Gray Lady Down Read online

  In October 2004, in New York’s East Village, a black man from Brooklyn shot three people and terrorized patrons in a bar, threatening to burn the place with kerosene and a lighter. At one point he held fifteen people hostage. At trial, prosecutors charged that the man was “on a mission of hate” to kill white people, and explained that the police had found tapes of anti-white rap music interspersed with the man’s own anti-white rants. “Get ready to pull your guns out on these crackers, son. All they do is party and have a good time off of our expense, son,” one tape said. “Blast the first couple you see having a good time. Let them visit your side of the tracks.” If the racial roles were reversed, the Times would have given the case far more attention and used it for a springboard—as it has often done—for pieces that searched for Larger Racial Meanings. Instead, the case was buried in the Metro pages.

  In April 2006, a New York University student emerged from the subway for a visit with an old friend who lived in a Harlem neighborhood. A gang of black teens attacked him. Fleeing into traffic, the student was struck by a car and died a few days later. The story was newsworthy: in a gentrifying neighborhood, gangs of black teens (“wolf packs,” as the New York Post called them) were on the loose, systematically preying on people who appeared well-to-do, overwhelmingly white. Indeed, a similar case involving a black man chased into traffic by a white gang in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens in the late 1980s was given wall-to-wall coverage by the Times and eventually brought down Mayor Ed Koch. The death of the NYU student was covered by other New York papers. “Harlem Thugs Yuppie Hunting,” read the New York Post headline. The Times mentioned the case in a one-paragraph “Metro Briefing.”

  Black crime in general causes skittishness at the Times, leading to classic liberal avoidance and denial. The perpetrators of these crimes are often portrayed as society’s victims, with the high rates of black crime and incarceration blamed on institutional racism and “racial profiling” in the criminal justice system. This representation is actually a disservice to the very minority group that the Times would like to think it is protecting. Although blacks attack whites at a much higher rate than the reverse, the vast majority of victims in black crime are also black.

  In January 2007, a young black man named Ronnell Wilson was convicted of killing two undercover police officers on Staten Island several years before. Both of the undercovers were black. Wilson faced a federal death penalty and, as Trymaine Lee put it in a Times report set in Wilson’s neighborhood, “much of the [defense] testimony this week focused on Mr. Wilson’s upbringing, on his struggling existence from an early age that his defense lawyers contend played a role at the moment he pulled the trigger.” Lee’s piece largely echoed the mitigating arguments of the defense attorneys. “While prosecutors paint Mr. Wilson as a cold-blooded killer, bully and gang member who depicted his violent lifestyle in rap lyrics,” Lee wrote, “neighbors who knew him said he was just a young man lost.”

  After quoting other residents of the projects on the justice of the death penalty, Lee closed with the perspective of twenty-two-year-old Fred Tuller, who made Wilson seem like a mere victim of his environment. Tuller had told Lee that “it was a rough neighborhood to live in, that violence and poverty are seared into who they are and how they see themselves. He saw his first dead body at age 5 or 6. The victim had been shot and left for dead in the stairwell of his building.” Lee described Tuller looking into the hills where the big houses seemed to be leering down on the neighborhood: “Look at us, in the middle of the projects, down here like lab rats,” he said. “They’re laughing at us.”

  Wilson’s death sentence was reversed on appeal in July 2010, a decision the Times seemed to endorse in two news reports. The first one ended with Wilson’s defense attorney saying she was “thrilled.”

