Good News

Journalists often seem obsessed with the sensational--war protests, riots, burning ghettos, crime, immorality, drugs--all the nation's fractures and cancers. Why is so little ever said or broadcast about quiet progress, small decencies, the things that are "right with America"?

The text seems to be taken from Spiro Agnew. Ironically, one of the nation's most effective black leaders has now made the same criticism. In the more incendiary days of black militance, says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, head of Chicago's Operation Breadbasket, the nation's press was like an electrocardiogram, recording every spasm. Recently Jackson fought unsuccessfully through the courts to win a place on the ballot in a mayoral election against Chicago's Richard Daley. Currently Operation Breadbasket and other black organizations are laboring all over the U.S. to give black Americans an increased measure of economic control of their lives. And journalists, Jackson justly complains, have largely neglected these legal and less flamboyant, but in the long run potentially more significant movements.

Only half humorously, Jackson argues that newspapers, magazines and television should give over at least 11% of their total news coverage to blacks, a figure reflecting the racial proportion in America.

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