a Minnesota News Council Forum
August 29, 2001

After the News Council’s public forum on race and sports reporting, held at Macalester College at the end of August, the Star Tribune’s Jay Weiner, who had served on a panel, said:

"I was startled by the level of mistrust for the news media among blacks in the audience, especially middle-class and middle-aged blacks. I wish every one of my colleagues had been there to experience it."

From left: Irv Cross, Macalester College Athletic Director, Richard Lapchick, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, and Mahmoud El Kati, Macalester College history professor.

That’s an important observation, and Weiner went back to the paper and told his colleagues and editors about it.

The discussion at Macalester centered on the way news stories about black people are often framed. Most speakers agreed that, even though racist language does not appear in contemporary news and sports stories, the framing of stories too often reinforces racial stereotypes.

The forum took shape based on complaints that the mainstream news media treated Clem Haskins, then the Gophers basketball coach, and Dennis Green, the Vikings head coach — both of them black — differently from the way the media would have treated them if they had been white.

Unfortunately, the sports writers at whom most of the criticism has been aimed were not there to speak for themselves. One of them, Bob Sansevere, a columnist for the Pioneer Press, said this to the News Council director a few days earlier:
"If I wrote any story differently because a coach was black, that would be racism."

Members of the public participated in the discussion.

The Star Tribune columnist Patrick Reusse, a frequent and severe critic of Dennis Green’s refusal to talk openly with the media, has acknowledged that he and fellow sports columnists dislike Green, but not because he is black:
"We all agree that Green is a jerk, just like Bobby Knight (a white coach) is a jerk."

One forum speaker, Richard Lapchick, former head of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said that fired black coaches have a harder time getting another job after a run of negative news stories than do white coaches in the same circumstances. That raises the question of whether the news media should downplay negative stories about blacks.

All of the black speakers agreed that the media should report negative news about blacks, but should take the time and space to place those stories in context, including references to whites who have been in trouble.
Some of the black citizens who asked for the forum said they believed the media were out to get Haskins, to knock off a black authority figure. Most whites have a hard time understanding that belief; they say Haskins was idolized by most sports fans in this overwhelmingly white state.

But blacks at the forum said the media, as surrogates for the predominantly white society, refuse to accept the independent stance of a strong black man such as Dennis Green. Some whites agreed with many blacks that sports writers (most of them white) seem petulant in their portrayal of Green because he refuses to talk to them the way they want him to.

Gary Gilson, News Council executive director, introduced the program.

McKinley Boston, the former Gophers athletic director and then a vice president for student affairs, has criticized the local sports media for years for their treatment of black athletes. At the forum he said he had never seen the media so angry as when the Vikings owner, Red McCombs, signed Green to a long-term contract. Again, Boston and others emphasized what they saw as the refusal of whites to accept a black man who takes a strong stand in his own behalf.

If the discussion was flawed by the absence of columnists whose work was being criticized, it did reveal the depths of pain that many blacks feel about the media’s portrayal of their lives and of the lives of their heroes.

If some whites feel that these complaints lack logic, then maybe the best thing they can do is follow Jay Weiner’s advice: Come, listen and feel the pain. Learn the history, understand the context. Then, report all the news, in context, and explain its meaning.
The News Council seldom receives complaints from black people. We have asked why, and the answer is consistent: No matter what the News Council may say about a complaint, black citizens don’t have any trust that it will make a bit of difference to the media.

If you were running a news outlet, wouldn’t that trouble you?

Panelists for the forum included: Richard Lapchick, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University; Mahmoud El Kati, Macalester College hisory professor; LeRoy Gardner, University of Minnesota instructor and former Gophers basketball player; McKinley Boston, former University of Minnesota athletic director and university administrator; Shelly Rodgers, University of Minnesota journalism professor of new media; Don Shelby, WCCO-TV and Radio anchor; and Jay Weiner, Star Tribune sports reporter.