Gabrielle Settles

sett@wayne.edu
313-401-1463
Journalism Book Feature Article
Due: 6/14/16

In her book, Uncovering Race: A Black Journalists Story of Reporting and

Reinvention, Amy Alexander gives a tough-minded look at the treatment of ethnic
minorities both in newsrooms and in the reporting that comes out of them, within
the changing media landscape, according to a review on Amazons website.

Alexander opens her book with the story of when she and a still photographer drove
250 miles southbound from Fresno to cover the Los Angeles riots in 1992 for their
newspaper, the Fresno Bee.
A furniture store and adjacent apartment building were ablaze, their broken
windows framing angry lashes of yellow-orange flame that whipped up into the dark
sky. Firefighters, evidently stunned by reports that they were being shot at, had
positioned their trucks between themselves and the crowd in order to work the fire,
Alexander wrote.

Alexander wrote that when her stories were published in the Fresno Bee, it had
been edited to include words with demeaning value that portrayed the angry
residents in a bad light.

To realize that I had risked life and limb amid the shooting and burning that had
transpired in LA and had managed to deliver compelling, unbiased stories about the

angry residents, the frustrated business owners who lost property, and other
aspects of the conflagration, only to have a white male editor sitting safely in the
newsroom hundreds of miles away muck up my reporting with words like savage
and rampaging, well... I was deflated, Alexander wrote.

Alexander wrote that she knew black women were more likely than white people to
have challenges in the media field.
As the only reporter on the Metropolitan staff who was black and a woman, she said,
she realized it was up to her to make sure that her journalistic integrity was
protected.

Bill Kovach, author of The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know
and The Public Should Expect, wrote that Alexanders analysis of the failure to
properly integrate news staff and the effect is has on the public couldnt have come
at a better time.

It reminds consumers today that though they now have access to an integrated
rainbow of sources of news online, the responsibility now shifts to them to integrate
the sources of news and opinion they aggregate, wrote Kovach.

Alexanders career landed her in places around the country, writing for newspapers
like the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. (ND)
Alexander wrote that she was convinced to become a journalist when she was hired
by the San Francisco Examiner and The Examiners city editor, Tim Reiterman
shared with her his story of covering a the 1978 mass murder/ suicide of members
of the Peoples Temple that cult leader Jim Jones had led from the San Francisco area
to Jonestown, Guyana, Alexander said.

The majority of those who died were African American, including hundreds of
elderly parishioners, babies, and children, Alexander wrote. When published
reports of the massacre-some written for the Examiner by Reiterman-first reached
San Francisco, the gruesome images of hundreds of bloated bodies laying in the dirt
under the merciless sun had fascinated and terrified me, a fifteen-year-old
sophomore at Abraham Lincoln High School in the Sunset district.
While covering the story, Reiterman said he was shot and nearly died from his
injury, Alexander wrote.

Alexander said Reitmans willingness to cover the massacre of black people who
would not be able to tell their own story convinced her to become a journalist.

As Alexanders career grew, she said, it became clear to her that there was a high
price to be paid by some journalists of color.

Alexander said it didnt make sense that in a place like the San Francisco Bay area,
a place filled with political liberalism and cultural hipness, that editorial staffs of
mainstream news organizations were nearly all white.

Alexander wrote that journalists who were young and people of color were not given
as much of a chance to join the white editorial staffs that were in mainstream
media.

In the year 2010, Alexander wrote, these young journalists are now being given a
small chance.

At the same time, a quiet hiring boom was underway in some traditional media
organizations and at new online-only outlets: young, relatively inexperienced
journalists who had no fear of gadgetry were being brought on at salaries much
lower than even the entry-level rates, Alexander said.