  Another story that showed a little too much victimology involved the suspended season of Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School basketball team in February 2007. Written by another young black reporter, Timothy Williams, the story was headlined “A Team Feared by Rivals Now Sits Idle, and Angry.” Williams explained that a violent brawl during the final minutes of a game had led city athletic officials to bench the team for the rest of the season. The Paul Robeson team was perennially ranked among the best in the city, Williams reported, and had a chance to win the city title that year. It attracted scouts and coaches from basketball powerhouses, and players regularly received scholarships, some to NCAA Division One schools. But there was something “toxic” about the school’s basketball program, Wilson noted. “Its popular former coach, Lawrence Major, committed suicide in 2005 at age 45 after being charged with statutory rape, accused of carrying on a three-year relationship with a student that started when she was 14.” In past seasons, “several rival coaches have agreed to play games in Robeson’s gym only if they bring their own security guards, saying they are fearful of being assaulted by Robeson fans. At least one coach has vowed never to take his basketball teams to Robeson again.”

  The incident that led to the suspension came after a hard foul on a rebound with thirty seconds remaining in a game against Thomas Jefferson High. A Robeson player then shoved the ball into the chest of the Jefferson player who had fouled. Benches of both teams cleared and the crowd surged out of the stands. The Jefferson team was trapped in a corner as a violent confrontation ensued. The Jefferson team coach said it was a “Brooklyn mauling” and that “we had to fight for our lives.”

  Despite the obvious pathology of the Robeson team, Williams chose to focus on the dashed hopes of the players and their anger over being suspended, reporting that one player started to cry. Williams also endorsed the school principal’s complaints that the punishment was too rough for the crime: “They wanted to send a real strong message, but it is not proportionate to the offense. The question we should be asking is, what lesson are these kids learning about fairness and justice?”

  A hallmark of the Times’ coverage of black crime is a fixation on racial profiling, which it sees as an expression of institutional racism in the criminal justice system. One example involved a study of speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike, conducted by the state in 2002, which concluded that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to speed than other drivers. The Metro editor, Jonathan Landman, proposed a story on it, which would have been an exclusive. But the study’s conclusion rankled the sensitivities of Howell Raines, who had not read the report but nevertheless said that the methodology was flawed and that the Times was being “spun.”

  The story was held for a week. When it did run, it acknowledged a sizable gap between minorities and whites in speeding behavior, and noted that the issue was a political hot potato between civil libertarians and state troopers, but finished with liberal conventional wisdom: “Whatever the reasons for the speeding rates found in the study, civil rights advocates and lawyers said they cannot obscure the state’s acknowledgment that racial profiling was an accepted tactic in the department for years.”

  The fixation on racial profiling appeared also in a 2007 report by Trymaine Lee, under the headline “As Officers Stop and Frisk, Residents Raise Their Guard.” Its pull quote said, “In Brooklyn, some neighbors see searches as police harassment.” Set in one of the most violent housing projects in the city, Brooklyn’s Red Hook Houses, the piece was about the aggressive “stop and frisk” tactic taken up by the NYPD under Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It had taken many guns off the street and played an important role in dramatically reducing New York’s murder rate.

  Lee’s story emphasized that more than half of those stopped and frisked by the police citywide were black. One of the Red Hook residents he interviewed, Mikel Jamison, said that in Brooklyn it was “hard being an African-American, hard to live and walk down the street without the police harassing us.” After having a police officer jam a gun in his chest a few years ago, “in an incident he said he would rather not discuss,” Lee wrote, “Mr. Jamison said he converted to Islam and is now more conscious of the way the comm
unity is affected by such police actions.” (Why Lee allowed Jamison to dismiss the incident as something he “would rather not discuss” is journalistically dubious.)

  Lee included fifteen paragraphs where residents disparaged the “stop and frisk” policy and just four where residents supported it. The closing paragraph described a press conference outside police headquarters the previous day, where representatives of black and Hispanic officers’ groups called for Police Commissioner Kelly to step down. “These numbers substantiate what we’ve been saying for years,” Lee quoted Noel Leader, a cofounder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. “The New York Police Department under Raymond Kelly is actively committing some of the grossest forms of racial profiling in the history of the New York Police Department.”

  The commentary on the unfortunate encounter that Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard had with the Cambridge police in July 2009, provided the Times with another soapbox to denounce racial profiling. “The clash in Cambridge about ID and racial profiling, about identity and expectation and respect was just a snippet of our culture’s ongoing meta-narrative about race,” according to Judith Warner, a Times Web columnist. Bob Herbert devoted two columns to the case. In the first, headlined “Anger Has Its Place,” he wrote: “Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.” In the second column, headlined “Innocence Is No Defense,” Herbert complained: “Young, old, innocent as the day is long—it doesn’t matter. Your skin color can leave you perpetually vulnerable to a sudden and devastating injustice.”

  In the past, a faith in integration had guided the Times’ coverage of race, as revealed in the paper’s response to the rise of the Black Power movement and its radical notions of cultural separatism. On the confrontation between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966 over the issue of white involvement in the civil rights struggle, the Times ran an editorial under the headline “Black Power Is Black Death.” It applauded the activist Roger Wilkins for telling the NAACP that “the way out of America’s racial dilemma” was “the inclusion of the Negro American in the nation’s life, not their exclusion.” A year earlier, after Malcolm X was assassinated, a Times editorial decried his “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.”

  By contrast, a Times news report about a Harlem exhibition in 2004 referred to Malcolm X as a “Civil Rights Giant” and extolled the exhibition for its description of a “driving intellectual quest for truth.” When John Carlos and Tommie Smith had given the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, the Times condemned the action; forty years later, the reporter Katie Thomas called it a “heroic gesture.”

  The Times has endorsed a separatist black identity by reporting favorably on Afrocentric education, which its supporters see as a way to overcome alienation and boost self-esteem in underperforming inner-city black schoolchildren, by teaching them that they are descendants of a scientifically and artistically rich African culture. The fans of Afrocentrism claim that Africa, not Europe, was the cradle of Western civilization, and that racist “Eurocentric” scholarship has systemically denied it. Afrocentric education also emphasizes a “distinctly black learning style.”

  To its critics, however, Afrocentrism is “a heavy dose of fantasy mixed with racism,” and an “ethnic religion” based on shoddy scholarship, with a dangerous potential to encourage racial insularity and intolerance. Claims that black children learn differently from whites are largely seen by professional educators as nonsense, an effort to teach history as group therapy. The notion of introducing a separate black curriculum would undermine the function of the public school as an instrument to instill a common culture and a shared sense of the past.

  The debate over Afrocentric education was one that the Times should have monitored closely. At the very least, the paper should have provided a complete and candid description of what Afrocentric educators were teaching, as well as an inventory of the pedagogical and scholarly assumptions these teaching materials embodied. Instead, the Times shrank from the challenge, and treated the competing claims about Afrocentrism as equally valid “perspectives” whose multiplicity should be celebrated. The Times ignored some of the more patently ridiculous claims and airbrushed uncomfortable realities about Afrocentrism as well as the controversy around it. For example, there was no research to support a link between self-esteem and educational achievement. Yet news analysis in the Times routinely quoted supporters of Afrocentrism making that linkage. The paper made no attempt to evaluate the strength of Afrocentric scholarship, including claims that Cleopatra (along with the rest of ancient Egypt) was black, and that Africans discovered mathematics, built the first airplanes and were the first to sail to America.

  As far back as 1990, the education reporter Suzanne Daley produced a fairly critical report on Afrocentric education, quoting experts who questioned whether history should become an exercise in self-esteem, emphasizing what many experts called the pedagogical “slipperiness” of Afrocentrism, and explaining that much of its curriculum accented white scholarly conspiracies against African achievement. Daley’s report set off protests by black staffers, who ensured that subsequent treatments of the subject were much more flattering and made supporters sound more convincing than critics. In one of those later treatments, Calvin Sims, a black reporter, claimed that the “scholarly underpinnings” of Afrocentric theories and curricula were “firm” and based on “the work of scholars who are trained in the ancient classics of northern Europe and Africa.”

  The Times also affirms separatist values in its coverage of the black family and the problem of illegitimacy. As already noted, back in the 1960s the paper had no problem with making value judgments about black illegitimacy. It gave sympathetic treatment to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the cultural disarray of “the negro family,” which was attacked by civil rights leaders and leftist publications. The Times reporter John Herbers explained that Moynihan’s work was not intended to fuel contempt for black Americans by drawing attention to the problem of illegitimacy; rather, its purpose was to show that “white America by means of slavery, humiliation and unemployment has so degraded the Negro male that most lower class Negro families are headed by females.” This, Herbers quoted Moynihan approvingly, had made it impossible for “Negroes as a group to compete on even terms in the US.”

  Today the general public has no trouble seeing the prophetic nature of Moynihan’s argument. In 1965, when he first tried to draw attention to the problem, the rate of black illegitimacy was 25 percent; by 2009 it was 70 percent. A consensus has emerged on solutions, emphasizing welfare reform, which it is hoped will make young, out-of-wedlock motherhood an undesirable experience for teenage girls. But for most of the last two decades, when the debate has been sharpest, the Times has been reluctant to admit that the issue is serious and has disparaged proposals floated to address it.

  The Times has been remiss, too, in reporting on social policy for dysfunctional black families and their relationship to the foster care system in New York City. In the early 1990s, the city began an experiment aimed at better protecting the black and Latino children whose parents have lost custody to the foster care system. The experiment was the work of Robert Little, the brother of Malcolm X and himself a former foster child, who believed that black children placed in white foster homes would lose their “black identity.” This racist assumption was shared most ardently by a child welfare advocate named Luis Medina, who believed, as the Times would write in late 2007, “that foster care in New York had become an evil and racist system that was engaged in little more than rounding up poor minority children.” At another point, Medina said the foster care system felt like “some version of apartheid.”

  Medina took over a venerable child care agency called St. Christopher’s, based up the Hudson River in Dobbs Ferry, New York. As the Times retroactively exp
lained,He hired additional black and Latino caseworkers, and made a priority of appointing minorities to the agency’s board of directors. He promised to recruit local foster parents from the same neighborhoods as the children coming into their care. He argued that black and Latino families had a “sacred right” to stay together, and pledged that his agency would do everything it could to keep intact the families torn by poverty, illness and drugs.

  As a symbolic touch, Medina ordered that the pictures of white children at the agency’s administrative office be replaced with pictures of black and Latino children.

  Eventually, St. Christopher’s would expand, opening offices in the Bronx and in Harlem. But Medina’s ideology began to divide the staff, and some felt there was too much operational chaos. “Mr. Medina’s main Bronx office became overrun by parents, some of whom were dangerous and some of whom came simply to hang out,” the Times wrote in 2007. “The presence of the parents—often confused or furious—and a chronic shortage of staff created disorder, particularly during visiting hours with their children. Telephones could go unanswered, dirty diapers often collected in the corners, toilets went unfixed, fights broke out, children were snatched.”

  According to Starr Lozada, a caseworker based in Medina’s River Avenue office in the Bronx in 2004, “The birth parents would come and hang out all day. Maybe they would come for the breakfast. Talk with each other. Stay until we closed.” The parents would bring in people from the neighborhood, and there would be screaming and carrying on. “We felt unsafe,” Lozada said.

  As this chaos was brewing, the Times ran a front-page piece on St. Christopher’s in 1995, extolling Medina and his approach in an account that relied on unverifiable claims by parents who either had been involved with or were still involved with drugs or alcohol, or domestic violence. A father claimed that after his son was taken from them, he and his wife walked into St. Christopher’s-Jennie Clarkson prepared to fight a hostile bureaucracy. Instead, they found case supervisors who promised to do everything they could to help the parents regain custody. “You have to give people something to shoot for,” one senior supervisor was quoted as saying, “not just hold something over their heads.” The 1995 article quoted Jeremy Kohomban, director of family services: “Most important was a shift of power from agency workers to parents.”