Paternalism by the Post or Blackmail by the Blacks?
Shuger, Scott
Post Paternalism or Black Blackmail? Why The Washington Post endorsed Marion Barry three times. by Scott Shuger No question about it, the guy who just stepped out of his maroon van, the guy...
...After all, he did, upon graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, volunteer for Army service in Vietnam and upon returning, did a year's stint as a D.C...
...But his mood darkened when he boarded a bus for home...
...Nor were questions raised about 3) his wife's using the travel as an opportunity to drum up business for her employer or about 4) Barry and his wife keeping gifts they received on the trip, even though this is expressly illegal...
...Those kids don't get much from Cathy Hughes or Walter Fauntroy or Marion Barry...
...Seven months before that, the Times had discovered a different $18,000 deal Bradley had with another bank handling city deposits, but its managing editor killed the story...
...That's not ground either should be encouraged to stand on...
...Almost every story is about blacks...
...Imagine," Smith wrote, ". . . a Post that found Style in people who earned less than six figures, or in people we could emulate rather than scorn...
...The Post's double standard for Barry first became obvious in July 1979, when it covered his taxpayerfinanced 18-day trip to Africa...
...As a result the section usually only has space for nonanalytical articles about officialdom...
...think, the Grahams know what's best," says University of the District of Columbia urban studies professor Howard Croft...
...Consider: December 1979, the Post breaks the story that Mary Treadwell had conspired to defraud the federal government and low-income tenants at a housing project she ran...
...Although widely recognized as one of the better reporters at the Metro section, Williams was not encouraged to get deeper into local stories...
...And he's been doing that for almost three years...
...The result was that the Post fell down on its duty to all its readers because of a misplaced sense of its duty to some of them...
...Present were two top officials from the U.S...
...You're my children...
...Although it's true that blacks commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes, upright blacks become understandably frustrated with feeling that they constantly have to compete with negative images...
...Walter Fauntroy is worried about...
...Events in their community went uncovered...
...Not one fact about the conspiracy—not even the name of a single conspirator— is revealed in the story...
...Editorial wheeze The most graphic example of this failing comes in connection with the Post's Juan Williams...
...Despite that just complaint, however, the angry boycott was an overreaction...
...this was the period when then-Lt...
...Reporters and editors at the Los Angeles Times were embarrassed last summer when their much smaller (and now-defunct) rival, the Herald Examiner, broke the news of black mayor Tom Bradley's sub-rosa $18,000-a-year consulting deal with a bank doing city business...
...It's true that after revelations in late 1988 about Barry's repeated late-hours visits to the motel room of a cocaine dealer, the Post finally admitted that Barry is "an embarrassing, ineffective mayor at a moment when residents have a right to expect the leader of their government to focus squarely on drugs, murder, municipal finances, housing, and other local emergencies...
...The paper's uncritical reporting of Stuart's false story about a black assailant demonstrated that racism and ignorance can still warp news coverage and showed why black readers' suspicions—even of apparently liberal newspapers like the Post and the Globe—are sometimes justified...
...They didn't cover it...
...he was there to pick up a political contribution—even though the owners of the club were under grand jury investigation at the time...
...Father knows best The Graham tradition of sacrificing news coverage to advance social aims was impressed upon Ben Bradlee during his earliest days at the paper...
...In short, to make the Post a better newspaper, Donald Graham needs to do the same thing Cathy Hughes needs to do to be a better community leader: Stop seeing the world as composed of groups deserving special treatment and start seeing it the way it is...
...The Post simply was not asking Barry the same tough questions it had been famous for asking white politicians like Nixon or Carter...
...That's why although the Grahams have, through the powerful instrument of their paper, achieved a very commendable record on such social justice issues as school integration and equal access to public facilities, they can't seem to shake their well-intentioned but ultimately condescending tendency to think of blacks not as people who, like whites, run the full gamut of talent and character but rather as a group in need of special treatment...
...There is no mention of the Mercedes Treadwell used to park in Barry's driveway, nor of the Volvo she gave him—all supposedly on her $23,000 annual salary...
...They are good...
...And criticizing blacks in print just doesn't fit well with noblesse oblige...
