Presswatch: The Sounds of Silence
Corry, John
checkers called R. Emmett Tyrrell directly to ascertain whether he was, indeed, an anal orifice, as opposed to a rectal passage or mildly irritating colon. Anyway, I've never met Johnny Apple....
...When it finally assessed what had happened it said that what was "clearly needed" was more attention to "gender relations and gender-related violence...
...A1 Sharpton makes a speech...
...The four white police officers who did the shooting were tried in court, and acquitted by a mixed-race jury, but the Times kept the story alive for months...
...Obviously that would never do...
...The topic was just too big and too complicated...
...What angered him most as he chased the story, he said, "was trying to get to the bottom of it-was this a racial moment or not...
...The man on the ground in Philadelphia, a particularly nasty career criminal, was black, but so were some of the cops kicking him...
...The next day the Black Caucus claims an "epidemic" of police violence is sweeping the country...
...sometimes they should just look the other way...
...The Times, and virtually every other big news organization, had a terrible time reporting the "wilding" that followed the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York...
...Jordan was denying his blackness...
...But William Powers summed it up beautifully in the National Joumah "The journalistic establishment is like one big, pretentious snot-nosed French waiter, and it~ time for America to hurl a glass of ice water in its face and give it the boot...
...Apple's home had, at the very least, to be typed up in the toilet-but only to suggest that their venerable correspondent has a reluctance to get out of the house far more pronounced than lacoby's...
...4 by John Corry The Sounds of Silence All race, all the time, at the New York Times & Co...
...Some things are what they are, and race has nothing to do with them...
...Jesse Jackson is slow to be heard from, although he has an excuse...
...In fact, I'm face down in the beer nuts in a bar in Acapulco haggling over prices with a transsexual hooker, but by the time I spotted the error the column had been running for a couple of months and it was too late to change...
...However, this does create journalistic problems...
...Jackson, like Cowers , lives offold grievances...
...certainly as a black man he had to have had some...
...Gharges of racism arose immediately, and the Times found none too outrageous...
...Patrick's Day Parade once was, although it seemed to have fewer stabbings, until New York cracked down, and forced a change...
...Meanwhile in Mississippi, Jesse Jackson did his best to recapture times past...
...It asked him about golf: "How does someone who grew up in the first public housing project in the country, in Aflanta's University Homes, end up so passionate about a 'white' game...
...to get beyond the silence about race...
...The past never dies...
...He has just led a march in Mississippi, and he is meeting with Janet Reno...
...Jordan is black, and ipso facto he thinks about race all the time...
...White louts have no protective status...
...So these guys Ithe Philadelphia copsl internalize the racist, oppressive culture of the police department in order to succeed...
...Apple argued in defense of his "In the Chamber" reports from his E-Z-Boy recliner that distance lends a certain detached judgment...
...How Race Is Lived in America," the terribly eamest Times series--fourteen very long stories, and an entire issue of the Sunday magazine-- rested on the assumption that race, or ethnicity, must always divide us...
...The Mississippi marchers, the Washington Post reported, chanted "Stop the lynching now...
...Nonetheless in announcing the suit against the city, the president of the NAACP chapter said it would hire "the baddest civil rights lawyer" in the state...
...Apple conceded that it had occurred to him that the title might not be the most appropriate, but by that stage the column had been running for a few days and it was "too late to change...
...Dial]o was the African immigrant who was shot fortyone times in a tragic accident...
...Amen to that, brother...
...Meanwhile the Times was nearing the end of a six-week series called "How Race is Lived in America...
...The race angle here may seem elusive, but seek and ye shall find...
...In other words, the white man tells them to do it...
...Indeed there were...
...I had hoped to do so last year when I was in the Senate gallery covering the impeachment trial, but I looked around and never saw him, even though the Times was running a daily report by him called "In the Chamber...
...If only it were that mild...
...JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's But there is no silence, and the din grows senior correspondent, more confused...
...As the Post said, the incident had "conjured up the ghosts of Mississippi's violent past during the civil rights movement of the 19~o's and 6o's...
...The Times wanted to know about his racial moments...
...Racial harmony must either go unrecognized, or be dismissed as an illusion...
...Or, as the question could have been phrased, although the liberal Times would have been appalled if it thought so, was Jordan trying to act white, when he was just another Negro...
...AS one of the reporters confessed in the panel discussion, she had lived in "a totally white suburb," and gone to "a totally white school," and she could see this now as % moral failing...
...The Times could not let him get away with that, and so it reminded him of what he was...
...Jordan replied, "When I go to Jackson Hole, I'm not thinking race, I'm thinking relaxation...
...Cowers said blacks who worked for white businesses, just like whites who worked for white businesses, could be trained to focus on blacks as criminals...
...Reporters and editors involved in the series recalled how they approached their work in a panel discussion for the Sunday magazine, In the beginning they met with an editor, who asked them to "reveal themselves...
