NYT, Beacon of Black Culture
At last week's National Newspaper Publishers Association convention, it was announced that Whitey — or the New York Times company, as he prefers to be called — will be starting an African-American newspaper in Gainesville, Fla. Naturally, this has been met with some opposition:
Black publishers freely concede that anyone has the right to start a newspaper. That is not the issue. What is so galling is that White-owned media companies that have done such an embarrassingly poor job of accurately portraying people of color on their pages and broadcast outlets are now seeking to supplant the only legitimate Black media voices that have performed that task admirably for more than a century. It is arrogant and ridiculous to think that newspapers that primarily portray African-Americans as criminals, athletes and entertainers will suddenly be able or willing to present African-Americans in their full complexity.
Forgive us, but it's positively absurd to insinuate the the Times doesn't accurately portray people of color. Why, just today, the paper's "black coverage" included fraudulent leaders in Darfur, angry soldiers in Florida, and Bill Cosby's infidelity.
