[P6: This is a comment on the Jena 6 demonstration I felt deserved broader distribution.]
The mainstream media's inattention to the story is very reminiscent of the mainstream media's coverage of the Montgomery bus boycott. "Most newspapers and the emerging journalism on television," write Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in their book The Race Beat, "showed their propensity to cover the hot and simple story, not the complex one; they were drawn to the raging fire, not to the slow burn, so the successful boycott on the Negro side of the racial line went of for weeks with little notice." Mainstream reporters at that time were looking for evidence that conditions were steadily getting better and passed on hope that white moderates would lead the way in reforming their region. Even a paper as dedicated to covering Southern race relations as the New York Times failed to grasp what was transpiring. "It did not see that the overwhelming success of the two-month-old Montgomery buss boycott--which it had covered almost entirely with small wire stories--was indicative of a civil rights movement that had no intention of quitting." Most other papers and media, report Roberts and Klibanoff, also fell into this misreading of the situation. "They had no sense of the depth of feeling on either side of the racial divide, had no idea who the leaders of the civil rights protests were, frequently misjudged the commitment and motives of the leaders on both sides, played fast and loose with the names and titles of anyone outside the white power circle, and sometimes served as adjunct investigative bodies for law enforcement in trying to squeeze out whodunit information about the leadership of the civil rights protests,"
Instead of vigorously and thoroughly covering the present-day race beat, modern headline media, more often than not, engage in the kind of practice which was astutely pointed on this site during Imusgate: 1) quote the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson; 2) point out their "past as a distraction/excuse for the current bigot eruption"; and 3) leave the discussion at that. Some say that the Jena 6 rally is the beginning of a new civil rights movement for the 21st century. It might be too early to determine whether this is the case. If it is true, however, than the mainstream media is about as uninformed of the events triggering a modern civil rights movement as the ones which triggered the previous one. I think black bloggers have pioneered a frank manner of reporting and discussing race stories that mainstream media and white bloggers will not touch and thus have the power to independently influence the actions of black protestors in a way that the mainstream will not or cannot understand.
