Black, White and 'Gray'

Ari Goldman has an interesting piece in the Jewish Weekly about his experience covering the Crown Heights riots in 1991 for The New York Times. (For those unfamiliar, the child of Guyanese immigrants was killed in a car accident involving the motorcade of a prominent Hasidic rabbi in a primarily West Indian and black neighborhood with a large minority of Jews, which led to riots during which a Jewish man was murdered in what is widely believed to be an act of retaliation.) In his article, Goldman says his editors -- in the misguided interest of "fairness" -- had erroneously framed the story as one of a "racial" conflict when in fact, he never witnessed -- or heard of -- any violence by Jews against blacks, but saw shockingly blatant examples of anti-Semitism during the three-day riot, including a group of demonstrators chanting “Heil Hitler” and “Death to the Jews.” He was filing reports of the attacks he was seeing against Jews, yet the rewrite desk -- under the editors' orders -- was churning out stories that made it sound like the violence cut both ways.

Goldman raises a great point that not every story has two "equal" sides. For years, I've laughed at the right's assertion that the media has a left-wing bias as I watched the "liberal" Times and Washington Post et al. report so "fairly" on George Bush and Dick Cheney (and the like) as to not even tell the whole story. (There's a reason Jon Stewart was voted the most trusted name in "news.") This "telling both sides" problem has only gotten worse with today's political coverage. There is nothing even remotely close on the (mainstream) left to match the vitriolic and quite frankly dangerous far right, which we know has become increasingly mainstream -- they control the House of Representatives! -- yet you'd never know it from what you hear on the nightly news and by reading most newspapers.

Ironically, though, Goldman's hero, A.M. Rosenthal -- the "brilliant" former executive editor of the Times who was "one of the first journalists at the Times to call the riots what they were ... an anti-Semitic pogrom" -- was also one of the most disgustingly homophobic men to ever be in such a position of power. The damage Abe did to countless LGBT people -- by giving a societal seal of approval to treat fellow human beings as less-than trash -- cannot be underestimated, and shows that even someone trying to set the record straight about journalism gone wrong is capable of perpetrating other falsehoods, and that even when we think we have the full story, not everything is ever really black or white.