The “Race Beat”

Two weeks ago, I visited Little Rock, Ark., with my parents. The day after visiting Bill Clinton’s presidential library, we drove to a more suburban part of the city to see Little Rock Central High School and the accompanying little museum.

Little Rock Central High School.

Little Rock Central High School.

After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, integration began in the nation’s schools. In 1957, nine African-American students attempted to attend Central High. Protests, threats and harassment were rampant, and Gov. Orval Faubus attempted to keep the students from the school. In the end, President Eisenhower had to call in the 101st Airborne to protect the students, while federalizing the state’s National Guard.

The museum had the displays you’d expect. A history of discrimination, photos and audio of protests and sit-ins. Video of news broadcasts and press conferences. It was a display in the middle of the museum, however, that caught my attention. This display was simply called “The Press.” It displayed headlines and front pages from the Little Rock crisis, and explained how in many cases, throngs of reporters and photographers took the brunt of protesters’ anger, acting as a buffer for the nine students.

I just started reading a book, “The Race Beat,” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. I found it in the site’s museum. It’s a fascinating story about journalists’ role in the civil rights movement. In many cases, it’s not that these journalists “took sides.” It’s that they bothered to cover the movement and the inequality at all. It’s that they allowed civil rights leaders the opportunity to present their cases. The cause also showed up in staff editorials, when progressive editors, both black and white, called for change. It’s a powerful reminder of a free press’s necessary role in a democracy. One can’t exist without the other.

Reading about this time period reminds me of lessons I learned while in school. Journalists don’t exist in a vacuum. We’re not mindless automans, reading the weather and sports agate like robots. I also learned that while we should always strive for fair coverage, we should never think that fair automatically means equal. Or that equal automatically means fair.

Righteous Indignation on the BBC

No later than June 2010, the UK will have a general election. In Britain, there are three major parties. Labour, led by current Prime Minister Gordon Brown; David Cameron’s Conservatives; and the third-wheel Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg.

While these three parties dominate Parliament, some fringe parties have taken hold, mostly because of voter apathy and general discontent with Labour and Conservative policies in particular. One of these is the British National Party, or the BNP. The BNP doesn’t hold any seats in Parliament, but has a seat in the London Assembly, seats in smaller councils and two seats in the European Union Parliament. One of these seats went to BNP leader Nick Griffin.

To say the BNP is controversial is putting it mildly. For one thing, its membership is limited to “indigenous Caucasians.” Party members, including Griffin, have a history of Holocaust denial. Its early anti-Semitic views have been replaced with anti-Muslim sentiment. The party is strongly anti-immigration. Its economic policies are protectionist, and reject free-market capitalism. It is, however, gaining ground with white Britons who are gravitating toward the BNP out of either desperation or protest against mainstream parties.

Given the recent electoral success of the BNP, the BBC invited Griffin to be a panelist on Question Time on Thursday. For my American audience, it’s a mix of Meet the Press and a Q&A-style town hall meeting. Some highlights are in the video below.

While I find the BNP’s platform repugnant, equally repugnant — nay, more repugnant — was the protest that stuffed up West London. People carried signs calling Griffin a “fascist” and said the BBC shouldn’t have had him on. I find it ironic that people try to fight “fascism” by engaging in the very fascist-like practice of trying to silence speech they don’t like. If the guy’s ideas are that godawful, that’s bound to come out during the program (er, programme). No one needs them to protect society from big, bad Nick Griffin. The British electorate can watch him and decide for themselves what to think.

If you’re opposed to Griffin and the BNP’s policies, you should want those ideas to come to light and for people to see in the harsh light of day how offensive they are. Keeping people like Griffin from stating their platforms only makes them free-speech martyrs and gives them a mystique they don’t deserve.

The Fighting Beckets

One of the first things I learned about British universities was that they don’t have mascots. The Cambridge Bulldogs don’t square off against the Oxford Crimson. One of my friends at the University of Reading asked me, “What’s that big bird thing?” when he saw a photo of me with Big Jay. This fact of life seemed to amuse my father.

Candle marking the site of St. Thomas Becket's murder.

Candle marking the site of St. Thomas Becket's murder.

My dad asked me what the University of Kent’s mascot would be. We settled on the Fighting Beckets, a nod to St. Thomas Becket, who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. It’s kind of hard to talk about Canterbury without mentioning the massive cathedral.

I’ve seen my share of European churches — St. Patrick’s, York Minster, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, St. Stephen’s, Notre Dame, the Berliner Dom, Florence’s Duomo — but Canterbury is special.

In July 2011, I’ll have my graduation ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral. After my raucous graduation from KU last May, it’ll be a big change in tone. The campus of my graduate school, the University of Kent, is right up the road from the cathedral. It’s daunting to have such an important even in my life tied to a building and a city that’s centuries old.

Interior of Canterbury Cathedral.

Interior of Canterbury Cathedral.

I’m excited to go back to Canterbury (I visited three years ago when I studied abroad in Reading) and explore it more. I’m lucky that I’ll get to attend the school I wanted, and be only about half an hour away from London. It’s worth sitting out a year to have that experience.

And I know that whenever I go into the centre of Canterbury, I’ll be able to look up and see the cathedral.