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Updated: Monday, December 24, 2007
Published: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 |
Les Payne
1981-1983
Essay by Derrick Z. Jackson
For Les Payne, concerns such as NABJ's bank account, national office and paid staffers were hardly paramount when he served as the fourth president of the all-volunteer, hand-to-mouth organization.
"If members persisted in such administrative minutia as getting their membership cards on time," Payne recalled, "I told them to vote for my opponent. The vanguard group was foundering and I felt it needed at least one more tough-minded, overachieving president with stature in the industry and, as Garvey put it, 'A man of big ideas.'"
That description fit Payne to a tee.
A winner of one Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the heroin trail, Payne had a second Pulitzer for his reporting on South Africa overturned without explanation in 1978. He had just been named Newsday's national editor and he was also a columnist.
Despite a crushing personal workload, Payne adopted an ambitious global agenda.
"I had not really intended to run," Payne said. "I had three kids, this new demanding job, and the column. But our first three presidents, Chuck Stone, Vernon Jarrett and Bob Reid had credibility as journalists and national reputations that gave them the clout to deal with the media titans eyeball to eyeball, steel against steel. I ran because I felt it was important not to lose that authority.
"A lesser journalist in those early years would have meant a lesser president and our demands would have been laughed out the door. I pushed hard for NABJ members to connect with journalists in Africa, the Caribbean and the rest of the diaspora. The bureaucrats could come later."
In addition to putting Africa on the group's agenda, Payne counts these other achievements of his administration:
Achieving 501c tax status for NABJ under the IRS tax code, which allowed contributors to make tax-free donations for the first time. Initiating the NABJ summer internship program by raising $30,000 and placing five students in 1983. Enlisting NABJ in the Ida B. Wells Award program that grants $10,000 in scholarships and each year honors a worthy newspaper executive. Allotting funds for the initial computerization of NABJ's membership roster. Establishing in 1982 the first annual "Most Objectionable News Story." (It is now known as the "Thumbs Down Award.") Inviting the first African diplomat to address NABJ, at the 1982 convention in Detroit.
And, of course, he spoke out, clearly and unflinchingly, on mainstream journalism's shameful failure to detail the assault on African-American interests that took place during Ronald Reagan's first term.
"The media," Payne declared at the 1982 convention, "is not sufficiently reporting about the Reagan administration's assault on blacks and the poor in colleges, high schools, the military, on the assembly lines, the maternity wards, and those standing idly on the boulevards, in the alleys, and on the tiers of the republic's Atticas and San Quentins."
Now at the close of the Clinton years, Payne could say similar things about the media that seem content to correct their own test papers - and NABJ, which, in his view, has grown fat from the compromising milk of the same offending media organizations it was founded to correct.
"We've lost that protest component, the critical impulse that brought us into existence, following the riots of the 1960s," Payne said. "It demanded that newspapers and television stations increase their black numbers, improve their coverage and treat blacks fairly in the newsrooms. We've made progress, albeit insufficient, but I think we've been co-opted."
A prime example: in 1985 NABJ gave its first $2,500 W.E.B. DuBois lectureship to former Boston Globe Editor Thomas Winship - who at the time was serving as an expert witness for the New York Daily News against four African-American journalists who had sued the paper for racial discrimination. With Payne as the plaintiffs' expert witness and strategist, a six-person jury, in Hardy v. the Daily News, convicted the newspaper of promotion discrimination, the only American paper so convicted of racism.
The problematic trend continues to this day.
"We tend to gag on a gnat and swallow a camel," Payne said. "Which is to say that we attack soft targets such as Pat Buchanan, yet misguidedly praise President Clinton despite his corrosive policies with regards to black people. We have to be more discriminating, more mindful of journalism that is racially offensive. We also have to avoid conflicts of interest.
"Some presidents, for example, have used the platform to give their bosses special NABJ awards. We've got to find the nerve to criticize even our own papers when they offend. During my administration, I gave the initial 'Most Objectionable News Story' award to the L.A. Times story on the 'Marauders.' It was a foul and terrible series that stereotyped black and Hispanic gangs. I attacked the series, even though the L.A. Times owned Newsday."
At Newsday, Payne has worked tirelessly to make sure that high potential black talent is promoted fairly. Despite grumbling from Newsday's union and some disgruntled white journalists, Payne at one point had Morris Thompson (now Mexico City correspondent for Knight-Ridder) assigned as his Mexico City bureau chief; Marilyn Milloy, now a senior editor at Heart & Soul magazine, running Newsday's Atlanta bureau; and myself as chief of the paper's New England bureau.
Nearly two decades after his presidency, the independence of NABJ weighs heavily on Payne's mind. He believes that both the organization and its members must work with a passion on a dual track to become great journalists without neglecting group interests.
One potential step, said Payne, would be building a NABJ clearinghouse for creative action, "where someone like a Charles Ogletree (the Harvard University law professor) could come in and listen to substantive cases of racial unfairness." He also wants a legal defense fund for members who must resort to civil suits to redress their grievances.
"We can't exist by simply persuading people to be nice," admonished Payne, who is the inaugural professor for the Dave Laventhol Chair that Times Mirror Inc. endowed for $1 million at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
"The media will remain at rest on the matter of fairness unless it is acted upon by an external force such as the courts. Now, you can't sue everybody, but we have to pose an alternative plan of action to these organizations that we petition to do better. Most of our journalists are still working stiffs, beat reporters, on-camera reporters, mid-level editors, who are often intimidated by the structure they face. It's difficult to protest against bosses who have to teach you the craft."
However, Payne insists, fairness demands it.
"The country is so deep in its denial about race that these companies don't seem to have a clue about what constitutes racial fairness in the city room. NABJ must forego politeness and force the necessary changes by whatever means. Creating true fairness is not going to be easy. However, it is the impulse that brought NABJ into existence and we need to spit on our hands and get on with it again."
Derrick Z. Jackson, an associate editor and columnist at The Boston Globe, is a former president of the Boston Association of Black Journalists. |
Foreword
