• Big media has failed black journalists, specifically, by siloing them in “stereotypical roles—sport, entertainment and especially what is euphemistically called urban affairs.” These twin effects, according to French, “strongly but silently [condition] how Americans understand their own country and the rest of the world.” This is an important piece—one worthy of the ongoing dialogue around newsroom diversity.
• Indeed Glenn Loury made it quite clear in one of his more illuminating discussions of Between The World And Me: If you’re riding high on The New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list #1, 2, 3 and if you’re up there for a couple of months you’re selling hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of copies of a text and you’re getting royalties of, I don’t know, it depends on the contract three, four, five bucks a pop.
• Last week, when corresponding with a 22-year-old Donald Trump voter who saw the billionaire’s rise as an opportunity to strike a blow against political correctness, I was asked why I believe Hillary Clinton to be a preferable candidate, despite my regarding her as a corrupt, untrustworthy person with poor foreign-policy judgment, and my repeated warnings to Democrats that they’d be foolish to nominate her.
• I replied that for all Hillary Clinton’s flaws, she is a known quantity who is very likely to govern much as her husband did in the 1990s—the United States under her stewardship is extremely likely to remain among the most prosperous, free places to live not just in the world today, but in all human history—so it would be imprudent to reject her for a bigoted, attention-seeking demagogue with an impulsive personality and no domestic- or foreign-policy experience.
• A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an event the rarity of which ranks somewhere between the Transit of Venus and a life-affirming debate on Facebook: A fountain in New York’s Madison Square Park had been drained and cleaners were hard at work collecting the change at the bottom.
• Big media has failed black journalists, specifically, by siloing them in “stereotypical roles—sport, entertainment and especially what is euphemistically called urban affairs.” These twin effects, according to French, “strongly but silently [condition] how Americans understand their own country and the rest of the world.” This is an important piece—one worthy of the ongoing dialogue around newsroom diversity.