...Do the Post thing Packaging a cover story on a black suspected of murder with an essay that legitimated making racial distinctions in the first, heavily promoted issue of the Post magazine may have demonstrated insensitivity to black readers...
...Since maintaining the appearance of fairness is an important goal for a newspaper, putting Williams, who is black, on the case would have been ideal...
...Those lucky enough to decipher the code on getting public housing sometimes have to wait years to get heat or running water...
...One of these articles opened this way: "As vice-president of one of the country's largest black advertising agencies, Caroline R. Jones, 43, of New York, a stylish and sophisticated divorcee, circles the globe on business and meets men of every nationality...
...The answer is: neither...
...Cathy Hughes has owned WOL since 1980, but the Post didn't really cover her much until "Take it Back"—and then only in the most deferential way...
...Witness the page one story last December under the headline, "Drug Scourge Is Conspiracy by Whites, Some Blacks Say...
...It looks like Ebony magazine," she enthused...
...Alcohol and Drug Services Administration was spending two days a week working at another job in Baltimore...
...A few more column inches and Plessy v. Ferguson would have been cited...
...If you're a white journalist—and the overwhelming majority of Post staffers are—and don't know many blacks well to begin with, and you spend too much time with blacks like that, you're going to get some very weird ideas about their concerns...
...This is news...
...Teachers said that Dooney often begged to be taken to their homes, once asking if he could stay overnight in his classroom...
...Although he grew up in Washington, Donald Graham was shielded from the city's blacks by wealth, class, and geography...
...In protest, Post Metro reporters produce a list of nearly a dozen stories critical of the Barry administration that had been diluted, delayed, or killed...
...I'll sleep on the floor,' Dooney told an instructor...
...It's significant that Graham's contact with Hughes is so structured and unnatural: 3 hours every 6 months for 10 years...
...The first started "above the fold," forcing down that day's story on the then-breaking Iran-contra scandal...
...Hey, wait a second," you can imagine the cop saying to his partner, "I've seen that guy's picture in the paper...
...The editor of Washington's City Paper, Jack Shafer, put his finger on what's wrong with such stories by suggesting a telling thought experiment...
...All policies based on generalities have their injustices," he wrote, going on to say of storekeepers, "ask yourself what their policies would be if young white males were responsible for most urban crime...
...A man with prior convictions on heroin and assault charges as well as 72 previous driving suspensions is issued a D.C...
...The offending material that provoked the "Take It Back" campaign, as well as the odd resolution of it, come from the same root: Donald Graham and his mother, Katharine Graham—The Washington Post Co.'s chairman of the board—don't really know many blacks well...
...Clifford and the Interior officials agreed to the deal...
...Although the editor defended his action by claiming that the story needed more reporting, one white Los Angeles politician told The New York Times that "there is a feeling that when you take on Bradley, the entire black population is going to be offended...
...ers who, fearing robbery, refused to admit young black men into their stores...
...like Donald Graham's Mission To WOL...
...Although the right balance is obviously difficult to achieve, there's a lot to be learned from the story of how the Post is failing to attain it...
...On the other hand, newspapers can go too far in yielding to community pressures...
...Such a grassroots effort would help the paper's staff learn that a lot of blacks in the city, unlike Hughes and Fauntroy, are not asking for soft coverage...
...But the paper was awfully late answering the wake-up call...
...In October 1986, a Post city hall reporter learns that the supposedly full-time director of the D.C...
...Since then, there's been no shortage of Post Fiddles While Barry Fiddles While Washington Burns episodes...
...But the right thing to do is to be tirelessly fair to those who've been historically oppressed, right up to the point of reverse discrimination—without ever reaching that point...
...Because anti-black bigotry is so monstrous, good people will find it very tempting to replace it with reverse discrimination...
...The schools are teeming with administrators who don't teach supervising teachers who can't teach...
...Nearly 17 years later, that same attitude led the Post to downplay Easter Monday riots at Glen Echo Amusement Park that sent black gangs marauding through Bethesda and northwest Washington...
...Milton Coleman, then a city hall reporter and now the Metro section editor and the highest-ranking black at the Post, didn't think that Barry's trip had to produce concrete benefits for the District or its residents...
