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ALL THE LIES FIT TO PRINT
Posted: December 31, 2003
By Shayla Bennett
The New York Times is under fire again for fabrications in its stories. This time the accusations come from former Times metro stringer Milton Allimadi in his book "The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created a Racist Image of Africa," in which he charges the newspaper with using racial stereotypes and interjecting racially motivated fabrications into its coverage of Africa.
The allegations result from extensive research Allimadi performed for an academic thesis while a student at the Columbia School of Journalism. The book was released independently a month before the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal and almost a year before the Times' latest reinvestigation of the Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to its correspondent Walter Duranty, who used his reports to cover up the famine Josef Stalin created in Ukraine to starve the kulaks into submitting to collectivized agriculture.
In "The Hearts of Darkness," Allimadi charges the late two-time Pulitzer Prize reporter Homer Bigart, famous as a Times war correspondent, with "concocting" pygmies to place into his reports from Ghana. Times editors also are alleged to have inserted "fabricated tribal scenarios" into Lloyd M. Garrison's articles on the Nigerian civil war, as well as "editorial insertions of stereotypes and fabrications" into Joseph Lelyveld's articles from South Africa during the 1980s.
The book probes into the paper's archives and examines correspondence between reporters and editors assigned to coverage in Africa. Allimadi cites memos from the Times archives as evidence for his claims against the paper.
As editor of the weekly Black Star, which was founded with support from actor Bill Cosby, Allimadi is interested in the general racial consensus of various periods in U.S. history, especially those ranging from the 1800s to 1950s, a time when the United States either practiced slavery or enforced racial segregation.
But he has looked most closely at the correspondence of the Times from the 1980s to the present – a time when the United States was more than 120 years removed from the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and more than 30 years from when Brown v. Board of Education overturned the 1896 separate-but-equal decision of Plessy v. Ferguson. After Times senior editor William Borders reviewed it he told Insight he would "recommend [the book] to anyone interested in how the American press used to cover Africa." And Allimadi tells Insight that he has a letter signed by Borders and dated Sept. 29, admitting questionable language in the paper's reporting on Africa. Responding to the paper's indiscriminate use of the words "tribe, tribesman and tribal," Borders wrote, "We should know better."
Allimadi reminds that, "People need to realize that past racist practices still condition and influence contemporary reporting." In his chapter "The New York Times as Apartheid's Apologists," Allimadi explains that when the media use the word "tribal" in references to Africa it has "the implication that they are irrational and have no logical or legitimate contributing factors" to explain their behavior. In fact, he tells Insight, while researching the newspaper's archives he came across a Times Style & Usage manual dated 1964 that recommended against using the term.
Kwamina Panford, chairman of African-American studies at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks that tribal explanations may just be laziness. He tells Insight that continual reference to Africans as tribal is an "easy way to describe conflict in the continent instead of doing a good job and reporting the details." He says "tribal terms represent the incorrect exotic, dark and disparaging view of Africa." In Allimadi's view, this becomes a cliché as "reporters reference old articles from papers like the Times and books like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness."
Allimadi sees "The Hearts of Darkness" as his rebuttal to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which Allimadi refers to as "just a collection of the most racist depictions of Africa."
"My sense of frustration with the derogatory terms used to describe Africans led me to choose this topic for my thesis. I wanted to trace the origin of control that contemporary Western writers followed," he says. Of course, the Times is not the only establishment journal made to suffer Allimadi's perp walk. But while Time, National Geographic and Newsweek are all named among the offenders, the Times remains the focal point, referenced in every chapter. As Allimadi explains, "Since I had access to their archives it allowed me to delve deeper into their reporting, plus the Times is simply the main example because it is so predominant in mainstream media. If they change their practices it may penetrate down to other media – especially since so many see the Times as holy writ."
Recently the Times named Daniel Okrent to the position of public editor, where he functions as the newspaper's ombudsman. Okrent was appointed on Oct. 28 to address questions and comments of readers about articles published in the paper.
Allimadi , on the other hand, has appointed himself an unofficial ombudsman for the Times in the area of racism. As he puts it: "I believe the New York Times owes its black readers an apology for its ugly African coverage of the past and an apology for the concoctions by editors to create and perpetuate the racist imagery, such as the case with Lloyd Garrison, the West Africa correspondent when the Times manufactured 'tribal' scenes and inserted them into stories."
It is unclear if Allimadi's claims will be addressed by the new Times public editor. Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for the Times, says that, "As a matter of public policy, we will not discuss what the public editor is planning to write before he does so."
In a statement to Insight, senior editor Borders says, "I told Mr. Allimadi, most of the sections of the book deal with the New York Times report on practices of three or four decades ago. Happily, we have improved our sophistication and knowledge about Africa, improvements that are evident in our coverage of the continent now." While Allimadi acknowledges that many of his complaints are based on articles from earlier days, he says he does not see why his complaints are any less worthy than those about the 1930s reporting of Duranty. And he recognizes that the Times has improved its coverage of Africa, crediting reporters such as Nori Onishi, Somini Sengupta and Howard French.
"He called our coverage in our pages excellent, which pleased me very much, given the obvious depth of his knowledge and interest," says Borders.
But Allimadi still believes the paper has a long way to go. As he notes, "The Times has not published an apology for the distorted African coverage even after I brought it to the attention of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., [the Times'] publisher. That means that the Times either does not care about its racist depictions of Africa or that the apologies that accompanied the Blair scandal were simply for PR purposes."
