www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=62930
A pasty white, middle-class, middle-aged brother has been exposed by USA Today as a monumental fabricator and plagiarist, making the work of Jayson Blair look like a Sunday School picnic. The malpractice of foreign correspondent Jack Kelley , which he denies before a mountain of damning evidence, threatens to focus suspicion on the work of white, middle-aged journalists everywhere. For decades, we white journalists have rolled the rock up the mountain of Caucasian privilege. RELATED RESOURCES Making It By Making It Up By Chip Scanlan Is the only way to become a big time reporter these days to make stuff up?
This trail of fabrication, plagiarism, and cover-up leads around the world and is breathtaking in scope and ingenious duplicity. Along that trail, Kelley narrated a series of dramatic moments in which he was a supposed eyewitness to powerful news events, including a suicide bombing in Israel. Isnt it enough, the reader may ask, that we mediocre white reporters have suffered the suspicions of our editors that we are slackers because we never get to events just in time to see people getting blown up? Because the downfall of Jack Kelley derives from his violation of several longstanding rules for white success in the newsroom. These include: If you work half as hard, youll accomplish twice as much. If you are not fired from journalism by the age of 40, youve got it made. Two source stories one Palestinian, one Israeli will get you out of the newsroom and into the barroom - where middle-aged white reporters belong. Now all the white reporters you left behind will have editors looking over our shoulders, sending teams across the globe to fact-check behind us, and running our best stuff through plagiarism detection software. You are a traitor to your race, man, so turn in your Lacoste shirts and those Barbra Streisand CDs. Blairs transgressions led to a cloud of suspicion being cast upon journalists of color and cynicism throughout the land about the effects of affirmative action. But isnt it an expression of white privilege that we never have to say were sorry? The man in the mirror is the color of Wonder Bread with the crust cut off, and, guess what?
|
http://csua.com/feed/