...The newspaper has pursued this skewed course in its coverage of blacks for many decades...
...Capen said he made his decision out of concern that failure to endorse Ros-Lehtinen would result in financial losses for the newspaper...
...Yet, in an editorial about "the disturbance" published shortly after the violence, the Post couldn't face just assigning blame to a bunch of thugs...
...I never dreamed they would put a black thug on the cover...
...All this encourages readers in cruel misconceptions: Black readers get the idea that they should expect extra breaks and white readers get the equally mistaken notion that blacks usually need them...
...But the Post didn't get around to reporting on him for another three months, and that first Powell story ran on page A9...
...Claude Pepper...
...A newspaper should be attentive to all the differences among races, ethnic groups, and social classes and it should use what it learns in doing so to make its writing and reporting truthful...
...One was already in jail, the other was on his way...
...Cathy Hughes was thrilled with the post-boycott Sunday magazine...
...Graham's forays to WOL are almost like trade meetings or summit conferences with a foreign nation...
...That's Donald Graham—he runs the Post...
...During the 1950s and much of the sixties, even while Post editorials made clarion calls for integration, blacks could not get wedding announcements or photos into the newspaper...
...The message was clear: At the Post, when liberal goals for blacks were at stake, paternalism would win out over honest reporting...
...It's not newspapering...
...Graham is here on one of his regular treks to WOL, one of the radio stations owned by black radio personality Cathy Hughes...
...The protesters went beyond reasonable disagreement...
...In New York, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, newspapers are constantly fending off the criticism that neither staffing nor coverage—especially on the front page—adequately reflects the communities that read them...
...In 1982, the Post's readers were told on the editorial page that "on the whole, things are much better in the city and in city government than they were before Marion Barry took over," and that "Mayor Barry's achievements begin with his appointments to office...
...I don't want to go back there.' "Dooney was painfully shy or exhaustively outgoing, depending largely upon whether he was at home or in school—the one place where he could relax...
...lease don't make me go home...
...It's never right to confer benefits on people that they don't deserve, no matter what their race, no matter how much we'd like to...
...The difficulties the Post has facing up to Barry's scandals are not the worst consequences of its confused racial idealism...
...by Scott Shuger No question about it, the guy who just stepped out of his maroon van, the guy now walking down H Street in northeast Washington, sticks out...
...All three installments opened on the front page...
...His pizza parlor burned to the ground as completely as if he'd been a Nazi...
...To be sure, the Post has covered some of these stories—it's hard to ignore a drunk running over a woman downtown on a weekday afternoon—but the paper has rarely explored the larger questions of government failure that such stories raise...
...Research assistance provided by Michael Carolan and Ned Martel...
...By the time he enters the low yellow and brown building on the other side of 4th, you realize he looks pretty unhappy too—as if instead of what he's about to do, he'd rather be having a root canal...
...The stories set off an immediate outcry from black readers...
...Playing by these rules is not easy, but doing anything else is either lobbying or lying...
...Among them were two of the appointees lauded by name in the Post's 1982 editorial, by now exposed as thieves...
...Or should it publish stories about blacks it wouldn't publish about whites...
...A drug dealer suspected of murder is mistakenly released from police custody...
...Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, who was vying to become the first Cuban-born member of Congress...
...But they covered the fire in a white neighborhood...
...In the summer of 1949, when Bradlee was a young reporter, a 400 person race riot broke out at a whitesonly "public" swimming pool...
...News about the District vies for only a few pages with items from Virginia and Maryland...
...But really there's a great deal of love in it—love of the truth and love of the sad and innocent children of drugs...
...Yeah, it's his paper...
...Or the "puff- pieces in the Sunday magazine or the Style section on blacks that are there not because the Post management really finds them significant or interesting but because by publishing them the paper hopes to bleed off black pressure...
...What's a guy like that doin' around here...
...While he was living in the crack house, Dooney was burned when a woman tossed boiling water at his mother's face in a drug dispute, and his right palm was singed when his 13-year-old half-brother handed him a soft drink can that had been used to heat crack cocaine on the stove...
