News-Record.com

Huffington Post? Nuff said.

Huffington Post? Oh, I forgot, Air unAmerica is gone! I wonder if the Huffington Post reported this AP story: Obama Makes Exceptions to Promises:

By CHARLES BABINGTON,
AP

WASHINGTON (Feb. 3) - Barack Obama promised a "clean break from business as usual" in Washington. It hasn't quite worked out that way.
From the start, he made exceptions to his no-lobbyist rule. And now, embarrassing details about Cabinet-nominee Tom Daschle's tax problems and big paychecks from special interest groups are raising new questions about the reach and sweep of the new president's promised reforms.

If we only had more black reporters we wouldn't have to read this awful stuff about the "Messiah!"

Um, whatEVER does this have to do with President Obama? Who hires the journalists? Isn't the "fault" with them, as much as it's with the N&R for not hiring more African-American journalists (try as you might)? Huffington Post aside and without reading everything she had to say and only looking at this fleetingly, who's hiring ANY print journalists these days?

And just one more thought FWIW, does a journalist's skin color influence the story? The HuffPo writer seems to think it does. Do you?

Huffington, herself is a born Greek. How many Greek jounalists does she know reporting on President Obama? For that matter how many anachists does it take to destroy Athen's reputation? I have two sisters traveling to Athens this spring and I hope Huffington huffs and puffs and brings peace to her own birth place. Christine

Assuming the reporter has the basic journalistic chops and skills all White House reporters should have, his or her diversity of life experiences can be an asset, Sue. Nelson notes in her piece reporters missing some details such as the Black National Anthem and other allusions Lowery made in his speech because they simply didn't know.

Tempest.
Teapot.

I think this article is unfair. Of course, it is true that journalists are, collectively speaking, as white as the driven snow, but Nelson totally ignores that they feel terrible about it.

Allen, your example of non-black journalists missing a detail about Joseph Lowery's prayer (itself so subtle as to nearly ensure such misprision) raises other questions. Would a black journalist (if there were one) tend to misunderstand allusions to French cheeses, the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or hockey? Should the AP, say, send both a black and white reporter so that they could ensure coverage of the entire range of Black National Anthem--Tennyson allusions? Since I recognized the allusion, could I count as black?Would a black journalist raised in a prep-school environment count as "really" black if he lacked the "diversity of life experience" that all real black people have?

I agree. A black reporter may know Tennyson as helluva lot better than Tupac.
But I would argue that a lot of us may know Tennyson AND Tupac because we've had to be bicultural. With all due respect, you probably haven't.
That's why diverse backgrounds add expertise, perspective and value.
It's hard to understand or to accept that more black reporters are not the in White House press corps.
There are too many very, very good ones out there.

Test post, TypePad won't allow logon to the LTE blog. What's new.

Well it allows posting without login under anonymous but won't allow sign in on this blog either. TypePad and it's predecessor TypeKey suck royally!!

So your argument is that black journalists, because "we are forced to be bicultural" (that is, masters of both "your" black culture and "our" white culture), have, as a matter of course, more diverse backgrounds than white journalists, since the latter (if they're like me) know only "our" white culture and can operate comfortably within it? Your argument, then, is that black journalists will know Tennyson and Tupac, but white journalists are condemned to know only Tennyson. Hence the need for black journalists.

Unfortunately, I failed to know only Tennyson. Even though I apparently wasn't "forced to be bicultural" (I couldn't help it! My skin color made me not do it!), I do know the works of James Weldon Johnson fairly well--better, in fact, than the works of Tennyson, well known for distilling the essence of tedium into a pure form rarely encountered in nature. But I get no respect for this--no street cred for diversity! Because black culture is a black thing I wouldn't understand?!! What's up with that?

In short, you're making dubious assumptions about the relationship between skin color on the one hand and knowledge and experience on the other. What I expect you and Nelson want is not someone with the cultural knowledge and experience you're attributing to black skin--knowledge that could be identified with a tests and questionaires (who was Sojourner Truth? did you grow up in the ghetto?)--but the black skin itself, which you assume will index the knowledge and experience.

This is classic. Here is the problem in this country. I am wondering why the question even comes up? A journalist is a journalist, period. Black, white, asian, hispanic, chinese, dutch, irish, german, australian, french, canadian, japanese, greek, jewish....I think that covers most everyone. This is silly. O'Bama is not even 100% black himself. I don't think you hear any of these other people groups crying about not having enough journalists do you??? We are all humans, and no one is any different from another. We are all created in the image of God, and He definitely sees no color, so we do not need to either.