The Inquirer’s look at itself ignores the paper’s history of exposing racial injustice | Opinion

As a journalist who has spent much of my professional career reporting about social injustice, I welcomed The Philadelphia Inquirer’s bold decision to commission and publish a critique of the paper’s own shortfalls in hiring and promoting journalists of color, especially African American journalists, in a city that is now 40% Black.

But as I dove into the 6,000-word “Black City, White Paper,” my enthusiasm turned into deep disappointment. Any story is only as strong as the reporting legs it stands on. In this case, those legs begin to collapse on careful and fair-minded scrutiny.

No one could disagree that The Inquirer, like most news organizations, could have done a better job of hiring, mentoring, and promoting journalists of color. And you would have to be out of touch not to see the insensitivity of the “Buildings Matter Too” headline that ran in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But The Inquirer’s story goes on to make a broad claim that the newspaper has ignored the interests of the city’s African American community. In her apology to the Black community, issued the day after the story’s online debut, Elizabeth H. Hughes, the paper’s publisher and CEO, made the even broader claim that not only has The Inquirer not served the Black community, it has also harmed the Black community.

» READ MORE: Black City, White Paper | The Philadelphia Inquirer has grappled with racism for decades. Is it too late to change?

These sweeping claims are overly broad, shamelessly shortsighted, and totally ignore The Inquirer’s long and distinguished history in exposing racial injustice in Philadelphia. Such watchdog reporting is journalism’s highest calling. But nowhere in “Black City, White Paper” are these investigative stories, which are costly and time-consuming to produce, even given passing mention.

The most glaring omission is the failure to cite, much less to describe, William K. Marimow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on police violence, including the use of K-9 dogs to attack innocent African Americans. Ironically, Marimow’s reporting exposed the very kind of policing problems that, decades later, would lead to the Black Lives Matter movement. Although Marimow, The Inquirer’s former chief editor, was interviewed twice for the story, none of his observations was included in the piece.

In addition to Marimow’s work, The Inquirer analysis failed to cite scores of other stories that exposed racial injustice in Philadelphia. These include the paper’s in-depth reporting over many years on grossly inadequate state funding for the city’s predominantly Black public schools; a probing look at inner-city life that punctured the myth of the “welfare queen,” a stereotype that has long dogged Black women on public assistance; and a data-driven examination of racial discrimination in the city’s overwhelmingly white building trades unions, a story that took me months to report and write.

Despite the enormous space devoted to “Black Lives, White Paper,” the story reported little that was new, but it did expose two previously unreported examples of deeply offensive racial name-calling by desk editors. One Black reporter was called “boy” and another “Aunt Jemima.” These odious remarks were made decades ago and each was an isolated incident. But they were presented in a way that gave the misimpression that racist rhetoric characterized prevailing culture in The Inquirer newsroom. It did not.

» READ MORE: From the publisher of The Inquirer: An apology to Black Philadelphians and journalists

The Inquirer’s look at itself also glossed over the economic crisis facing local newspapers as they strive to hire more minority journalists at a time when newspaper jobs are in steep decline. Since 2004, some 1,800 newspapers have folded, including 60 dailies. Nationwide, newspaper employment of editorial staff has plummeted to just 30,000, down a whopping 57% from 2008. The Inquirer once employed some 680 reporters, editors, and other editorial staff. Today, that number is down to about 200. Even the best-laid plans to diversify the staff falter when confronted with economic forces that shrink the size of the pie rather than enlarging it.

While “Black City, White Paper” shines a light on the disparity between the racial mix of the city’s population compared with the racial mix of newsroom staff, it fails to note that The Inquirer’s mission in the Philadelphia region was never just to cover the city, but also to cover the large and populous suburban counties in Pennsylvania and South Jersey that surround the city. These suburban areas are home to 75% of The Inquirer’s readers, and they provide the revenue required to cover the city.

At the same time, The Inquirer’s lengthy takeout failed to make any mention of The Inquirer’s sister paper, the Philadelphia Daily News, whose mission was always to focus on the city, not the suburbs, and whose stories took readers inside the daily lives of city residents of every color, including those of African heritage.

“These sweeping claims are overly broad, shamelessly shortsighted, and totally ignore The Inquirer’s long and distinguished history in exposing racial injustice in Philadelphia.”

The story gave the Rev. Mark Tyler, a powerful figure among the city’s Black clergy, a platform to sound off about how The Inquirer doesn’t matter to “regular” Black folk and how it should be razed and rebuilt from scratch. But The Inquirer story made no effort to examine his sweeping claim by interviewing or surveying a significant number of “regular” African American residents, whatever “regular” is taken to mean. Nor did the story reach out to interview other prominent Black leaders, some of whom might have a very different view.

Taken together, these reporting problems turn what might have been a thoughtful analysis of a critically important topic into a biased screed that presents a distorted portrait of a newspaper that has served the Black community in myriad ways, including as a watchdog to hold the police and other city institutions accountable for racial discrimination.

Instead of approaching the story with an open mind, the reporter appears to have determined his prevailing narrative before he began his reporting and then cherry-picked the sources, statistics, and anecdotes to support the narrative. Anything that fell outside of the predetermined storyline didn’t make it into the piece. Even worse, his editor let him get away with it.

Huntly Collins has spent more than four decades in journalism, including nine years as a reporter at the Portland Oregonian, a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, 18 years at The Inquirer, and 12 years as a journalism professor at La Salle University.