Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

Letter to the Editor, The New York Times November 5th print edition, from Rev. Connell J. Maguire, Riviera Beach, FL: That day has dawned, the day dreamed of by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when a man is judged by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin. …”

Of which man does Rev. Maguire speak?

I’m not being cheeky.  In fact, the question exhibits a lack of assumption that I wish more of the media had deployed both last night and throughout the election cycle.  Hopefully, they’ll master those assumptions over the next four years of practice.

Here’s my beef with reporters and editors: If you’re going to cover race, you can… nope, you should also speak to the roughly 85 percent of the country who isn’t black.

On November 4, in addition to camping out in Harlem and at Morehouse, the historically black college, the major networks could’ve planted reporters in predominantly white neighborhoods too.

John McCain, in his eloquent concession speech missed an opportunity to get it right.  The “special significance” and “special pride that must be theirs tonight” belongs not just to black Americans.  It is America’s and also belongs to white Americans.

What about the white Freedom Riders who’ve lived to see this election?  There’s also the little white boy or girl in the 1950s, forced to give up a black friend and conform or risk being ostracized?  Fast forward a bit: what about the whites who hunkered down in white flight neighborhoods like those in Long Island or the Detroit suburbs between the 1960s-1980s?  Or the infamous “white working class” voters in Appalachia territory?

If the coverage is tainted with what I’ll call, “Baby Boomer assumptions,” about race and racism then two main but truth-obscuring ideas flourish: 1) blacks support Obama simply because he’s black, rather than because he’s charismatic and qualified and 2) whites are miraculously, race-less, or worse, when they are race-full, it’s only because they’re racist.

The cost of skewed coverage is that Americans really are taken aback by each other November 4th–which means that we (blacks, whites, Asians, etc.) really don’t know each other.  And that the media hasn’t helped us in that regard.  It typically hasn’t covered stories, like this Christian Science Monitor piece, that show us how the country and our relations with each other have changed.

Back to Rev. Maguire’s Letter to the Editor: Suppose Martin Luther King, Jr. in this statement plucked from his 1963 March on Washington speech, also included white men and women?  Suppose he realized that whites also judged each other by the color of their skins rather than the content of their characters?

Perhaps voters, including those who abstained from the process on election day, were finally judging McCain by his character?

Just a thought.  But in the final analysis, it’s the questioning of long-held assumptions that matters more.