Is the Baltimore Sun racist in the way it covers crime news? Is a Baltimore Sun crime reporter racist because of the way he does his job? And what do we mean by the word “racist” anyway?
Provocative questions, and I’m not sure I can answer all of them with confidence. Thanks to a recent disturbing incident in the local media world, though, I feel compelled to try.
The incident in question was a back-and-forth this month between Baltimore Sun crime reporter Justin Fenton and local activist Adam Jackson, one of the founders of a local black self-empowerment group called Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. In a back-and-forth on Twitter recounted here on storify.com, Jackson grows increasingly strident in his objections to what he sees as the Sun’s failure to report adequately on a community meeting in which black leaders discussed how to reduce violence in the community. (Fenton attended the meeting but didn’t have time to write a story for the next day’s paper, so he tweeted about it instead.) In the end, Jackson denounced both the Sun and Fenton: “I feel pretty confident in saying that @justin_fenton, like other @baltimoresun reporters like him are closeted white racists.”
Fenton (an acquaintance and former colleague of mine) is a smart, extremely dedicated reporter who does not need me to defend him, but for what it’s worth, based on what I know of him personally, the charge of racism is an outrageous lie. It is not really worth dignifying with a response. Whether the Baltimore Sun is, as Jackson claims, “a racist publication,” is a more interesting question. I would argue the answer is no — but at bottom, it depends on what your definition of “racist” is.
The most widely understood meaning of racism, of course, is the intentional infliction of harm against people — usually black people — based on their race, ethnicity, etc. In my opinion, only someone who was deeply paranoid could imagine that those who edit and report for The Sun perform their jobs in a spirit of ill will toward black people and a desire to do them harm. Jackson seems to have a different definition in mind. He writes, “The media in this city has done a very good job of highlighting the recent rash of violence in this city over the summer. … What they have NOT done a good job of is covering the Black leaders and ordinary Black citizens working together on the issue to SOLVE it.”
He may be on to something. There have been few reports in The Sun or any mainstream media outlet about community efforts to reduce crime in Baltimore. However, it’s also true that the community response to crime has often been disorganized and anemic.
The Sun does not have many black writers or editors — certainly fewer now than when I started working there in 2004, before multiple waves of layoffs and buyouts. I don’t know how hard the paper is trying to recruit blacks to the newsroom. Doing such a thing is surely easier said than done. But I feel that this should be among the paper’s very highest priorities.
Of course, Jackson’s complaint goes beyond the number of blacks working in the newsroom. His core objection is to the way the news is covered. I am white and so can’t speak personally to how The Sun is perceived in the black community, but friends who are black tell me that many black Baltimoreans view the paper with suspicion or hostility. At least part of the reason is a perception that the paper emphasizes crime and other bad news rather than positive developments in the black community — and that the loss of black lives is trivialized, while the killing of a white person receives massive coverage.
For example, a typical Baltimore murder — black perpetrator, black victim, drug and/or gang related — normally rates a short article on an inside page; if little information is available, the coverage might be no more than what journalists call a “brief.” (This example from a few days ago is typical.) On the other hand, when a middle-class white resident is killed, there tends to be heavy coverage with a front-page story, photos, sidebar articles, and sometimes opinion pieces. (A case in point from recent history was the death in Charles Village of Johns Hopkins researcher Stephen Pitcairn.)
This reality can create the impression that the paper values white lives over black lives, but the situation is much more nuanced. In most cases, overworked reporters and editors are doing the best they can with limited information. If each “typical” Baltimore homicide was played up with a big headline on the front page, some of the same people now complaining about the trivializing of murder would no doubt be accusing the Sun of sensationalism and playing up bad news about black people. Meanwhile, the major attention given to a crime like the Pitcairn murder probably had less to do with Pitcairn’s race than the many other factors that made his case unusual: that he was a successful, middle-class, had no criminal ties, and was stabbed to death in a comparatively “safe” neighborhood. In other words, if Pitcairn had been black, his killing would still have received intense coverage — as is the case with other atypical crimes that shock the conscience, such as the shooting of Monae Turnage, a 13-year-old black girl, by a young friend of hers.
Of course, one might argue that any murder on the streets of Baltimore should shock the conscience. This may be the essence of the Adam Jackson argument: that the media should cover the news in a way that delves deeply into the reasons why crime ravages many poor, black neighborhoods in Baltimore and ought to go into great depth about what people who live there are doing in response. He is essentially asking for the Sun to step out of its traditional role of objective reporting and engage in advocacy journalism. There are all kinds of reasons why that won’t happen, but it does raise important and interesting questions about the role of media. These are conversations that absolutely should be happening in Baltimore (and elsewhere), but Jackson has chosen to shut down even the possibility of such a conversation by blithely labeling well-intentioned people with whom he disagrees as “racist.” It’s a damn shame.
Charm City Rising 