How Black Reporters Report On Black Death

[iammalcolmx]

This is long but an excellent read and something I never thought about. Feel free to quote points that stand out to you. Here is something that stuck with me :

Last summer, Wesley Lowery, a young reporter at the Washington Post (and another personal acquaintance), found himself becoming part of the story when he was arrested for trespassing in Ferguson. Some police officers had asked him to leave a McDonald's where he and other journalists were hunkered down, and they decided he wasn't moving quickly enough. They threw him against a soda machine and handcuffed him. (Fittingly for this genre, his encounter was captured on video.) Just last week, as Wesley returned to Ferguson for the anniversary coverage, the city filed charges against him for trespassing and interfering with a police officer, related to the previous year's encounter. "I was anxious and stressed because I have to deal with all this again," Wesley told me later that night. He'd just gotten off the phone, trying to calm his mom down. "It's going to be a big distraction for a while."
Wesley Lowery (right) speaks to a Ferguson resident in 2014, a couple of hours before being arrested. i


Wesley, who's 25, has been one of highest-profile reporters on this beat since Ferguson, where he attracted attention both for the volume of his tweets about the protests and for their tenor. More than most other journalists on the ground affiliated with a major news outlet, Wesley tweeted direct quotes from angry residents and seemed to channel the voice and emotion of the protests. That felt unmediated and refreshing to some, and slanted and politically charged to others. He's become a lightning rod for anti-Black Lives Matter sentiment across the country, at one point earning the ire of notorious right-wing troll Chuck Johnson, who tweeted out Wesley's parents' home address in a way that many read as an attempt to intimidate and silence him.

www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/08/19/432590298/how-black-reporters-report-on-black-death?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

[NewOrleans]

These stories come at such a rapid pace that they snowball into each other, carrying with them the accumulated mass of all the grim stories that came before. Wait, was that the guy who was killed while cosplaying? No, not that guy shot by the cop in South Carolina; the other guy who was. No, not that college football player killed by the police; the other one.

This.  There were names in there I didn't know.  How many more names don't I know?  How many of us have tried to keep the killings straight because there are so many.

[NewOrleans]

I've written about the problem of being The Only One in the Room — the unwanted burden of representing the concerns of an entire group of people, coupled with the anxious desire to do a good job of it.


And this.  The responsibility of bearing witness.  The responsibility to testify. The responsibility of trying to reach people with your testimony, hoping you'll be believed, certain you won't.

[NewOrleans]

Bumping this post because I just saw this.

thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/08/21/3693895/barnett-wright-birmingham-news/

A newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, a predominately African American city famous for civil rights battles in the 1960s, has laid off its last black reporter.
The Birmingham News, which is owned by the Alabama Media Group, announced it would be laying off a number of staff members as it continued to make a transition to the digital era. One of the reporters laid off was Barnett Wright, the last black reporter on staff.
“We wish the best for those who leave our organization today and thank them for their dedication and good work,” Michelle Holmes of the Alabama Media Group said in a staff memo.
Wright covered the Jefferson County Commission and had won first place in deadline for the Alabama Associated Press Media Editors newspaper contest in 2012. Wright covered everything from corruption charges to residents fighting unjust property liens to a story titled, “Did death of lion draw more outrage than death of black males?”
Sherrel Wheeler Stewart, who co-founded the Birmingham Association of Black Journalists and previously worked at the Birmingham News, told All Digitocracy that when she started in the 1980s, there were only “six or seven” black journalists on staff. After that, Stewart said, there was a greater emphasis on hiring more African American journalists, which is important for covering a city that is nearly three-quarters black.
Birmingham is also home to many fights over civil rights for African Americans. The Birmingham Campaign consisted of lunch counter sit-ins, marches in downtown, and protests against the “Whites Only” signs on restrooms, which were finally removed in May 1963. It was also where Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” At the time, he wrote, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.”