Sunday, July 15, 2012

Truest statement of the week

News for black audiences? Forget about it. A look at the web page of the Chicago Defender on July 11 shows the pattern. In the “our city” section there are ten stories. Seven are Associated Press stories. Only 3 are written by local reporters. On the site of the Atlanta Daily World, the five top stories contain one AP piece, two press releases from local government, one press release from another source, and a single story by a local reporter. The black print press exists to sell ads, nothing more and nothing less.
It means that among the most generous sponsors of last month's NABJ national conference, was British Petroleum, the homicidal and ecocidal corporate criminal conspiracy responsible for what may have been the worst oil spill in history just offshore from New Orleans less than two years earlier. BP got to host its own “career development breakfast,” a panel of black execs from Chevron, BP and Exxon-Mobil “moderated” by a CNBC reporter. (Comcast-NBC was also a major sponsor of the conference.)
NABJ also thumbed its nose at black New Orleans in a session that presented the closing of more than a hundred New Orleans public schools and the firing of all staff, the wet dream of charter and privatization advocates, as “educational reform.” One could take a look through the conference program book and doubtless find several more examples of the distance between the professionals of NABJ and the lives led by ordinary African Americans in New Orleans as elsewhere.


--- Bruce A. Dixon, "The Black Press Is Dead, Get Over It" (Black Agenda Report).
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