Conference addresses coverage of race issues

By Elizabeth Kassab

Daily Staff Reporter

The first event celebrating the 14th annual Symposium in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. tracked the evolution of the media's role in covering race relations since King's time.

The conference, titled "Covering Race Then and Now: The Press and Public Policy," brought together a "truly a remarkable group of soldiers and veterans," said Gerald Boyd, deputy managing editor of The New York Times. All 12 panel members, including Boyd, have covered race relations in the United States. Some panelists covered the Southern Civil Rights in the 1960s while others contributed to more recent coverage including The New York Times' recent "Living Race in America" series.

The Times' series, which ran last summer, provided a springboard for the panel's discussion using the theme of the series - the average American citizen's perspectives on race in today's world. The idea was not to tell the reader what to think but to offer insight into the opinions and lives of ordinary people, said Times Assistant Managing Editor Soma Golden Behr.

The idea for the series formed during the O.J. Simpson trial. In a completely silent newsroom, Boyd said he watched his co-workers' faces as the "not guilty" verdict was read and noticed that whites and people of color, especially blacks, reacted much differently. Despite their varying points of view, no one really discussed why they felt the way they did.

Intrigued, Boyd and Behr began their quest to "get into what people were saying about race around their dinner tables," as Boyd put it.

"Things have never been this good" in terms of race relations, said Steven Holmes, citing a recent New York Times poll. But, some panel members offered a contradictory view - that there is room for improvement in covering race issues.

"I don't think it's an overstatement to say race remains the nation's most vexing problem," Boyd said.

The media is accustomed to covering race in the United States in the context of conflict, Boyd said. What began as a genuine battle in the South for civil rights evolved into something much more elusive. Covering race today is "definitely less stressful and considerably safer," said public affairs specialist Moses Newson, formerly a reporter for African American Newspapers in Baltimore. Newson recounted how he and two other black reporters and a photographer were "attacked, beaten quite badly" when they attempted to cover the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School.

White newspapers consistently ignored or covered up race issues. "They would not cover race. They would not cover anything outside their zip code," said author and Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam. "It drove us crazy."

Black newspapers covered the early civil rights movement.

"Most black papers lived hard and died young," said Gene Roberts, former managing editor at the New York Times. Roberts added that the average life span of a black paper was nine years.

When papers in the North recognized the civil rights movement, "change was inevitable," Roberts said. The results were critical to the success of the civil rights movement. The attention brought the movement to America's living rooms in such a way that it could not be ignored, he said.

But after the initial explosion, there was no defined battle to cover. "Race as a journalistic story was not quite as sexy," Boyd said.

The issues have changed. Widespread institutional inequality is no longer the focus of the media or its American audience.

Delaney attributed this shift in attitude in part to "racial fatigue."

Steven Holmes agreed. "The country is tired of black people. I don't think people are tired of Hispanics or Asians," he said. This shift has colored the media's coverage of race in recent years.

But the fight is not over, said Wilkins. Black children, he said, are still being killed - "maybe not 'boom, you're dead' but 'boom, we're not going to educate you.'" The panelists agreed affirmative action is one of the more explosive stories today.

Websites on the Internet devoted to race relations are the modern equivalent of the South's black newspapers last century, picking up issues that the networks overlook, said Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial board member Clarence Page.

JOYCE LEE/Daily

Roger Wilkins, professor of history and American culture at George Mason University, looks over the program for "Covering Race Then and Now: The Press and Public Policy" conference.