...In March 1983, the Post assigns a reporter to investigate widespread rumors that Barry had used cocaine when he stopped by a 14th Street strip joint in 1981...
...congressional delegate...
...The technique often works as appeasement...
...In spite of repeated complaints about such myopia, the trend continues...
...According to the paper, also at fault were the rioters' parents, the amusement park's operators for "unskillful management of overflow crowds," the city for the lack of recreational facilities, the Congress for "hanging on to local powers of government that it is not equipped to exercise," and the federal government for failing to fund education and recreational programs in Washington that it finances elsewhere...
...That first issue contained a lengthy cover article on a black singer charged with murder in Washington and a column by Richard Cohen sympathizing with downtown jewelry store ownScott Shuger is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Imagine," Shafer wrote in his press column, "if the Post ran a news story about white proles who believe that Jews control the media and high finance and that nobody gets elected without their approval...
...it's the problem of affirmative action...
...The story about the singer was accurate in every detail—right down to its revelation that in an attempt to cash in on his predicament, he sang about killing people...
...well, when he came to the Post a few years ago for a meeting set up to cover city problems, his uppermost concern was the newspaper's refusal to call him "Congressman" in print...
...But in the end, the publisher prevailed, as publishers usually do...
...The paper's demurrals on local coverage—which are in such stark contrast to the aggressive reporting and thoughtful analysis coming out of its national desk—seem driven by its wrongheaded racial attitudes...
...along with attempts to identify the frustrations of black Catholics, there was the revelation of an incident in which Stallings allegedly had sex with an altar boy and the report that shortly before Stallings made his break, his church superior had asked him to undergo psychological counseling for a sexual disorder...
...When the comparison to Sal was made to Graham, he didn't get it...
...Coleman wrote: "From a black perspective, it's important that black leadership understand, be a part of, and identify with what's happening in Africa...
...And that's why they've never really figured out how to do news reporting about blacks...
...Cathy Hughes is worried about her ratings...
...It makes for a newspaper that mistells stories, misses them altogether or—most unforgivable of all—chooses not to tell them...
...When the Post concludes that the cocaine allegations are unfounded, it runs an editorial denouncing their "smear quality" without addressing the payoff implications of Barry's own explanation for his attendance at the club—that he wasn't there for drugs or even for erotic delight...
...When Stallings attempted to launch an advertising boycott of the paper, his campaign fizzled...
...The problem the Post is stumbling over when it publishes these bizarre stories is no small one...
...A Post that did not wait for the downfall of the mayor to report the other voices and other ideas in the city...
...But a story like that could be the beginning of the salvation of Dooney, other kids like him, and a generation of Dooneys—of whatever color—as yet unborn...
...To understand Graham's visits you have to go back to 1986 when, after months of planning, the Post unveiled its newly revamped Sunday magazine...
...If a newspaper can do a story that great, it deserves to be prodded to do more like it...
...But there is no better example of its different standards for reporting on blacks than its failure to do just that, sooner...
...More local stories have been creeping onto the front page, and the Metro section has been sprinkled occasionally with articles about interesting people and places in the community...
...Hughes, along with D.C...
...The thinking seems to be this: Since most of the city's employees are black, so are most of its incompetent employees...
...Capen's stance set off a 30-minute, heated argument in the editorial meeting, where a majority of those present backed Richman...
...In class, he played practical jokes on friends and passed out kisses and hugs to teachers...
...He hadn't seen the movie...
...And I know what's best for you.' " In a way, Donald Graham is like Sal, the white pizza parlor owner in Spike Lee's movie, Do the Right Thing...
...Milton Coleman suppresses the story until after Barry's re-election, on the grounds that nothing illegal was involved...
...When Bradlee had finished, Graham told the government officials that the Post would run a full account of the riots the next day unless the Truman administration agreed to close all the city's swimming pools for the season and to reopen them, fully integrated, the following year...
...Hughes said that the magazine's cover story and the piece by Cohen were "an indictment of all black males in the metropolitan area between the ages of 18 and 25...
...Just real coverage...
...Strip joint endorsements The Post today is either praised or blamed by city residents for doggedly dragging down Mayor Marion Barry...