Shayla Bennett is an associate reporter for Insight magazine. ###
Review: The Hearts Of Darkness
THE HEARTS OF DARKNESS
Trade Paperback; 85 Pages In The Hearts of Darkness investigative journalist and Columbia Journalism School graduate Milton Allimadi not only unearths, through painstaking and old-fashioned reportorial digging, research, and acute analysis, old (and not so old) examples of shocking, if not surprising, racist confections, slanders, stereotypes, and even journalistic conspiracies, most dramatically at the venerated "paper of record", The New York Times; but he also, as a journalist and an African-American, at first unwittingly and then crusadingly, becomes himself an actor in his own story of fighting to tell a true narrative against forces with a self-interest in retaining control of the way the story is told.
Going back as far as the Greek "first historian" Herodotus who in the 5th century BC made perhaps the original published essentialist racist argument when asserting that "Ethiopians have black seed....like their skin" through the sensationalistic and bloodcurdling tales of explorers such as Sir Richard Burton, pseudoscientific eugenics in 17th century England, through self-exculpatory tales of murderous cannibals dispensed by colonizing imperialists during the halcyon years of the British Empire (which were also used, of course, to justify and popularize slavery in the United States and other colonies), Allimadi provides an historical and critical background of how the nature of Africans, African-Americans, and indeed, the continent of Africa itself, has been demonized, patronized, and made up out of whole cloth for the most venal of reasons: To justify the most inhuman and immoral of oppression; to manipulate and form public opinion and public policy; to distract other oppressed groups by giving them a fantastical "subhuman" species to fear and mock; and also, simply, to increase profits by conflating histrionic, ridiculous, sensationalistic narratives which appealed to the lowest most vulgar tastes and prejudices of the reading public--and, as a bonus, legitimized and reinforced their own (often denied) racism.
First began as a Graduate Research Paper in 1991, Allimadi's award-winning expose did not reach the public until last year. The odyssey of its polite repression and gentle conspiracy is one more example of the attempt to control and distort the discourse about Africans, African-Americans, and Africa itself, both to retain privilege, to shape and at the same time pander to public opinion and policy, and to self-justify.
Doing research the hard way, in crumbling files and stacks of papers in the NYT archives, Allimadi uncovered damning (and truly disgusting, even if you're used to this kind of stuff) documents and correspondences from NYT African reporters to editors from as early as the 1950s, including from the Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent Homer Bigart to Times Foreign Editor Emmanuel Freedman describing African liberation and anti-colonialist hero Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in the most inflammatory, racist, and indeed, grotesque terms, as well as following the long tradition described by Allimadi in his historical background as depicting Africa and the African people as menacing cartoons, dangerous and buffoonish at the same time. These descriptions--sentiments and expressions for which both correspondents seemed to congratulate themselves and each other, as well as their readers--later found their way into the "paper of record", during a time when anti-imperialist revolution swept Africa, and infuriated and panicked the colonialists--one more attempted justification for continuing oppression for "their own good"--meaning the good of the oppressed, and the oppressors.
At first mysteriously, the paper exposing this material was dropped from its promised publication in The Columbia Journalism Review, and Allimadi never did succeed in getting the Times to exactly take responsibility for the material. Allimadi's tone throughout is clear, straight-forward, sometimes droll, and never politically correct: He makes sure to state that he is not suggesting Africa or Africans be canonized, just not demonized. The subject of just what is "fiction" and what is "fact" becomes an intriguing subtext, as Allimadi discusses such things as the paternalistic fiction and "fictionalized" memoirs about her African plantation by Isak Dinesen, and the way the supposedly scientifically factual "Magazine of the National Geographic Society" (but actually designed to appeal to the sensationalistically racist and even prurient interests of a bourgeois readership) actually plagiarized passages (or at least heavily borrowed) from Joseph Conrad's notorious "The Heart of Darkness" the original modern culprit in the portrayal of a sinister, "tribal" Africa, and of the "noble savage". Apparently, it wasn't enough to turn the real lives of people and continents into fiction presented as fact--actual fiction was shamelessly plundered too.
Although the Times editors to whom Allimadi spoke brushed off the material discovered as "old stuff", the author goes on to present distressing characterizations as late as the apartheid struggles of the '80s, and beyond. Allimadi quotes Michael Kaufman, once an East African correspondent at the Times and at the time of the quote in 1992 its deputy foreign editor as calling this sensationalist approach to Africa "ooga-booga" reporting and "titillating".
As Kaufman suggested, the real stories in Africa--as he said ecology, Islam (the historically African-related demonization of which, so pertinent at this moment in history, Allimadi also explores extensively), and as we know, naturally, economics, are just too complex, not just to appeal to a "general readership" but also for the relatively untutored reporters sent to Africa.
In times of unrest, of general social and economic hardship, those who shape the national narrative have historically used racism and the demonization of Africa to divide and conquer the economically hard-pressed; to justify public policies that should be causing moral and political outrage; to entertain and to distract; to sell papers, and to feel good about themselves. At no time than this of media conglomerates, embedded reporters, and the blurring of propaganda and news has it been more important to read and feel the message of this book. ###
Iventing Africa When New York Times reporters such as Lloyd Garrison in the 1960s and Joseph Lelyveld in the 1980s filed news stories from Africa, editors at the Times routinely fabricated scenes and manufactured quotes for their articles. In some instances, the foreign editor colluded with the reporter to manufacture scenes that they believed would conform to the racist stereotypical biases that U.S. readers had come to expect in reports from Africa.
istory of European colonial rule and exploitation in Africa. During the rule of King Leopold II, an estimated 10 million or more Africans were exterminated and countless more permanently maimed or disfigured, all in the quest for wealth. African slave laborers who did not deliver their designated quota of ivory and rubber had their hands severed, to motivate other slackers. Yet Bigart and Freedman's utmost concern was to find pygmies to malign.
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