By Amy Miller
As we listen to or watch the news, we are the blind men touching different parts of the elephant. The allegory tells us of the man who feels the tusks, another the toenails or the thick hide of the elephant’s flank, and each has a different notion of what the elephant is.
As we turn on the nightly news or flip through the pages of our newspaper, some of us are feeling a tusk while another is touching the rough skin. This is happening because our news outlets are presenting different parts of the animal to us, giving us dramatically different pictures of what is happening in the world around us.
It’s old news that dozens of newspeople have blatantly obvious politics and opinions. We know the profit motive creates more sensational news, and that we live in echo chamber largely driven by social media. What I find just as interesting, but less often addressed, is the way news outlets pick different stories to highlight. I am not considering here whose news is more accurate or fair. That is for another day or columnist. I am suggesting rather a path toward a bit more comprehension of those we disagree with.
I mainly get my news from radio and print, but for one month I watched a variety of television news. It was 2020, when all of us were newly floundering around about the meaning of the pandemic and how we should approach it. One channel told us how businesses were suffering as a result of masks and lockdowns, while another station reported on the suffering of hospital workers caring for an overflow of dying Covid patients.
Your heart could go out to the small business owners struggling to survive amid drastic regulations or you could feel empathy for the overwhelmed health workers caring for countless ICU patients they could not save.
More recently, several news outlets covered every hour and speaker at the Jan. 6 Congressional hearings, while another outlet announced that the hearings on the events at the Capitol did not warrant regular coverage.
My weeks of watching opinionated – and yes, sometimes inaccurate — news shows convinced me our problem is as much about which facts we are given as it is about lies and the abundance of opinions on news shows.
Today, one cable outlet’s online headline was that protesters were turning their rage on Justice Kavanaugh’s neighbors, while another outlet’s top headline was about a bipartisan Senate group proposing a law to make overturning elections harder. Down the line, the new stories rarely overlapped.
Once I suggested a friend watch a news show they detest. They insisted they could not stomach that. How, I wondered, can we understand the ideas of other people if we don’t see the part of the elephant they see.
In the story of the blind men and the elephant, the men conclude the elephant is like a wall, or a snake, or a spear, a tree, a fan or a rope, depending upon where they touched. Needless to say, none of blind men’s descriptions correctly represents the whole elephant.
By Guy Trammell Jr.
Who was the first woman of color to anchor a major news show? Hint: She covered Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa, the Senate impeachment of President Clinton, China’s Tienanmen Square massacre, and the Oklahoma City bombing.
Tuskegee Institute students were required to read several major newspapers each morning
Under Booker T. Washington’s leadership, Tuskegee Institute students were required to read several major newspapers each morning before going to class or reporting to work. This was part of his strategy to transform former forced laborers by having them gain a global view and learn the progress other Black people were making in transforming their society.
Washington needed someone who knew their way around the news industry so in 1897 he hired Emmett J. Scott as his executive secretary. In 1893, at age 20, Scott and two other men had founded the Texas Freeman, the first Black owned Houston newspaper. While working with Washington at Tuskegee, Scott helped address issues around the country affecting the Black community, writing articles under pseudonyms to give counter points of view.
Washington’s constant speaking engagements required that he get help with research on topics that were priorities for Black communities, so in 1908 he hired Monroe Nathan Work, a sociologist. While still in school, Work became the first Black author published in the American Journal of Sociology and was one of the first U.S. scholars on African culture. Work created Tuskegee’s Department of Records and Research, the second oldest archives in the United States, behind the Alabama Archives. Work created such an extensive collection of news articles on lynchings that the Associated Press would come to his department in Tuskegee to research lynching. Work also created the Negro Year Book, a composite of data on Black life and culture.
Dr. George W. Carver, the famous Tuskegee scientist, was also prominent in the media. His articles were carried in many peanut industry journals and in his syndicated newspaper column “Professor Carver’s Advice.” In 1941, Time magazine called him a “Black Leonardo.”
The media communicates world events. It informed us of world protests after George Floyd’s murder, but for decades news media portrayed Black men as people to be feared. Also, freedom of the press is not free; the advertising industry pays and controls media. The tobacco industry, for example, barred news of cigarette health risks for years. How do you spell “control”? Why is coronavirus news only reported about Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S., not Mexico or Africa (except South Africa)? Will the 2021 story of a study by German scientists that dandelion leaves offer a 60-second Covid cure ever reach mainstream news?
In 1975, Carole Simpson was the anchor at NBC News, the first Black woman to anchor a major network newscast. From 1988 until October 2003, she was an anchor on the weekend edition of World News Tonight at ABC. She fought racism and sexism throughout her career in news reporting, and forced major changes in a white, male-dominated industry.
Prior to that, from 1962-1964 when Simpson was fresh out of college, she taught journalism and was director of the information Bureau at Tuskegee Institute under President Luther Foster.
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