...Colin Powell was being considered for promotion to second-in-command of the National Security Council...
...Instead, it's usually been P.R...
...The Post's woes are similar to those experienced by newspapers across the country trying to cover cities populated largely by minorities who can point to a long history of media neglect...
...In a real sense, it bears responsibility for those continued emergencies: After all, the Post has endorsed Barry in three elections...
...This criticism has increased pressure on publishers, editors, and reporters to pay more attention to local coverage...
...Hughes's attitude about news isn't all that different from Spiro Agnew's in his "nattering nabobs" heyday: She wants it all positive...
...Then driving drunk, he cripples a woman for life...
...The series was called not "African Junket" but "African Journal...
...In a city with 10,000 homeless, the municipal housing authority can't seem to fill the 2,400 vacant apartments it owns...
...And you can't fault the Post for having taken that stand then—Barry had played a crucial and courageous role in the civil rights movement and had served on the city's school board and city council...
...He hadn't seen the movie...
...As was the pervasiveness of corruption in the top levels of his administration: During Barry's first two terms, more than a dozen senior city officials were forced to quit under suspicion of wrongdoing...
...But the Post's silence has a cruel result—most of the incompetents' victims are black too...
...That information is run on page 16...
...it was overwhelmed by his other qualities...
...If you were a cop on surveillance watching all this, you might be on the radio already...
...When I give the Post a dollar and a quarter on Sunday, I want to feel good," Hughes says...
...Congressional Delegate Walter Fauntroy, launched a strikingly effective boycott: Each Sunday, the "Take It Back" protesters collected copies of the magazine—nearly 300,000 before it was all over—and tossed them on the front steps of the Post's building...
...The Post's failure to run these stories is all the more glaring because frequently it had unearthed most of the pieces of news that would support them...
...She said that when she'd heard that the inaugural Post magazine would feature a black subject, "we assumed someone like Bill Cosby, . . . Oprah Winfrey...
...According to an account in The Powers That Be, In a way, Donald Graham is like Sal, the white pizza parlor owner in Spike Lee's movie, Do the Right Thing...
...Although the Monthly is proud of such articles, the point of citing them here is not self-promotion, but rather to show what the Post could have been doing...
...You could even dress it up by quoting White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger in the affirmative and my brother Jerry in the negative...
...Significantly, when the comparison to Sal was made to Graham during a recent appearance on WOL, he didn't get it...
...But the Post kept supporting Barry and suppressing bad news about him long after his last shred of promise had disintegrated...
...The Post never publishes what it knew about the episode, even though Barry's desire to avoid a paper trail should have aroused suspicion...
...The Post runs that story on page D5...
...On top of that, the item was inaccurate: It described the riot as an "incident...
...Two days before the Herald's endorsement editorial was scheduled to run, publisher Richard Capen announced to his staff that he would not permit an endorsement of Richman...
...Maybe the Grahams don't watch TV: The Post still endorsed Barry for mayor, this time citing "time-ingrade" as one reason for preferring him, and for another, that "neither the city nor its government has gone to hell in a handbasket over the Barry years...
...Donald Graham knows he's got an elitism problem, and he's tried to fight it...
...he was dismissed as "a weak-kneed, cocktailsipping Uncle Tom...
...The kicker is that the same guy shows up here every six months like clockwork...
...Despite such lavish use of "hard news" space for a "soft" feature, there was no lack of real news about blacks at the time, if only the Post knew where to look...
...A Post in which one could expect to find both the joy and danger that awaited when one left the house in the morning...
...The Post could begin improving in this direction by substantially increasing the size of its Metro section...
...Yet it never put them together...
...That kind of exaggeration characterizes many of Hughes's criticisms of the Post...
...These are the same conditions that continue to isolate most Post editors and reporters from them...
...there was real justification for thinking that this blend of idealism and practical politics would move the city forward...
...The Miami Herald has recently gone through great turmoil in trying to serve the fast-growing, prosperous, and politically influential Cuban-American population in its circulation area...
...The election pitted Jewish businessman Gerald Richman, a Democrat, against Republican State Sen...
