Read on Twitter
It's come to my attention that some people have interpreted my tweet about the word "reckoning" as a shady subtweet @WesleyLowery 's op-ed today. 1) It wasn't. 2) That would be cruel & unfair to Brother Wes, whom I love 3) Simply put, Wes' column is right: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black-journalists-coronavirus.html
What's Wes right about? There needs to be a radical re-imagining of how daily cops reporting is done in journalism. It's long overdue, and it'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'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' wrong, suspects previous arrest records were wrong. Fortuantely, I'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't care about all of the "police said" attributions you'd add to shift the blame from the fact that you couldn't report it fully. (4/
Fortunately reporters on the day shift would often re-report what deadlines simply didn'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)
