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).