Obama's White House Press Corps Fails To Reflect Diversity

The White, White House Press Corps
By: Sam Fulwood III
Reprinted From The Root

Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign boosted—no, it actually created—the careers of a whole cadre of black political reporters.

Barack Obama's historic capture of Oval Office? Well, not so much.

The reasons behind the white-out of the Obama campaign are varied and complex, ranging from the reduction of general political coverage by mainstream media to fewer experienced black political reporters to the persistence of racism in the doling out of coveted newsroom assignments.

A generation ago, as the peripatetic preacher crisscrossed the country to the chants of "Run, Jesse, Run!" black journalists—among them Gwen Ifill of The (Baltimore) Evening Sun, Julie Johnson of The (Baltimore) Sun and later The New York Times and ABC News, George Curry of the Chicago Tribune, Ron Smothers of The New York Times, Milton Coleman of The Washington Post, Kevin Merida of The Dallas Morning News and Kenneth Walker of ABC News—traveled along, reporting and interpreting the historic political campaign.

Nearly a quarter century later, Barack Obama made the same primary run, and it was not the symbolic stab at the White House that Jackson's represented; instead, the junior senator from Illinois took the prize and will become the nation's first black president.

But black journalists by and large weren't around to document the groundbreaking victory. A handful of black journalists popped in and out of the Obama campaign, notably Suzanne Malveaux of CNN, Ron Allen of NBC and William Douglas of McClatchy Newspapers. At the end of the campaign, the black faces most visible on the Obama plane belonged to reporters and photographers representing Ebony and Essence, magazines that don't traditionally cover politics.

The complexion of the media can be an important factor in defining the president and his policies. In fact, even as Obama's campaign operated with "no-drama" precision, some media miscues emerged, among them the Associated Press describing Obama as half-black.

Speaking at a recent journalism symposium conducted by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, Jack White, who covered the 1984 Jackson campaign for Time magazine, noted the irony of Obama's taking office with relatively few black reporters assigned to cover his administration.

"We are going to integrate the Oval Office long before we integrate the media that covers the president," White said. "The job of interpreting this president to the world is too big and too important to be left just to white reporters and editors."

Political reporting is something of a boutique corner in most newsrooms, a space reserved for those deemed to be the best and the brightest. Political reporting was glamorized by Timothy Crouse's 1973 "The Boys on the Bus," a best-seller that revealed the techniques and antics of the reporters covering the 1972 presidential campaign. Of course, all the boys on that bus—the biggest names in the business—were all white.

The color of campaign coverage changed somewhat when Jackson announced his presidential aspirations. Run more like a civil rights crusade than a modern, efficient presidential campaign, the Jackson entourage was populated, at first, by skilled black reporters who had come into mainstream newsrooms a generation earlier to cover dangerous urban unrest, neglected minority concerns and a host of other issues that their white colleagues couldn't or wouldn't write about. By 1984 and the Jackson campaign, white-directed newsrooms had turned the page on those stories and many of the black reporters on the Jackson bus weren't covering politics for their news organizations.

Kevin Merida, now an associate editor of The Washington Post, recalled being reluctant to cover Jackson's fledgling campaign, fearing it would derail him from more coveted assignments as an investigative reporter. Now, he credits covering Jackson with boosting his career, which includes his recent publication of a photo-essay book on the Obama campaign.

"I guess I was like a lot of other black reporters who didn't want to cover Jackson," he said in a recent interview. "We didn't want to get pigeonholed, and we didn't anticipate the story becoming as big as it did."

The lure of political reporting stayed with Merida, unlike most of the other blacks reporters covering Jackson. Often, between presidential campaigns, he marveled at the dearth of black faces at political meetings and gatherings where white political writers cemented relationships with campaign operatives and grass-roots activists.

"Covering politics isn't always a glamorous job," he said. "It's a lot of rubber-chicken dinners and talking to a lot of county political hacks."

Squeezed by tighter budgets, fewer newspapers are springing for reporters—white or black—to indulge in such reporting. The number of black reporters who do cover full-bore politics has reverted to its pre-Jesse Jackson days.

White, now retired from Time and a regular contributor to The Root, recalled covering Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential runs, saying it was starkly different from the coverage he observed from the sidelines during the Obama campaign.