...And although there were ample grounds for reasonable disagreement with Cohen's essay, it was hardly a one-sided endorsement of antiblack bias...
...Far worse than scandal is poor service...
...Cathy Hughes hated that story...
...budget bill was pending in Congress...
...The crowd of 10,000 young people at the amusement park at the time rioting broke out was almost entirely black...
...Despite the Post's immense resources, stories showing real understanding about the breakdown of D.C.'s government have usually run somewhere else...
...But the next day he discovered that very little of his reporting had gotten into the newspaper, and what there was had been buried in the second section...
...Never in a million years would the Post have made that omission if a white person had characterized Jackson that way...
...The face doesn't quite fit the place...
...But for all his efforts, he still can't seem to lose his noblesse oblige...
...Barry, who first came into office in 1978 after his underdog candidacy against two more established rivals—the incumbent mayor and the city council chairman—was helped in no small part by the Post's endorsement...
...before he is recaptured, he's wanted for killing four more people...
...In short, despite appearances, Donald Graham's meetings with Cathy Hughes are based on real common ground—they share the idea that blacks require not just fair handling but special handling...
...If they aggressively cover minority politicians, they likely will find themselves charged with racism...
...There was the series "The New Black Woman" that positively sprawled—it totalled more than 240 column-inches—over the paper for three days straight in December 1986...
...To get Hughes to call off the campaign, Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee finally agreed to publish an apology in the newspaper, and Graham consented to appear on Hughes's talk show every six months through 1996 to discuss the newspaper's local coverage...
...Nowhere, in its more than a dozen stories about the trip did the Post press the mayor about the propriety of his taking the trip 1) at public expense and 2) while the D.C...
...When I was working on the editorial page staff," says Juan Williams, "there was a tendency to hold Barry to a lower standard than other politicians...
...It's as though Katharine Graham is saying, 'You're my flock...
...After all, the magazine articles themselves were not defamatory or racist...
...The Stallings stories were extensive and by no means one-sided...
...She has asserted that in many years of living in Washington, the only time she has seen a black face displayed prominently in the Post was "when there was a crime or a scandal involved...
...During the evening, speakers came forward to attack black politicians who've attracted white support...
...Post reporter Juan Williams says that older city blacks tell him, "I remember when my uncle was in a fire over here...
...The Post has run many other damage-control pieces as news...
...So why didn't the Post ask Williams to do that story...
...Real news But the most important sign that the Post may be making some progress through the minefield of reporting and race came last July, when the paper ran a story about Dooney Waters, a six-year-old black boy living with his crack-addicted mother...
...Hughes's notions of what constitutes good coverage are also skewed...
...The paper uses Fauntroy 's actual title: "D.C...
...When it came to blacks, Sal was kindhearted, but also defensive and paternalistic...
...They are very nervous about what happens if this guy is toppled and that causes the lid to be blown off...
...In the end, the kindhearted part didn't matter much...
...There will be just that sort of pressure on the Boston Globe, for instance, in the wake of the Charles Stuart murder-suicide case...
...But if they try to soften their coverage, then they open themselves to charges of pandering...
...The Post's relationship with Hughes has led to some unacceptable gaps in its news coverage...
...Justice requires destroying the traditional prejudices while abstaining from creating new ones...
...Shying away from this difficult task and instead spending so much time and page space on public relations piffle keeps the Post bonded to very unrepresentative blacks whose concerns are not those of most of Washington's citizens...
...And the existence of black antipathy towards Jackson is certainly newsworthy...
...When it came to blacks, Sal was kindhearted, but also defensive and paternalistic...
...The Post matched its tradition of condescension towards blacks with an equally well-entrenched tendency to ignore day-to-day news about them...
...All this forbearance was somehow available although the Post criticized Jimmy Carter for taking a trip down the Mississippi while important issues were unresolved in Washington...
...Then at the west corner of 4th and H as he goes by the sign for Your Pizza Home restaurant— the long-neglected one with all the missing letters that actually says YOU A HOME—you notice his clothes: a worn, shiny suit and an unfashionably wide tie that both look older than he does...
...There is this sentiment that, independent of what the people of Washington, D.C...
