Kudos to "Race Beat" and Republican Surrealists

In 1955, John Chancellor, who was then a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, was in Mississippi. Emmet Till, a teenage boy visiting Mississippi from Chicago recently had been viciously beaten, murdered, and then hidden in a river. Suspects were found. A trial was held.

An all-white jury found the defendants not guilty. It was in this volatile and turbulent atmosphere that Chancellor was interviewing a black woman. He was confronted by a phalanx of white men wearing overalls. Many carried pitchforks and other intimidating tools. The men clearly were out to get Chancellor.

Chancellor considered a variety of responses. He held up the microphone of his tape recorder and said, "I don't care what you're going to do to me, but the whole world is going to know it."
The threat was an empty one. The microphone was attached to a tape recorder, not a radio transmitter. Had the mob acted against Chancellor, it easily could have ruined the man’s tape recorder. But the threat dispersed the mob.

It is one of my favorite stories—because it is a very good story, because it is true, and because it is more than a story. It’s a little morality tale that represents the larger story that was going on. Many reporters and editors were doing gutsy things. By telling the truth about what they were seeing, they were exposing powerful and ugly exhibitions of ignorance. The exposition of these ignorances was helping to address them.

The Chancellor story and a host of others make The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation a fascinating and very human story. But it is the larger arcs of the novel that show how the press generally long ignored and then often aggressively pursued the race story in America that makes it such a compelling and important book.

Race Beat

I get plenty of invitations to go hunting with Dick Cheney—one may even be legitimate. But I never have been invited to have dinner with the Pulitzers or any of the members of the various committees that award the coveted Pulitzer Prize. Nor do the people who award Pulitzer Prizes consult me for advice. Over the years I have criticized Pulitzers and, at times, have criticized the awards the Pulitzer committees have conveyed.

But this year they got one of the awards right. This year the Pulitzer for historical non-fiction was awarded to The Race Beat. The book, researched and written over a sixteen-year period by veteran reporters Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff is a gem.

The authors begin with a nod to a Swedish economist and lawyer who in 1944 published The American Dilemma, a work that told some of the dark truths about how blacks were treated in the US as well as how little of this news was reported widely.

The authors of Race Beat suggest that the murder of Emmett Till in August 1965 changed all that. Till, a teenage boy from Chicago, was visiting family in the tiny Mississippi town of Money. Till may have whistled at a white woman. Later, he was beaten and brutally murdered. The acquittal of the defendants exposed the racial pathologies and judicial perversions that had been going on for decades in the region. The Chicago black press covered the story. Soon the white press did as well.

An unusually creative journalist William Bradford Huie paid the defendants in the trial—and the men who murdered Till—to tell their story. In January of 1956 it was published in Look. The story shocked readers and showed editors that the race story had legs.

According to the authors of Race Beat, it is the Till trial and the repercussions of it that alerted northern white reporters and editors to the importance and power of stories about race. But not everyone got the wake-up call.

Race Beat follows the story of race in America and how it was and often wasn’t covered by the various factions—Northern press, Southern press, black press, television. Race Beat shows how television producers learned to use the tools of their medium to cover the stories revolving around race. The authors often step back from the crises and conflicts to explain the larger historical context.

The book details stories of many courageous white Southern reporters and editors—the way The Arkansas Gazette covered the integration of Central High School in Little Rock is an iconic but certainly not the only example.

There are times when even the best-intentioned reporters failed—according to the authors of Race Beat the Watts riots stand as just one illustration. The authors often criticize Southern papers for attempting to exile watered down versions of race stories to the back pages. They also chastise the New York Times for failing to step up to the truth.

Race Beat and the Pulitzer Prize it earned for history may not have come at a better time. Newspapers in America are dealing with various assaults—new technologies, massive layoffs, increased pressure to become even more profitable—all at a time that readership is shrinking. Race Beat provides a powerful reminder of the importance of good reporting. It holds up to the reader a provocative mural that shouts how simply telling the truth can serve as a powerful catalyst for change—something valuable at any time, but especially one where the truth seems to be taking so many ugly and powerful beatings from so many different sources. More importantly, Race Beat not only shows what good reporting can do, it frequently provides a model of it.