...Maybe not with gay teenagers, but certainly with Republican senators...
...The first question was, "You spent the Fourth of July at Jackson Hole, right...
...Some months later, Mr...
...Everyone was stricken with "racial fatigue...
...But the editors' therapeutic interventions were not enough, and the series took a toll...
...The lawyer could argue his case along the lines Ronald Hampton of the National Black Police Association suggested to Newsweek: "Success is designed in white male terms...
...Indeed, pace the Globe's ombudsman, Mr...
...A nother da...
...The press helps where it can...
...You'll notice this column is place-lined "New Hampshire...
...But racism, Cowers insisted, was the catalyst for the death nonetheless...
...I was angry about how much I had to think about it," one reporter said...
...And the cops, of course, got the message: They should be very, very careful when they deal with members of minorities...
...It's that this country's unreadable press and unwatchable news shows are pompous...
...What's the real problem here...
...But Jordan could hardly be asked about that, even though it was more interesting than anything he and Clinton might possibly say about affirmative action...
...The Michigan demonstrators, according to the New York Times, shouted "no justice, no profits," and sliced up Lord & Taylor credit cards...
...Almost immediately, though, the police, and not the mobs, became the story...
...There is an explanation there of why they seemed slow in responding to the wilding, although the Times would never buy it...
...Four of the five guards, including the one charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death, also were black...
...Jordan once told a reporter that when they were on the golf course they talked about sex...
...no black man with a mind of his own need apply...
...But there were breakthroughs afterwards...
...Were there any other African-Americans out there...
...penance is required...
...It wasn't that hard to do...
...Actually it is unlikely he and Clinton ever talk about it at all...
...Blacks and whites should never be left alone to work out their destinies, and when there is no problem you invent one...
...Then there was a delicious question about Jordan's relationship with Bill Clinton: "when you're golfing with the president, or just hanging out, do you ever talk about race...
...The Police Department was infested with racism...
...Alas, in Boston and many other towns, it's even worse: one mot-nosed waiter with no daily special, no beverage options, just the same bland fixed menu day after day after day...
...He pronounced the death of a 17-year-old youth a "lynching," and led a march to what he said was the "hanging tree...
...Anyway, I mention this not out of some sniffy truth-in-advertising fastidiousnessI'm sure that the Times, a world-class windbag on the subject of journalistic ethics, was scrupulous enough to insist that a column called "In the Chamber" written from Mr...
...As it transpired, he wasn't "In the Chamber" at all, but back home watching the trial on TV...
...Meanwhile editors served as facilitators to help the reporters develop an enlightened self-awareness...
...Liberalism gives everyone a role to play, and discourages improvisation...
...B ut if he had to think about it, it probably was not a racial moment...
...It is different, though, with Hispanic louts, and if you think it is not, you do not know New York politics...
...Like most members of minorities-- the Clarence Thomases excepted--he gets either proteeted or patronized...
...Not pompous in the way that, say, Senator Byrd of West Virginia is pompous...
...Could it be because they were sexist, or because most of the women, like their assailants, were also black or Hispanic...
...The louts could be ignored...
...It was intended, as one of its editors explained...
...Two days before, John Cowers, who is also talking to Reno, had led a demonstration in Michigan...
...The one that would be staring Jack Thomas and the rest of the Times-Globe ethics gang in the face if they ever got past patronizing the homeless shelters and gay teenagers...
...The wilding was a disaster waiting to happen...
...Meanwhile the ghost of Amadou Diallo hovered over the cops...
...Cheering mobs of Hispanic and black males sexually assaulted as many as fifty women in Central Park...
...No matter that two autopsies, one even requested by the youth's family, had found the death consistent with suicide, or that Jackson had no evidence to indicate otherwise...
...The American Spectator _9 September 2000 47...
...Some filled out questionnaires...
...Ihat meant no evidence was needed...
...As the Times explained, "Mr...
...The Times, however, has not been called "unsatirizable" for nothing, and the same issue of the magazine that contained the reporters' musings also had a Q & A with Vernon Jordan...
...It seems the stories "called for a degree of nakedness you don't ordinarily experience as a reporter...
...We shocked reporters by what we asked them to reflect on, and come back at us with" one editor said...
...Why hadn't the cops acted sooner...
...the local chapter of the NAACP says it will sue Philadelphia...
...another incident, this one on a z8-second tape shown over and over on television: Philadelphia cops are kicking and stomping a man as he lies on the ground...
...Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, had a similar idea...
...There were tears, there was emotion...
...You don't spend much time on the golf course talking about race," Jordan replied...
...But the Puerto Rican Day Parade has been a mess for years-- disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, and lewd behavior, much the way the St...
...The Michigan demonstrators were protesting the death of a 32-year-old black 46 September 2000 " The American Spectator man who was choked in a scuffle with five security guards in a shopping mall parking lot...
Vol. 33 • September 2000 • No. 7