"I got the impression that black reporters didn't get as much of a bounce from [Obama's] campaign as you might expect," White said. "Maybe that's because Jackson was seen back then as the black people's candidate, who shocked the world by winning a couple primaries. Obama was seen as something more than a black candidate and that meant white editors wanted to put their best political team on him. And, of course, in their minds that meant white reporters."

Michael Calderone, a media writer for Politico.com, wrote recently that an Obama White House is likely to bring more black and minority reporters to Washington beats.He quoted Julie Mason, White House correspondent for The Examiner in Washington, as saying: "The number of African-American commentators on TV has gone through the roof and I think that'd be reflected in how [news organizations] cover the White House."

But others are more skeptical. Richard Prince, author of the online Journal-isms, reported recently that black political writers were "big-footed" off the Obama campaign plane by white reporters. He said in an interview that he sees no evidence of that changing after Obama takes office.

"Most news organizations are ignoring that [Obama] is black, just as they did for the most part during the campaign," Prince said. "Having black reporters on the White House beat is just not a priority, unless it can be measurably demonstrated that some special access or advantage can be gained by having a black reporter there."

What if Obama insisted on black reporters being among the press corps?

"That's not likely," Prince said. "He's not going to be that kind of president. Jesse might have been, but not Obama."

Sam Fulwood III is a regular contributor to The Root.

YBW Interview With Dr. Christopher J. Metzler On Obama & "Post-Racial" America

Interview with Georgetown University dean and author, Dr. Christopher J. Metzler, by Tolu Olorunda.

Dr. Chris Metzler is associate dean at Georgetown University and the author of The Construction and Rearticulation of Race in a Post-Racial America. In his new book, Dr. Metzler makes the case that Sen. Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to political stardom is an inclination of racial progress, however, not an indictment on racism in the U.S. and beyond. Dr. Metzler is also a political analyst and a full time advocate for diversity at higher institutions and global organizations. I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Metzler on issues including diversity, the role of a disproportionately white media in the 2008 presidential election, Sen. Obama, and the concept of “post-racialism.” Dr. Metzler was poignant in dissecting the politics of “racial-exceptionalism,” which has aided Sen. Obama immensely in his historic bid for the White House:

Thanks for joining us, Dr. Metzler. Can you describe what your educational background entails of?

Well, I have a Masters degree in Human Rights from Columbia University, and a PhD in Law from University of Aberdeen. I am also a member of Oxford University and Kellogg College.

What preceded your deanship at Georgetown?

I was on the faculty at Cornell University for 8 years, and at Cornell, I headed the equal opportunity and diversity program. There, I did a fair amount of reach into issues of Human Rights, diversity and equal employment opportunity. At Cornell, I created the nation’s first certification program for diversity management professionals. In addition to academic, I also do a fair amount of work in the private sector.

Based upon your lengthy work in the field of diversity, do you sense a substantive improvement in diversity vis-à-vis College, Universities and the academic world at large?

There is an improvement, but I wouldn’t call it substantive. There is an improvement with regard to the number of students of color being recruited into Ivy League Universities. However, in some respects, a number of faculties still don’t know how to work effectively with students of color. A number of faculties don’t take enough time to think about having classrooms which are inclusive of students of color. So while I think there has been a numeric improvement, I don’t think there has been a sustained improvement.

In a recent interview, you said, “If diversity is the right thing to do, frankly everyone would have done it already… The difficulty is that we have not been able to define that with any specificity what we mean by diversity.” Can you expound on that?

In most organizations, there is a stated “commitment” to diversity, but for most of those organizations, that simply translates to activities centered on diversity; for example, Martin Luther King Holiday or Black History month – the shortest month of the year. Very few organizations want to actually focus on looking at the institutional racism, which is still rampant in these organizations, and address them. It is far easier to participate in activities, which don’t substantively change the organizations. Some of them now have a definition of diversity which is so broad that it makes it meaningless and, therefore, renders no one accountable.

What is incumbent upon the corporate structures as well as the peoples of culture to bring about that diversity?

Well, a number of things: First of all, an acknowledgement that we are not living in a post-racial America. We have gotten to the point where discussions suggest that racism is no more an integral issue in every organization in America. Secondly, as it relates to people of color in organizations, we must step up to the plate to speak on issues of racism/diversity in these organizations. In a way, we are complicit because we, often, don’t want to have that discussion. We would rather participate in these useless ethnic food and dress days. It’s what I refer to as “Taco Tuesday, and Soul Food Wednesday.” So we have to participate in a practical way. Thirdly, what we need from organizations is a demonstrated commitment to diversity.

