As Boyd?s generation of young black men began to trickle into the Times, it became clear that Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor, had no idea what to do with them. He generally stuck them on the so-called urban-disintegration beat and let them languish there. Though theTimes of the seventies was ?trying hard,? said Ron Smothers, who left the company last summer after 35 years, the paper was ?unable to see black reporters beyond being black ? Race was the water we swam in.?
Minority journalists, then as now, were up against an all-white managerial tier that mentored people just like themselves: the original affirmative action. As black reporters stalled at the bottom rungs, the notion hardened that they belonged there. (Latin and Asian journalists weren?t even on Rosenthal?s radar.) ?It?s the kind of stuff we called institutional racism,? Smothers said. ?And that?s why affirmative action was needed?not because we needed the leg up, [but] because those guys needed to put a blindfold on and just do it on merit.?
Paul Delaney became the Times? first black Washington correspondent, in 1969; he would make it to senior editor, but no higher. ?There was an elitism at the Times,? he said, a ?belief that there was no black as good as any of the white reporters and editors.? Through the eighties, the upper newsroom echelons remained lily-white. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., then deputy publisher, conceded that his paper was ?miserable to blacks.? It was hard to imagine anyone piercing the ivory bastion of the masthead. Then Rosenthal was deposed, and the old-boy network began to quake.
Note: While I have written of Jayson Blair vis a vis Byron Barnett's Defamation snafu (Byron: Don't trust those reckless white reporters at the Herald, you know they get sued early and often) with Joanna Marinova I had forgotten about Gerald Boyd (RIP) until Bob Holt, III raised his name at last week's 2011 NENPA Conference and Trade show:
Here's the Herald/WDHD problem according to an EOPSS Senior Staff member email:
"The ticket didn't say anything about sexual acts. The officer wrote it was dismissed. This statement needs to be put out because no one is speaking out. The administration should have responded that these allegations are clearly not true. [KingCast note: The Governor has said nothing despite promising me in video that he "did not want a prison system shrouded in mystery" and on another occasion that he was going to "put it to bed." It's all in my YouTube video just run a name search... perhaps that's why I get"The Look."]
What we have here is a crooked cop who is not only presenting a lie, but also snuck the information out of the institution which is violating CORI laws and CORI information. If the Herald did their research they would have seen that it was all dismissed. It was the Herald's and Jessica Van Sack's Responsibility as a reporter to look into all the facts. Jessica didn't. She ran the story. So either she got a forged report or she intentionally ran it."
