I'm usually immediately suspicious when I hear Southerners complaining about how people outside the South just don't understand them. That's mainly because I grew up in Mississippi hearing people whine endlessly about how the Yankee press was horribly misrepresenting the South in general and Mississippi in particular. The truth is that most Yankees don't know or care very much about Mississippi. And the ones that do have almost as little patience with that sort of whining as I do.
Having said all that, I was especially impressed by this column from last September by Michael Marshall, editor of the Mobile Register. He makes a good point here about how lazy journalists rely on sloppy stereotypes and conventional wisdom, sometimes to the point of downright bad reporting.
The New York Times bears false witness Mobile (AL) Register 09/01/03
Marshall focuses in particular on a New York Times report on the protests in favor of the showboating former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument. Marshall himself has been a strong critic of Moore. But he gives some examples of how anti-Southern stereotypes and sloppy reporting distorted the story for the Times' readers. It also shows how decent editors think about communicating information.
I was particularly amused at how he said the Times reporter managed to work in people with Confederate t-shirts into the Ten Commandments protesters, thus "conjuring up a revival of gap-toothed, barefoot, unreconstructed racists."
When Marshall checked with the Register's reporter, he found that some participants in an unrelated demonstration by the far-right group the League of the South had wandered over to the Ten Commandments protest. The organizers asked them to leave, and they did. As Marshall notes of the supporters of the League, "many of [them] really are gap-toothed racists." He adds, "We Alabamians have embarrassed ourselves enough by electing Moore as our state's chief justice. The New York Times need not embellish that reality by bearing false witness."
Check out the whole piece.
1 comment:
The stereotypes creep in at other times as well...
When was the last time you read an article about Howard Dean that didn't include the word "angry?" And how many times is Bush referred to as "a popular war-time president?"
In the 2000 election, Bush was stupid and Gore was a liar. Even though Gore was far more knowledgeable about the issues, Bush came out the winner in the debates because he didn't drool on hisself.
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