Republicans Acting like Surrealists Part I

Testimony last week before the Senate Judiciary committee revealed a story that seemed too incredible and bizarre to be true. In March 2004, James Comey was the Assistant Attorney General. Comey and the then attorney general, John Ashcroft had determined that wireless wiretaps were illegal. They had decided not to renew their support for such activities. This came at a time when the Attorney General Ashcroft was in the hospital to have his gall bladder removed. While Ashcroft was hospitalized, Comey served as Acting Attorney General. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card asked Comey to approve continuing the authority to wiretap. Comey refused. Card and other administration officials, one was Alberto Gonzales (who was then White House Counsel but as I write this is Attorney General), rushed to Ashcroft’s bed. The head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, also accompanied Card.

Comey beat them there. Carr sought to have Ashcroft sign the continuance. Ashcroft refused and said that Comey was Acting Attorney General.

The story gets worse. Comey testified that Carr was upset. Later that day Carr asked Comey to come to the White House immediately. Comey replied that he would not come tot the White House without a witness.

And there’s more: Card pushed to have the continuance authorized. Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller—the head of the FBI—said that if the authorization was continued, they would resign. Only then did the Bush Administration back down.

To suggest this was damaging testimony to the Bush Administration is to suggest that the Titanic was a little ship. The incident has been compared to the Twilight Zone, The Sopranoes, Absurdist Theater, Twin Peaks—and no doubt a lot of other wild and crazy fictional endeavors. The incident shouts to the world that Alberto Gonzales either does not understand or does not respect US laws.

Many of the chattering classes are predicting that because of these and many other indiscretions that Attorney General Gonzales will have to resign. But the Bush Administration can’t want this to happen. If Gonzales goes, they will have to put forward another candidate for the office. If the candidate does not appear to be squeaky clean, unbiased, and non-partisan, that means a long, complex, and damaging confirmation hearing. And if someone with some gravitas and sense of fairness does get the job, s/he no doubt will find more evidence of blundering, backslapping, and miscarriages of justice at the department that is supposed to be above such shenanigans.

Lines of the Week/Republicans Acting like Surrealists—the Sequel

The second Republican debate was held last Tuesday. It was notable for many things. Though Fox News had over ninety minutes to ask the candidates questions, education, health care, and the environment did not come up. There’s nothing surrealistic about that from Fox, that’s not unusual for them. But check this out, during the debate, not one but three Republican presidential candidates were witty—and generous enough to provide this week’s installments of the lines of the week.

Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, “I am glad to see conversions. I am glad they happen. But I must tell you I trust them when they happen on the road to Damascus, not on the road to Des Moines.”

Arizona Senator John McCain: “We spent money like a drunken sailor, though I never met a sailor drunk or sober with the imagination of the US Congress.”

Former Arizona governor, Mike Hucabee: “We’ve had a Congress that spent money like John Edwards at beauty shop.”

Tancredo probably was more interested in debilitating Romney’s character and highlighting his flip-flops than winning any prizes for wit. McCain has used the line and variations of it before—but probably not as effectively. Still this was an unusual if not monumental moment in Republican political history—three witty moments in ninety minutes—from my point of view, the last two were-laugh-out loud funny. That’s a record that may last longer than most.

Idiots of the Week

Bush and his administration for going through the idea of creating a “war czar”—the formal name is Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan Policy and Implementation. According to the Administration, the czar will be able to cut through bureaucratic red tape. Creating the war czar position and all the aides that will accompany it is similar to initiating the post of Director of National Intelligence in 2005. Rather than solve problems, the issues are disguised by creating another bureaucratic layer. Perhaps this also positions yet another person, who when things turn really ugly in Iraq, will be scapegoated.