When a Republican presidential candidate goes around talking about Barack Obama as the "food stamp president," eventually reporters are going to have to write about racism. But how they talk about the issue in instructive. In today's New York Times (1/18/12), Jim Rutenberg has a piece headlined "Risks for GOP in Attacks With Racial Themes," where we learn this about Newt Gingrich's food stamp rhetoric:

Mr. Gingrich was clearly making the case that he is the candidate most able to take the fight to Mr. Obama in the fall, but he was also laying bare risks for his party when it comes to invoking arguments perceived to carry racial themes or other value-laden attack lines.

This is the kind of language one expects to encounter when reporters have to figure out ways to talk about racism without calling it racism. In Monday's Times (1/16/12--Martin Luther King Jr. Day),  John Harwood reported on why several Republicans didn't pursue the presidential nomination:

Political heavyweights who declined to enter the 2012 race all had uniquely personal reasons. Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana faced family resistance; former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi feared being bogged down in the politics of race; Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey doubted his readiness for the Oval Office.

People who remember the Barbour story might not recall anything about a bog. Barbour talked to the Weekly Standard in late 2010, and he professed fond memories of the white supremacist Citizens Council groups in Mississippi. In Barbour's mind they were anti-Klan activists, which as critics pointed out, is a rather remarkable description of groups that were founded to oppose school integration and protest civil rights advocates.

That controversy brought up other unpleasant Barbour stories, like this anecdote from a 1982 New York Times article (dug up by Ben Smith at Politico) about Barbour's Congressional campaign:

But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be "coons" at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.

That the obvious racism on display is characterized as "racial sensitivity" suggests the Times hasn't changed a whole lot over the years.

One point that Rutenberg's piece today makes is that the pointed questions that were posed to Gingrich at the recent debate were asked by a black reporter: Fox's Juan Williams.  To Williams, there's nothing subtle about what Gingrich is doing here; it is  "more than a dog whistle.... It's a hoot and a holler."

It could be that journalists of color would be more likely to call out a candidate making these kinds of appeals.  That's less likely when there are few journalists of color covering the campaign. To take just one outlet as an example, Richard Prince recently noted in his Journal-isms column (1/4/12) that Time magazine does not have any blacks or Latinos covering the 2012 political season.

The Scott sisters (Gladys and Jamie) were serving double life sentences in a Mississippi state prison over the supposed role they played in an armed robbery that amounted to $11. At the end of 2010 their sentences were suspended by Governor Haley Barbour, provided that Jamie receive a kidney donation from her sister.

The sisters' ordeal, as columnist Richard Prince wrote back in November, came to national attention thanks largely to a November 2008 piece in the Black Commentator by Nancy Lockhart, which then spread throughout black-oriented blogs and talk radio, as well as the alternative media (Prince cites a piece by James Ridgeway of  Mother Jones).

The story then began to get national attention, mostly thanks to African-American columnists like Bob Herbert and Leonard Pitts, and NPR's Michel Martin of Tell Me More. Prince joined us on CounterSpin (12/3/10) to tell the story behind this story.

Bob Herbert was back on the story on December 31, writing a strong column that ended: "The Scott sisters may go free, but they will never receive justice." That they're free at all is a testament to activism and the role of the independent media. And it should serve as a reminder that diversity inside the mainstream media certainly mattered; as Janine Jackson put it during that CounterSpin interview with Prince:

But it seems reasonable to consider whether this case would have even the so-called "big" media presence that it's gained at this point, if it weren't for Bob Herbert at the New York Times, who's written about it; Leonard Pitts, syndicated columnist; Michel Martin at NPR. It has been not entirely, but it's had a lot to do with highly placed black journalists that the story has kind of bubbled up.

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).