MLK to Obama: Reflections on Racial Barriers in the Media
Posted January 19th, 2009 by Joe Torres
When Barack Obama is sworn in as our nation’s first black president on Tuesday, it will represent a triumph for millions of people who have fought to overcome racial injustice in our society for more than two centuries.
The press will focus on the civil rights leaders who have paved the way to make this moment possible, reminding us of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream a day after we celebrated the slain leader’s birth.
But the day also belongs to all those whose names we may not remember, who by raising their voices knocked down racial barriers in their communities, in their neighborhoods and in their workplaces, forcing our country to change. For me, this means this day also belongs to the thousands of minority and white journalists who challenged their newsrooms to improve coverage of communities of color.
While the mainstream media still too often marginalize people of color in their coverage, I believe Obama would not have been elected president if the press did not cover him as a legitimate candidate. And this would not have happened if newsrooms were not forced to integrate their work force 40 years ago.
Few people know that Dr. King actually played a direct role in helping to inspire media activists to challenge our nation’s racist media institutions.
As Mark Lloyd wrote in his book a Prologue to A Farce, Dr. Everett Parker, head of the Office of Communications for the United Church of Christ (UCC), attended a meeting with King in New York City in 1963. During the meeting, King told the gathering he could use help dealing with the racism of Southern broadcast stations.
Following the meeting, Parker focused on finding a Southern station to monitor in an effort to challenge its license with the FCC. He settled on WLBT in Jackson, Miss., a city with a 40 percent Black population. But you would not have known the city’s demographics by watching WLBT, a racist station that was run by a member of a white supremacist group.
Blacks were not featured in news programming except crime stories; the airwaves often carried the views of white supremacist leaders on racial issues; and the station often pre-empted network programming that featured civil rights leaders talking about racial injustice.
The UCC challenged the station’s license, even though citizens had no legal right at the time to contest a broadcast license. In a historic decision in 1966, a federal appeals court ruled that the public did indeed have a right to challenge a license, giving citizens legal standing before the FCC for the first time.
Another critical event occurred in 1968 when the Kerner Commission released its landmark report on the causes of riots that tore apart cities that summer. The commission found that “by failing to portray the Negro as a matter of routine and in the context of the total society, the news media have … contributed to the black-white schism in the country.”
As a result of the Kerner Commission report and the WLBT case, the FCC was forced to adopt Equal Employment Opportunity rules in 1969 that banned discrimination in the broadcast industry and required broadcasters to hire a diverse work force that was reflective of the communities they serve.
The new rule and court decision inspired a citizen’s movement, led mostly by black and Latino organizations, to challenge the license of hundreds of broadcast stations across the country in the early 1970s, thereby bolstering newsroom integration. These events led to the founding of our nation’s first minority journalist associations, as well as the FCC adopting its first policies to increase minority ownership of media.
The journalists who have worked in our nation’s newsrooms during the past 40 years have helped prepare the editorial ground for the day when the press had to take the candidacy of a black president seriously. In addition, the ethnic press has and continues to play a critical role in covering issues critical to communities ignored by the mainstream media.
Despite these steps, I do not believe we are living in a post-racial America. The press did a terrible job covering race during the election. I am not sure what the country learned about the profound issues affecting black America except whether white Americans would vote for a black candidate. There is an inherent contradiction in Obama’s presidency. While his election is a sign of racial progress, the conditions for so many people of color continue to worsen — just look at the latest unemployment figures to see that real disparities exist.
And those disparities are also impacting journalists of color during the current crisis in the journalism industry. Last year, more journalists of color working at daily newspapers left the industry than entered for the first time in 20 years. The presence of minority journalists is declining. So is minority ownership of broadcast stations. Meanwhile, people of color are far less likely to have a broadband connection to connect to the Internet and are unable to participate in the nation’s 21st-century communications system. Look no further than coverage of immigration to see that people of color are still being marginalized in news coverage.
The dwindling presence of journalists of color working in newsrooms across the country has real consequences for the future of our country. Will the media be willing to cover legitimate voices of change in our country, regardless of the color of those leading the way? Or was coverage of an Obama candidacy just an anomaly? Stay tuned.