In you new book, The Construction and Rearticulation of Race in a “Post Racial” America, you break down the dynamic of Race in an alleged post-racial America. How significant is that to the emergence of Sen. Barack Obama?

It is extremely significant for a number of reasons. First of all, what the book does is put into historical context the genesis of Race in America. We know that Race is not biological, rather social. So we have to ask ourselves this question. Does Race matter? It certainly does. So if we look at the number of caricatures of Race throughout our experience, we see that in the 60s for example, there were always two choices: Dr. Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. For a number of white Americans, the more palatable choice was Martin Luther King, because he was viewed as more “acceptable.” With regard to Sen. Obama, he is not the first Black individual to run for public office. Before him, there was Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Shirley Chisholm. But all three of them were considered, by a number of White people, to be “maddening” Negroes, while Senator Obama is a more “acceptable” Negro. And thus, they can consider themselves to be non-racist in voting for Sen. Obama. A number of people in the media have been silent on this issue because they don’t want to be viewed as racist, and also because they have neither the language nor the sophistication to talk about it.

Do you think that the media, being disproportionately white, makes them inept and devoid of the necessary intellectual faculty to deal with this issue proportionately?

Yes. Let’s look at who is covering Race in this election. You had Soledad O’Brien supposedly host this discussion about being Black in America. From my perspective, that was one of the biggest wastes of time – relative to race. The folks who she got to speak about race did nothing. The conversations were empty and did not advance the conversation in any way. Then you look at the political commentators. The vast of the American media does not have the language to talk about Race. They all want to speak of Obama as “transcending Race.” But how do you transcend Race when you live in a society whose very foundation was built on Race. So they then recruit a few Black Commentators to speak on Race. And, in fact, with a few exceptions, none of them have been able to talk about it in any significant format. So you might have Roland Martin analyzing the dynamics of Race, but he is clearly an Obama supporter, and that is identity politics. That only provides a reaction to Race, instead of an analysis of it. In my book, I also analyze the issues of White privilege because a lot of people (Black & White) have a problem discussing it.

There has been a lot of talk within the Black Community by Black scholars and activists – a la Dr. Cornel West, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, and Earl Ofari Hutchinson – about Sen. Obama running away from his race, in order to appease white delegates. But it also seems inevitable when put in the context of our society. In your assessment, how do you analyze that dynamic, and what will be the outcome of this historic 2008 presidential race vis-à-vis Race vis-à-vis Black people.

It’s a catch-22, but I don’t think he had to do it, or be the messenger. I think he could have employed surrogates to act independently in analyzing the issue of Race. But he didn’t do that, and it ended up where he was the one essentially speaking out about it. I also think you’re right, because he boxed himself in, and at that point he could not be seen as the “Black candidate.” I have had White colleagues who admit to me that they would vote for Obama because he seems to transcend Race. What those white people don’t understand is that thinking that way exposes the fact that a number of white people are still trapped into the kind of racial thinking that got us to where we’re at presently. Now, there are a couple of scenarios. Number one, if he is not elected, we’re going to see a significant number of hand wringing in the Black Community; because, to them, if this “acceptable Negro” couldn’t even get elected, who can? So there might be a disengagement from politics for the Black Community. Number two, if he wins, he cannot be a “Black president.” He’s going to have a very delicate balance relative to how he governs. We have to ask, “What are the kinds of policies he puts forth that affect Black folks disproportionately?” He has already started talking about the issue of affirmative action in terms of a more class-based system. Also, if he wins, a number of White folks would begin beating the drum that suggests racism is finally over because of the fulfillment of a Black president.

And how do you suggest Black people ‘play the hand they’ve been dealt’ with regard to a potential Obama presidency?

Black folks of conscience must look at the policies he would be able to influence and figure out how they would affect people who have been historically disenfranchised (people of color). We must also figure out a way to advocate for the historically disenfranchised in such a way that the problems they are experiencing are alleviated in an Obama presidency.

This interview was conducted by Tolu Olorunda, Staff Writer for YourBlackWorld.com