Read on Twitter
It& #39;s come to my attention that some people have interpreted my tweet about the word "reckoning" as a shady subtweet @WesleyLowery & #39;s op-ed today. 1) It wasn& #39;t. 2) That would be cruel & unfair to Brother Wes, whom I love 3) Simply put, Wes& #39; column is right: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black-journalists-coronavirus.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/2...
What& #39;s Wes right about? There needs to be a radical re-imagining of how daily cops reporting is done in journalism. It& #39;s long overdue, and it& #39;s been something reporters - particularly black reporters - have complained about for years. I know this because I am one of them. (1/
Almost a decade ago, my old news organization asked me to placed on the night cops beat. I didn& #39;t want to do it because deadlines were stiffening, newsprint was shrinking and all that led to an uncomfortable reliance on arrest reports and official statements from cops. (2/
The problem with those reports were they would be thrown out if they came from any other source. Names spelled wrong, victims address& #39; wrong, suspects previous arrest records were wrong. Fortuantely, I& #39;d catch them. But some times, entire narratives were wrong. (3/
And nothing was worse than getting a call the next day from a family who didn& #39;t care about all of the "police said" attributions you& #39;d add to shift the blame from the fact that you couldn& #39;t report it fully. (4/
Fortunately reporters on the day shift would often re-report what deadlines simply didn& #39;t allow me to do the time to do. But I felt like the job was journalistically ethical but morally dubious. Night cops reporting almost led to me giving up on news reporting altogether. (5/
I told my editors that if I had to do the job for more than a year, I was going to leave the paper. By the 364th day, they knew I had a job offer and acceptance in grad school in hands, and gave me a new beat. But here is what stung: (6/
In the end, an editor was called a dutiful but not extraordinary night cops reporter. It was true. The editor said it was also because they learned I was "insulted by the position." That was not true. (7/
I had serious journalistic discomfort about what I was doing. I rarely got the time to scrutinize the stories I was quickly writing to make sure that the cops were saying the right thing. I told them the job was off. Instead I got called a diva (which I may be, but not for this)
