media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Race Matters

(April 3, 2008)  In the last five years, the Times-Standard has gone from a laughable paper to a darn good one. Now when I pick it up I find some solid reporting and intelligent writing. I wanted to say that before I launch into my longest standing pet peeve with the paper. It has to do with how it presents non-local news.

Back on Dec. 14, Jared Ball, an African-American professor of communications at Morgan State University in Baltimore and a contender for the Green Party’s presidential nomination, made several campaign stops in Humboldt County. They weren’t your typical campaign stops; Ball mixes politics with hip-hop.

But you wouldn’t know any of that because the Times-Standard only covered his visit with a photo. Not only did the caption leave out much of the information that makes Ball interesting, the paper also left out his first name, so readers wanting to learn more had little to Google on.

Newspapers can’t cover every event; I think they spend too much time covering events. Ball himself is a preacher of “emancipatory journalism” which calls for, among other things, more focus on ongoing processes rather than events. Running a photo is a way to acknowledge an event without spending too much space on it. And journalists make mistakes; the omission of Ball’s first name was a classic one that can slip through.

Here’s the problem. The Times-Standard shows so few positive images of African-Americans on its pages that this particular omission was a shame.

But that’s only part of the problem.

Consider the issue of March 9. The paper ran three photos of African-Americans in the news section. The Op-Ed page carried a photo of conservative syndicated columnist Star Parker for her regular column. Meanwhile, the national news page had two photos that accompanied wire services stories: A photo of Courtney Lockart, arrested in Alabama for the capital murder of college student Lauren Burk, and Jessie Dotson, a recently released killer charged in the deaths of six people in Memphis.

In a quick audit of photos in the news section of 54 issues from December through March, I found 55 photos of African-Americans. There are generally between five and 10 photos in the news section on any given day. So considering that black people account for just 1 percent of Humboldt County’s population, one photo per issue wasn’t bad. But in that count were 14 photos of Barack Obama, 14 photos of either syndicated columnists Star Parker or Rhonda Chriss Lokeman and three of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Celebrities accounted for six more. Some of those were teasers for the entertainment or sports pages. One was for the swearing in of New York Governor David Paterson, one was of Martin Luther King, Jr. and another of King’s family. Two were of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, implicated in a huge scandal involving a stripper, thousands of text messages and a secret multi-million dollar hush money legal settlement.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE