Has Al Thompson even bothered to look at the BBC documentary about the
Jena 6 the link for which I sent him last week? The BBC reporter does
an interview with the local paper editor and it showed the local editor
to be biased against the black young men. There is no good reason why
the all white local jury ruled so severely on a minor. The African
Americans from the area tell a different story than this white local
paper. The claims the editor makes are almost exactly the same as those
made by racist white local newspaper editors in their vilification of
Civil Rights protestors.
SHAME ON YOU AL for supporting and rationalizing for the poor, little,
racist newspaper. Al have YOU taken Keith Woods course on reporting on
race? It doesn't seem so from your column.
We sometimes have problems with our server rejecting incoming email. If
your reply to this email is returned to you, PLEASE call me at the
number below. Apologies...We are working on it. Sincerely,
Rev. Dr. E-K. Daufin, Professor
Department of Communications
Alabama State University
915 South Jackson St.
Montgomery, AL 36101-0271
334.229.6885
Thank you in advance for your
Scholarly & Creative Activity Referrals -
Lectures, Performances, Workshops, Consultation Related Info:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ekdaufin/
-----Original Message-----
From: Poynter Institute [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 6:11 AM
To: E. K. Daufin
Subject: Al's Morning Meeting - Tuesday Edition: A Small Paper's Lessons
from the Jena Six Story
Poynter online
Al's Morning Meeting
Posted, Oct. 2, 2007
Updated, Oct. 2, 2007
Tuesday Edition: A Small Paper's Lessons from the Jena Six
Story
A community paper's take on why coverage of the Jena Six
matters.
By Al Tompkins
(http://www.poynter.org/profile/profile.asp?user=1557)
(more by author
(http://www.poynter.org/search/results_article.asp?cdl_userID=1557&btn_s
ubmit=true) )
I really want you to read today's column, all the way to the bottom.
Today's content is an e-mail interview I had with Paul V. Carty,
executive editor/local information center director of The Town Talk
(http://www.thetowntalk.com) newspaper in Alexandria, La.
A week ago, and for a nanosecond or two later, the national media paid
attention to a story in Jena, La., where protesters said they had lost
faith in their legal system. Blacks said the Jim Crow South had never
died, young people were fighting one another and prosecutors said they
were doing their duty. While most of the world has only recently heard
of the Jena case, (which is referred to as the "Jena Six" case -- a
throwback to the "Little Rock Nine" moniker), The Town Talk has been
on this story for more than a year. The paper has published more than
110 stories in 12 months related to the case and the many events that
surrounded it.
Carty's staff has been threatened, and the community his staff covers
has been shaken. Is this case really the opening salvo of the Civil
Rights Movement of this century as Rev. Al Sharpton said? Or is it a
diversion while OJ is on bail and Brittany has her clothes on?
I also noticed that the phrase "Jena Six" first appeared in The Town
Talk 's stories in May of this year. That was just about the time the
rest of the country began to catch on. I am convinced that the marketing
phrase helped propel the story. It became easier to explain with a
catchy title, even if the title oversimplified the story.
Here is my exchange with Carty:
Q. Your paper started covering the story that became known as the Jena
Six in September 2006. Why did it take so long for the rest of the
country to notice this case? What finally pushed the case into the
national spotlight?
A. You could write a dissertation on why it took "so long" for the
rest of the nation to notice this case. Some of the chapter headings
would have to be:
Readers are too busy to read, listen or watch. "It doesn't affect
me, so I don't care." They have time for the headline or the sound
bite, but not for the facts. They are unwilling and, in many cases,
unable to think critically. It hasn't really happened until it's
made the rotation on CNN's "Headline News" -- and stayed there long
enough without the distraction of the "naked-drugged-out-pop-star" story
of the day.
That's not meant to be cynical. These things simply reflect the lives so
many of us have carved out for ourselves. If it's not on your iPod, it
doesn't exist.
The Jena Six case made it into the national -- and global -- spotlight
for two reasons: people, and the Internet.
People everywhere started talking about the Jena Six online -- many of
them for reasons that reflected their own life experiences and hopes,
and plenty of others for specific political, social and activist
reasons. The evolution of the coverage of the Jena Six story -- the
micro and the macro of it -- is the quintessential example of viral
marketing: A piece of information was dropped into the "social network"
that is the Internet, and in an instant it became its own, unique brand.
Everybody who wanted to associate it with -- for whatever reason -- did
so. That was the "big bang" that forced the story onto the radar of the
traditional "big media."
Q. What are the guiding principles that your paper has tried to follow
in covering this story?
A. The principles that serve us well every day have been followed
throughout. They should be familiar to anyone who respects the practice
of journalism and embraces the unique First Amendment responsibilities
and obligations of the press. At The Town Talk , we adhere to the high
standards set and championed by Gannett Co. Inc., our parent company. I
know that you, your colleagues at The Poynter Institute and many of your
readers are familiar with them. They start here:
We seek and report the truth in a truthful way. We serve the
public interest. We exercise fair play. We maintain
independence. We act with integrity.
Q. How has your coverage been different from that of the national
media?
A. The Town Talk 's coverage has been fundamentally different, for
two key reasons:
1.) Because we are located here, we are better able than all other media
to put the news of the day into context. For us, it's a local story.
That means the online updates must have the right links to provide
readers with relevant background information; and our print story or
package must be longer or bigger so the contextual elements don't get
lost along the way.
2.) We start from a differently biased point of view. You read that
correctly -- differently biased. The Town Talk is Jena's daily
newspaper, even though Alexandria is 32 miles from there. That means we
have the cumulative experience of having covered that community in other
ways and across time. We have covered more than polar extremes of the
news that attract other, non-local media -- the big (good) annual fair
and the big (bad) crime or tragedy. Our experience on the local streets
is hardly complete, but what we have makes it much more difficult for us
to be persuaded that one side of a story is right or wrong. Of course,
no self-respecting journalist ever makes an assumption like that --
right? Right.
That said, it's much easier for journalists who come into the story from
a distance to arrive at conclusions that are based on less information,
or to agree with someone else's conclusions (prepackaged and e-mailed,
thank you very much). The probability of assuming information and
drawing conclusions increases significantly with physical and
chronological distance from any story. Living inside that reality is a
journalist who has parachuted in on a big story from far away has had to
get up to speed, make sense of the facts that can be gathered, find a
way to advance the story or at least make it appear the story has been
advanced, make a deadline and then make some calls on an unrelated
story.
That is some context for this thought, which has been nagging at me: In
27 years of working for community newspapers in six states, I have never
seen a story become so distorted by what John and Jane Doe call the
"national media." The problems I have read, seen or discussed by phone
fall into several categories:
Accuracy without truth: Facts get reported with no context. For
example: Yes, there was an all-white jury in the trial of Mychal Bell,
the only one of the Jena Six defendants who has been tried so far. That
got reported incessantly and in a vacuum, and it became a rallying cry
among civil-rights activists. What didn't get reported effectively in
the national media was why there was an all-white jury. Most people, I
am willing to bet, still do not know the answer to that.
Assumptions and skewed reporting: Lots of people working for major
media -- and others working with small advocacy journals and
point-of-view e-zines -- already "knew" the story by the time they
started asking questions about it. They made assumptions based mostly on
selective information -- the headlines and sound bites that most people
were ingesting -- and based on some stereotypes about the South that I
worry may never be overcome. (I do feel somewhat qualified to make that
statement, as I am a Yankee whose roots are in Boston and Philadelphia
and who today has the honor of steering a news organization in the Deep
South.) The assumptions made by some people in the "outside" media
provided the starting point for their reporting, which included this
unfortunate question from a network reporter's live camera shot: "How
long has Jena been known as a racist town?
Q. Why have there been no interviews with any of the teens, white and
black, directly involved in this case?
A. There have been some interviews done -- remember, you have to
consider who's talking on MySpace -- but access to the defendants to
conduct traditional interviews has been restricted for a number of
reasons -- some reasonable, others less so.
Initially, the defendants followed standard legal advice: Don't talk
about this with anyone but your lawyer. Who can argue with that? We're
talking about serious criminal charges.
That posture changed when several nationally recognized figures --
notably Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King III and Al Sharpton -- were
persuaded to comment on what they thought might be happening in Jena. A
decision was made -- by someone, somewhere -- to make the Jena Six the
centerpiece of a motivational and operational strategy. To quote the
Rev. Sharpton, who spoke at the Sept. 20 rally in front of the LaSalle
Parish Courthouse in Jena: "This is the beginning of the 21st century's
civil-rights movement. In the 20th century, we had to fight for where we
sat on the bus. Now, we've got to fight on how we sit in a courtroom."
By the time of the rally, anything to be said by a defendant was being
done in a forum arranged by the activists, and the defendants' families
were being chauffeured to airports and flown to Chicago, Washington,
D.C., and Baton Rouge.
The victim, in a notable exception, granted an interview to Richard
Barrett, the founder and leader of The Nationalist Movement, a white
supremacist group. Barrett also is the editor of its publication, The
Nationalist . The victim and his family say they did not know about
Barrett's point of view and the organization he leads.
Q: I notice you have archived every story you have published about this
case online. Why did you do that, and how important has your online site
been to your coverage?
A: We have archived all of our coverage of the Jena Six on
www.thetowntalk.com for one reason: It needs to be there. It also needs
to be there for a while. No one will read every word, look at every
picture, watch every video, listen to every audio clip or follow very
link -- but they could, if they chose to do so. Right now, too many
people believe that the story of the Jena Six is about race first and
criminal behavior second. Could that prove to be true? Yes, it could.
Has that been demonstrated? No, not at all. Indeed, the few people who
have read the statements made by people who witnessed the assault have a
very different take on this story.
The Web site has been -- and continues to be -- fundamental and
essential to our coverage. Our coverage plans start with the online
pieces, and then we build to print. On our best days, one piece
complements the other, and the whole package is coherent.
The thing about online publishing is this: It's just the latest thing.
Newspaper newsrooms have always been information centers that found ways
to make intelligent use of any means at their disposal. Think about the
paperboys (I used to be one, 100 years ago) who once stood on street
corners and yelled out the headlines. That worked. Today the Internet
works. Tomorrow? Who knows. The platform is important, but it will
always be secondary to the quality of the information.
Q. How has this story affected your staff?
A. Some of us are tired -- physically and mentally. Some of us are
invigorated and filled with a sense of purpose.
The big story always takes its toll on any staff, and especially a small
one. My experience supports that -- in Florida, when a phosphate
freighter took out a 1,200-foot chunk of a bridge and 35 people fell to
their deaths; in Kentucky, when 27 local kids and several chaperones on
a church bus burned to death in a crash caused by a drunk; in
Pennsylvania, when a college student sat down under a bush outside the
student union building on a big campus and opened fire with a rifle,
killing one student; in upstate New York, when the terrorist attacks
against the United States became a local story in every newsroom in
every community; in Louisiana, when first Katrina and then Rita
shattered much of the state.
Some of us, including the lead reporter on the story and the switchboard
operator, also are dealing with threats from a couple of different
camps. If you had to label them, you'd call them militant whites and
militant blacks.
Some of us also are trying to help our readers and the community at
large understand why we must continue to report the story and why the
story continues to make page one. Most of the callers, letter writers
and e-mailers care about the people involved, and they say so, but they
think we at the paper make matters worse by covering each and every turn
of the screw. I understand their anxiety.
Q. How has Jena changed since this story broke?
A. I wish I knew the answer to that. I don't, but we will try to
report it.
We are fortunate to have an assistant managing editor in charge of local
news whose family has deep roots in Jena. While growing up, he spent
summers there with his grandparents, and his parents live there today,
right on the street where about 20,000 marchers carried signs, sang
songs and called out: "No justice, no peace." In fact, he coordinated
our live coverage of the demonstration from his parents' house. That
proved to be convenient and very valuable when the cell cloud over Jena
maxed out. (Hard-wired Internet access is rare in Jena and elsewhere in
rural America.)
I will offer this anecdote, which relates to your important question:
I have been visiting the Burger Barn (good burgers and good people) in
Jena off and on since the story of the Jena Six started more than a year
ago. A young woman who works there, who happens to be black, says she
knows some of the defendants. She says the same thing today that she was
saying a year ago. To paraphrase: This is about some guys who got into a
fight and who have gotten into trouble before. No one in Jena is
surprised by what happened. Likewise, she has said since the story
became superheated, no one in Jena is surprised that "the media" have
made things worse.
I am not sure what to say or do about that last statement other then to
share it with other journalists.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences
and hot links.
Editor's
Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story
excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as
original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly
from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided
whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the
accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and
inaccuracies found will be corrected.
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=130598
(http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=130598)
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