories about the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (July 16 N&R and last weeks paper) and also editorialize and offer his opinions about it (The Lex Files) without violating the N&R's stated policy of a "brick wall" between the news division and the opinion division.

This doesn't help your case that your news staff is not biased.

Thanks, Sam, I was going to ask a similar question of Mr. Robinson about Lex Alexander.
Alexander's articles seem to gravitate towards pleading the TRC's case for them, not unbiased reporting. His article today once again highlights the WVO opinion of a "police conspiracy" even though no proof has surfaced. T
alk about beating a dead horse...

What in Lex's posts at the Lex Files do you find him espousing editorial opinion? The ones I read seems to be drilling down much deeper into the TRC report and explaining, giving context and offering some interpretation. (I've read much of the report and it needs some interpretation, which is not necessarily editorializing.)

jaycee, Lex is only reporting what the TRC report said and what one of the participants in the discussions wondered about.

"But the most important, the one that most makes truth-and-reconciliation projects necessary, is the fact that in every culture there are two communities -- them that has, and them that don't -- and the first group invariably is willing to use violence to keep the second group in its place." Lex, July 7, 2006.

This is clearly an opinion about not only the value of the commission but a political statement about class.

"There are arguments from a number of religious and philosophical backgrounds that seek to justify that arrangement -- Ayn Rand's Objectivism is a big one out here in the blogosphere, for example -- but sooner or later they run up against both religious and secular notions that we share a common humanity and that to a certain, significant extent, the problems of one portion of the community are the responsibility of us all." Lex, July 7, 2006.

Ditto on the opinionation. This goes beyond context into political philosophy.

"Another is the demonization of the truth process by those involved in the oppression, or their successors/descendants. Here in Greensboro, there's at least a small group of people -- I've heard from some personally in my short time covering this process -- who seem categorically unwilling to accept even the possibility that those involved in this process are sincere or that any good can possibly come from what they're doing." Lex, July 7, 2006.

"Demonization" is not a characterization? "...of those involved in the OPPRESSION..." Believing there is "oppression" is not an opinion? It certainly seems like he is lockstep with the T&R Commission on that. How can he be trusted to write objectively if he has already drank the proverbial "Kool-Aid"?

"I think some people, like former dictator Augusto Pinochet, ought to rot in prison for the rest of their lives no matter how decrepit they are now, just to serve as examples for others at any level of government who might be prone to sanction state violence or other state-sanctioned human-rights violations. But seeking only retributive justice, I'll grant you, won't make future episodes less likely, and it does little or nothing to address the problem of making one community out of two groups, oppressors and oppressed." Lex, July 7, 2006.

Note how that paragraph started with "I think..."

"What are oppressors fighting so hard to keep oppressed from getting?"

"I realize that money and power are two obvious candidates, and that dynamic has led some local folks to suggest that Greensboro's entire T&R process is nothing but a smoke screen for the victims of Nov. 3 to seek more money from the city. Convention attendees both local and out-of-town roundly disparaged that notion this afternoon. I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case, at least up to now; certainly, it doesn't look like the kind of work one goes into to get rich."

"Would you not agree, for example, that regardless of your feelings about Klansmen and Communists, the people of Morningside Homes deserved more protection on Nov. 3 than they got?" - opinion

"Would you not agree that the long line of questionable decisions and missed opportunities by Greensboro police in the weeks leading up to Nov. 3 constituted a problem?" - opinion disguised as rhetorical question.

"I've heard that argument, and although it makes sense on the surface, I'm not sure I buy it anymore." - opinion. If it was purely news, why should it matter whether he "buys it" or not?

"But to make that argument is to presume that these events took place in a vacuum. They did not -- not even the Greensboro shootings, as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report makes clear." -argumentative opinion.

"Each event took place within a system of antidemocratic repression. Now, the drivers of that repression vary from one instance to the next in terms of their relative levels of influence, but the repression is a constant. By definition, then, class issues are also a constant -- one is either a repressor or a repressee, and money tends to be the demarcator. And in the U.S., class issues and racial issues, particularly in the South, often have been very difficult to tease apart, a fact that has contributed in many instances to the longevity of the repression by dividing the opposition to the oppressors." - opinion.

