A face CNN can trust and the white man’s media burden
Race and media converged like a mug this week - from the racially homogeneous game of musical chairs playing out at CNN to the one-sided conversation on race boiling over in Philly
- YouTube screenshot/CNN
- SMUG MUG: Jake Tapper is “the face of the new CNN.”
So the “face of the new CNN” is a white guy. No surprise there. The news network’s new prez Jeff Zucker made the proclamation Monday at a Washington D.C. launch party for former ABC reporter Jake Tapper’s new 4 p.m. weekday show on CNN called “The Lead.”
While Zucker heralded Tapper’s debut as “a really important day in the history of the bureau and the start of something very exciting and very fresh,” most of the media hubbub since then has revolved around the anchors and analysts who are on the outs at CNN - specifically, the black ones - Soledad O’Brien and Roland Martin.
Indeed, it’s been another interesting week or two in race and media - from the racially homogeneous game of musical chairs playing out at CNN and MSNBC to the polarized response to Robert Huber’s Philadelphia magazine cover story, “Being White in Philly.”
In case you haven’t read it, Huber’s piece is essentially a privileged white guy’s earnest but failed attempt at bridging the racial gap in a city equally divided by segregation and gentrification. Instead of interviewing people across racial lines, he sticks to his own kind by talking to white “urban pioneers” and longtime white residents about the blacks. Huber’s piece has kicked off a conversation, all right. The city’s black mayor, Michael Nutter, who called the article “a pathetic, uninformed essay” in a four-page letter, has asked the Philadelphia Human Rights Commission to rebuke the writer and the magazine in addition to investigating some of the “sensitive racial issues” explored in the piece.
The latest fallout, which includes a call to boycott the mag’s advertisers, occurred at a Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists meeting that Huber and Philadelphia editor Tom McGrath attended this week. At it, members of the PABJ questioned the magazine’s total lack of racial diversity among its editorial staff - some of whom have criticized the story as racist, faulty journalism. The internal torment doesn’t stop there; a writer at the weekly and all-white Philadelphia City Paper even wondered, “Why Is The Journalism Industry So White?”