Post Impressions
Feldstein, Mark
Post Impressions A spicy, bare-knuckled account of life at The Washington Post savages the newspaper rightly in some places, unfairly in others by Mark Feldstein Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic...
...Nelson claims Barry was only "allegedly" smoking crack on the infamous FBI videotape...
...The paper's real crime was that for far too long it really didn't care enough about Barry or the people he represented...
...For Nelson, payback is a bitch, and she pays back—and bitches back—with a vengeance, settling some nasty scores with the establishment organ that seduced her from freelance writing in New York Mark Feldstein is a correspondent in Washington for CNN's Special Assignment investigative unit...
...instead, much of what she writes is an apologia for the coke-tooting mayor...
...Still, the question nagged: Why had one of the best papers in the country fallen down so badly in its own backyard...
...Not that I minded, really...
...One notable exception was Post writer Juan Williams, whose most scathing indictments of Barry were published—tellingly—not in the Post, but in The New Republic and The Washington Monthly...
...But Nelson's argument falls short when it comes to explaining the sticky issue of race at the The Washington Post...
...Nelson doesn't really try to answer this question...
...September 1993/The Washington Monthly 53...
...It is also a poignant tale of being black and female in a white and male corporate world—"voluntary slavery," she calls it...
...Ben Bradlee turns out to be "a short, gray, wrinkled gnome...
...When Marion Barry was arrested, Nelson writes, the "newsroom was damn near giddy...
...But it just wasn't politically acceptable to say so, at least at The Washington Post...
...Post Impressions A spicy, bare-knuckled account of life at The Washington Post savages the newspaper rightly in some places, unfairly in others by Mark Feldstein Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience Jill Nelson, The Noble Press, $21.95 Like so many other aspiring college journalists in the seventies, I was inspired to become an investigative reporter by the Watergate heroics of The Washington Post...
...But ultimately, Nelson's book is more than just an angry middle finger extended to her former colleagues...
...A soul sister who revels in the racy, Nelson describes exploits like having sex with a mortician on his embalming table ("I would have burst out laughing, but he had such a pathetic look on his face that I know if I did he'd get mad and might not be able to get it up") and the joys of male bimbos ("Whenever he did or said something stupid, I'd think about what a pure ego feed it always was to look up into his handsome face when he fucked me...
...Ten years later, I moved to the capital and was surprised to discover that the same newspaper which bravely felled a crooked president seemed afraid even to criticize the cocaine-riddled corruption of the city's mayor, Marion S. Barry, Jr...
...Williams may have other faults, but he was one of the few reporters who wrote what so many said privately—that Barry was a tinhorn dictator, a corrupt, self-aggrandizing ruler who would have been ridden out of town long ago had he been white...
...But she does grudgingly acknowledge this: "Overweight, greasy, usually dripping with sweat, Barry speaks English like it's his second language...
...Nelson calls it "the newspaper equivalent of Coon Town, where Negroes are happier among their own (you see, it's not segregation, they like it that way...
...Outside of that, nowhere does Nelson confront the enormity of Barry's crimes—how he steered city contracts to his drug suppliers and then corrupted the upper ranks of the city's police department to keep them from busting him...
...From 1984 to 1990, he covered the Barry administration as a reporter for WUSA, a CBS affiliate...
...This is not a conspiracy of well-turned-out Ku Kluxers, as Nelson seems to believe, but a knee-jerk color consciousness that makes it ideologically unacceptable to criticize anything black, even when you're black...
...Nowhere does Nelson explore what it meant for inner city kids to watch their role model turn out to be a drug addict, or what scars Barry's racially polarizing demagoguery left on the city...
...In this autobiographical essay, Jill Nelson offers the most pointed critique yet on racism at The Washington Post...
...52 The Washington Monthly/September 1993 Still, it's race, not sex, that fuels this autobiography...
...I envy the arrogance," she writes of the Post, "their inherent belief in the efficacy of whatever they're doing, the smugness that comes from years of simply being Caucasian and, for the really fortunate, having a penis...
...She has a nervous breakdown, quits the Post, and returns to freelancing in New York—a loss for Washington and for the paper, both of which desperately need original voices like hers...
...When Negroes passed by, they would grow silent, voices lowered...
...Throughout it all, Nelson is forever in search of her own "authentic Negro experience," forever at war between her own pride in being black and her self-criticism for not being black enough...
...Most of my colleagues walked around grinning at one another, clotted in small groups, whispering and smirking...
...that the Post was "part of a de facto conspiracy on the part of the U.S...
...and then abandoned her in the back-stabbing nation's capital...
...As for the white editor in charge, she "squeal[ed] . . . damn near salivating" as other, white reporters recapped the juicy court testimony about Barry, whom she says the Post viewed as "this powerful, arrogant, crack smokin' Negro...
...Take the paper's metro staff...
...Nelson's philosophy about the opposite sex is a simple one: "One thing I love about men and pussy is that it makes them so predictable...
...In the end, it's not clear whether Nelson comes to realize any of this...
...she happily picks at the scabs of race arid sex and class that most writers prefer to leave untouched...
...I was one of the paper's television rivals, and its neglect only made it that much easier to break local stories...
...To Nelson, it's simply racism, of white-bread owners and editors who just don't get it...
...The Post's coverage of the Barry administration—indeed, of black Washington generally—seemed to vacillate between the obligatory and the enfeebled...
...Bradlee utters such inspiring lines as "I want the fashions [section] to be exciting, new, to portray women who dress with style, like my wife...
...Yet Nelson unfairly dismisses Williams as "a neoconservative opportunist a la Clarence Thomas...
...And nowhere does Nelson acknowledge the sorry failure of Washington's black establishment—District coun-cilmen, mayoral aides, Post editors, and local TV reporters, many of whom knew of Barry's drug use but looked the other way—to take a stand against Barry...
...But Nelson's focus on Barry-bashing at the Post begs the question: If the paper was so racist, why did it go so easy on Barry for so long...
...Attorney...
...White Boys 1, Black Boys 0." When it came time for Barry's trial, Nelson complained that she was the only African-American assigned to cover it—"The colored writer writing 'color' pieces," as she puts it...
...Nelson, an African-American reporter who worked at the paper for four years, delights the reader with a memoir that's raw, acerbic and hilarious...
...Unfair...
...that a woman who testified that Barry forced her to have sex had it coming...
...Nelson gets her licks in good...
...Other Posties are uncharitably described as "weasel-like" and "mottled, plump, sour-lipped...
...the perfect Negro, at least in the eyes of white folks, because most of the time he writes—and apparently believes—what Caucasians think black folks should feel and think...
...She writes movingly of her own particular family pathos—a brother on crack, a sister permanently disabled by a drug overdose—and struggles with her own guilt at being a member of the black bourgeoisie...
...What was going on...
...Publisher Don Graham is "a rich kid waiting for his mother to let go of the reins...
...In many ways, this well-meaning paternalism is more insidious than the racism of a Bull Connor, because at its core is the notion that African-Americans can't be expected to choose someone better than a Marion Barry—and because the real victims of a demagogue like Barry are the poor and powerless he claims to champion...
...to 'get' Marion Barry...
Vol. 25 • September 1993 • No. 9
