The Maynard Institute's Richard Prince (Journal-isms, 3/30/09) has a look at "a two-day conference in Washington called '1968 and Beyond: A Symposium on the Impact of the Black Power Movement on America,'" with "hardly anyone from the mainstream media...there to cover it."

Urging his readers to "think beyond the news media script that often pits a noble civil rights movement against a 'destructive' one preaching black power," Prince quotes some symposium participants:

"The white media just basically attacked us," Askia Muhammad Toure, activist, educator and poet and one of Monday's panelists, told Journal-isms. "Very few black people were writing in the white media at the time, and those who did attacked us, too." He attributed the attacks to fear of black self-assertion....

The activists didn't always feel so alienated, according to playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones. The media "were a little naive earlier," he told Journal-isms. "But they got wise. You used to be able to hear Dr. King, Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael," he said, referring to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But those voices soon disappeared. Today, "they only put fools" on the air. (And too many, Toure added, are happy to go on.)

Poet Sonia Sanchez assessed the "very important role" of media in the black power movement as "positive and negative, but mostly negative," and "said most reporters were more interested in creating an uproar than providing context and getting facts right." In fact, "she said she doesn't see much difference today, citing recent coverage of Obama's grappling with the economy." Prince backs up the idea of an essentially unchanged corporate press with depressingly familiar statistics from StopBigMedia.com: "Racial and ethnic minorities make up 34 percent of the U.S. population, yet own just 7.7 percent of full-power radio stations and 3.15 percent of television stations."

In his online column (2/26/09) for the Maynard Institute, Journal-isms, Richard Prince reports on those who see the New York Post's recent cartoon of a chimpanzee shot-dead--so that now "they'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill"--as "an opportunity to examine the factors that led to the cartoon's appearance in the paper." Specifically, "the NAACP plans to focus on diversity in newspaper newsrooms," calling the incident "a reminder that when we get through with Fox and the New York Post, we need to focus on the newsrooms in the country":

In December, an NAACP report pointed to "an ongoing trend where African-Americans and other minorities continue to be under-represented in nearly every aspect of television and film businesses, while largely being denied access to significant positions of power in Hollywood."

The NAACP has been issuing such reports at least since 1999.

Diversity efforts in newsrooms have stalled and many have given the issue lower priority as economic and survival issues consume the time of editors and publishers.

Citing a poll showing "a majority of voters... believed the Post's cartoon had racist undertones," "was directed toward Obama" and that the Post "should be responsible for dealing with the repercussions," Prince also notes that there has "not been an African-American editor on the local news desk since 2001, when the late Lisa G. Baird, who had cancer at the time, was fired."

Read about the Post's regrettably still relevant history of racism in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "New York Post: Militant White Daily" (1-2/93).