Covering the Minorities

By failing to portray the Negro as a matter of routine and in the context of the total society, the news media have, we believe, contributed to the black-white schism in this country. They have not communicated to the majority of their audience--which is white--a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of living in the ghetto. They have not shown understanding or appreciation of--and thus have not communicated--a sense of Negro culture.

Since the Kerner Commission published its disturbing report on race relations two years ago, the news media have stepped up their reporting of minority concerns. But an imbalance in coverage persists. Some black leaders argue that white prejudices and ordinary inertia lie at the core of the problem. Perhaps, but there is also a logistical hurdle: most newspaper and broadcast editors contend that they lack sufficient manpower to cover the spreading ghettos in any depth.

To overcome this difficulty, a minority-oriented operation called the Community News Service (CNS) has been established in New York City. An outgrowth of the Urban Reporting Project launched by the New School for Social Research, and partially supported by a $375,000 Ford Foundation grant, CNS since April has been helping big dailies, radio and TV stations keep in closer touch with the city's black and Puerto Rican communities.

The service has five editorial deskmen, seven full-time reporters and twelve stringers, including four whites. They operate under the experienced hand of George Earner, 40, the first black reporter ever to win the New York Press Association Award (for his account of the 1958 stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King in a department store). Working out of offices on lower Fifth Avenue and in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the staff turns out an average of 5,000 words a day, consisting of five to eight stories plus a calendar of events.

Avoiding Advocacy. Coverage concentrates heavily on housing and education, but also includes politics, poverty and welfare programs, the arts, and trends toward community control. Increasingly the service has been producing stories on such sensitive subjects as the police, the drug scene and private enterprise efforts in the ghetto. CNS was the first to report the occupation of Lincoln Hospital by the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican version of the Black Panthers. A CNS report recently led to a story in the Times about the head of a small clinic who was about to be drafted; his induction, subsequently deferred, would have deprived many poor families on Manhattan's Lower East Side of a source of medical care.

The service steers clear of what Earner calls "blatant advocacy." Says he: "There is advocacy in the sense that we exist at all, but our reporting and editing is strictly professional. There is no pitch or special line." All CNS reports contain a complete listing of sources and their telephone numbers. The data help subscribers to use CNS stories as a starting point for their own coverage. So far the clients have been impressed. Says Marvin Siegel, an assistant metropolitan editor of the Times: "It's the sort of service every big city should have." In one recent three-week period, 71 CNS stories appeared locally.

As with most such projects, CNS has financial worries. Revenues currently run about $10,000 a month v. $28,000 in expenditures, and the Ford grant expires next summer. Still, Editor Earner is guardedly optimistic that the service will become self-sustaining. "Barring mishaps," he says, "we should hang in." To reach a broader market for news of the ghetto, Earner hopes to begin a weekly newsletter aimed at business executives and social service agencies, and he is exploring the possibilities of a school kit dealing with such topics as narcotics and building-code violations. The thirst for improved coverage of minorities seems widespread. Editors, civic organizations and other private groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago have asked CNS about the chances of establishing similar organizations in their cities.

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