Your turn, John.

Venturing into that uncharted territory which is The Lex Files, I see that you and Lex and jaycee have already gone over this territory.

I think Lex has skirted close to the line, but hasn't crossed it in any meaningful way. He calls what he has done in the blog posts as analysis and I tend to agree. One of the tasks we take on is making sense of the facts we get. Part of what Lex is trying to do as I read it is to lend perspective and context to the "facts" -- true as well as disputed ones -- flying around the issue. He may be overly provocative with his language on occasion, which leads to a conclusion that he has taken a side, but I read him as being pretty agnostic on it all.

Yeah, but John don't you think his opinion on the subject is rather clear? It's obvious that he is advocating a position, and critical of the opinions that the T&R was agenda driven from the outset. Writing a news story on the subject doesn't seem right.

That doesn't really leap out at me the way it does to you and jaycee. I read someone who is poring through it, analyzing and interpreting as he goes along, and challenging everyone who approaches on the topic. (That's kind of what reporters do...the reader just doesn't see much of it in the finished product.)

Tell you what. I will discuss this with Lex and report back. He's elsewhere on assignment for a few days -- not relating to the TRC -- so it'll be a few days. Bear with me.

Sam critizes Lex for being "critical of the opinion that the T&R was agenda driven from the outset," but isn't thinking critically about all opinions the job of a good reporter? And given that the notion that the t&r process was agenda driven from the outset is several years old, it seems to me to be quite appropriate for the reporting on the process to shift from that (which has been hashed and rehashed) to exactly what Lex is doing now, which is diving into the report and surrounding discussions and trying to understand it all better. It is appropriate that Lex should use his blog to share his examination and allow his own analysis to be challenged by others.

Going back to the original post now:
I think it is a great idea for the N&R to be proactive and challenge leaders/reporters to visit other communities to see other cities' initiatives to deal with racial divisions and disparities. The only caveat I see in the suggestion and subsequent comments is that such research should not begin with the assumption that Greensboro is somehow worse off than other cities in terms of struggling with the issue of race. On the contrary, I think Greensboro has a great deal to offer to other communities in terms of attempts to deal with these realities. We've not done it perfectly, but the fact that the conversations are front and center in Greensboro -- witness the recent declaration, undoing racism workshops, T&R process, Mosaic Project, and even the police issues -- shows me that we are ahead of other communities who may just be "too busy to hate," as Atlanta describes itself. (If only they had more time...)

JR - in today's article on the city council meeting last night regarding the T&R, your staff writer Margaret Moffett Banks wrote:

"A heavily armed caravan of Klansmen and Nazis drove into the area and confronted anti-Klan marchers, many of whom were members of the CWP. During the ensuing gunfire, captured by TV crews, five anti-Klan marchers were killed and 10 others wounded."

Nowhere in this article did it mention that the CWP was also armed and exchanged gunfire. It is this kind of deliberate omission of facts that gets people up in arms about "bias". It seems like an attempt to erase a critical part of history so that only one version is heard.

Yes, and your observation is a common one from people on both (all) sides of this story.

In an ongoing story like this one, we always struggle with how much of the history to put into each story. When you have 20 inches of column space to write about the City Council's first substantive discussion of the TRC report, you try to spend as little of it on rehashing the historical events so that you can spend most of it on the discussion of the report.

John, surely you can do better than that. Your writer could have easily written that paragraph in a more balanced fashion with the same amount of words.

"A heavily armed caravan of Klansmen and Nazis drove into the area and confronted ARMED anti-Klan marchers, many of whom were members of the CWP." One word would have made all the difference.

Point taken.

The N&R doesn't further anything along...you could not even report accuratley about the steps at saint james...your police story has been spoon fed to you by the evil empire...the county commissoners should all step down...and so should you.

JR has asked me to respond to some of the points raised above. I've done so (warning: at some length) here.