...Many voices Donald Graham was challenged recently to produce real coverage in a letter he received from Sam Smith, a longtime community newspaperman and political essayist in the city...
...It was only in the pages of The Washington Monthly (see "A Dream Deferred: A Black Mayor Betrays the Faith," July-August 1986), and later in The New Republic and Regardie's, that Williams was able to confront the poor performance of Barry's administration...
...It was clearly the Post's responsibility to do a story like Jason DeParle's "The Worst City Government in America," which ran in this magazine...
...That news was disclosed not by the Post but by Mark Feldstein, investigative reporter for the local CBS-TV affiliate...
...As Joseph Nocera pointed out at the time in these pages (see "How Washington's Mayor Got a Free Ride," November 1979), although the Post had long been justifiably tough on freeloading white politicians—it had recently run a story about 14 congressmen attending a meeting in Lisbon under the accurate headline, "Passage to Portugal: A Diary of a Junket"—it covered Barry's trip not with skepticism but with reverence...
...The Metro desk has by far the largest number of reporters but typically gets the least amount of daily space...
...Bradlee got the assignment...
...George Stallings...
...This is what you've got to keep in mind when you wonder: Should a newspaper be color blind...
...Additionally, a drug-related investigation into Barry stalled only when his mistress and purported cocaine dealer, Karen Johnson, went to jail rather than cooperate with prosecutors...
...But it should never let what it knows about race or believes about race or hopes about race influence it to write for any reason other than to communicate the truth...
...When the men asked Bradlee to describe what he'd seen, he poured out all the grim details that his publisher had kept out of the newspaper...
...Stallings is the priest who broke with the Vatican last summer, alleging racism, in order to set up his own brand of black Catholicism...
...One example occurred last August when Hughes was seated prominently on stage at a rally of followers of Nation of Islam leader and black separatist Lewis Farrakhan...
...New improved Post puffs The Post's reaction to black hostility typically hasn't been more honest reporting...
...Jesse Jackson got the lion's share of the abuse...
...But, in its coverage of the event the next day, the Post didn't mention the attacks on Jackson...
...Four years later, Barry's woeful shortcomings as an administrator and his association with people connected with drugs were well known...
...Despite sumptuous budgets, it's been years since the District's government worked...
...Treadwell is later convicted and sentenced to three years in prison...
...These newspapers, admittedly, are in a tough bind...
...First of all, in a neighborhood that's mostly black, he's Wonder Bread white...
...These improvements in reporting may have already yielded a benefit for the Post...
...A signal event was the paper's coverage of the Rev...
...driver's license anyway...
...he interviewed participants and police and filed a comprehensive story...
...No mention is made in the Post's front-page coverage that during some of the time she was committing this fraud, Treadwell was married to Barry, and that the mayor was Treadwell's partner in the housing project's umbrella organization...
...Consider what happened during last summer's heated campaign to fill the House seat of Florida's late Rep...
...Both the hysteria and the groundlessness of the 60 columninch story is established right in the lead: "A significant number of blacks believe that the white establishment has intentionally allowed narcotics to devastate their communities, even encouraged drug abuse as a form of genocide...
...Since last summer, however, the Post has been showing some hopeful signs of change...
...Instead of producing agitprop like the cocaine genocide fantasy, Post reporters and editors should be aggressively covering the city's institutions, elected officials, and neighborhoods...
...In 1982 the Post learns that when one of Barry's supporters offered him several thousand dollars, the mayor responded by asking for the money in cash...
...Later, when Treadwell is released from prison, she is immediately given a $28,000-a-year job with the city parole board...
...Department of the Interior, which controlled the city's parks and swimming pools, and one of Harry Truman's closest aides, Clark Clifford...
...David Halberstam's 1979 book on the national media, Bradlee was fuming about this when he suddenly was summoned to the publisher's office—the office of Donald Graham's father, Philip...
...That editorial was the epitome of white liberal guilt—assuring us that "blame aplenty lies about us everywhere...
...Even in a world too ready to make horrors like crack a statistic and a clich?, who wouldn't be wrenched by this narrative...
Vol. 22 • February 1990 • No. 1
