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Mixed-Up Media Madness
Date: December 17, 2008
- Fact: The media is undergoing tough financial times; newspapers are laying off staff, magazines are ceasing their printing and only publishing online, television and radio stations are cutting corners.
- Fact: Because of bad economic times, media outlets are turning to syndicated columnists and opinion writers instead of hiring their own. They are also carrying more stories by Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and similar content providers, therefore these stories have wide readership.
- Fact: An AP or Reuters writer has no more credibility than any other journalist.
- Fact: Project RACE was contacted on November 11, 2008 by Megan Scott, a "Lifestyle Reporter" for AP, who claimed to be doing a story on Barack Obama and how multiracial people felt about him.
- Fact: Project RACE provided three lengthy interviews for Ms. Scott with Project RACE members. No article has appeared.
- Fact: An AP article came out on December 14 by AP "Race and Ethnicity Writer" Jesse Washington.
- Fact: The original story had this headline or title: "Is Obama Black, White, or Neither?"
- Fact: America Online (AOL) changed the headline to: "Is Obama Black, White, Both, or Neither?"
- Fact: The Huffington Post changed the headline to: "Many Insisting that Obama is Not Black."
- Fact: The story is riddled with the writer's personal viewpoint of how confusing it is to consider our next president multiracial. In the first paragraph of the story he calls it "perplexing."
- Fact: The article is neither balanced nor correct, an example of which is his quote by a Dartmouth professor apparently about identifying as anything other than black, "it's a ploy to sort of reclaim the presidency for whiteness, as though Obama's blackness is somehow mitigated by being biracial."
- Fact: AOL conducted a poll with the story as a sidebar to the AP story and asked, "How do you see Obama?" The results are very encouraging despite the AP story. These are the results of the public opinion poll of almost 100,000 people:
- How do you see Obama?
Biracial or multiracial
Black or African-American
Other/I don't define it
White
60 percent
27 percent
11 percent
2 percent
Jesse Washington is the past entertainment editor for The Associated Press. Prior to that, he had been an editor of Vibe Magazine and founder of Blaze, a magazine focusing on hip-hop culture. He also founded the street basketball magazine Bounce. Washington used to write about Britney Spears and rap music; some called him "the celebrity bumbler." That hardly qualifies him to be an expert on race and ethnicity. Jesse Washington's appointment to the race beat was met with opposition and some called it a publicity stunt.
I don't personally know Jesse Washington. I do know that his bio states that he is the "son of an interracial marriage," but not how he self-identifies racially. I do know that he quotes some guy who merely wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper, a black schoolteacher, a U.S. Representative, who he calls "a black man who by all appearances is white," and an unnamed Fox News commentator. He did not use any interviews that AP reporters conducted with members of Project RACE or any other advocates for the multiracial classification. Had he done so, he could have learned more about the actual, factual history and what did go on in Washington DC. He also would have learned that we are not at all perplexed.
Susan Graham
Executive Director
Project RACE, Inc.
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