ACCORDING TO THE GUY ON the left, Jena is a wonderful place to live for blacks and whites. Craig Franklin, who works at the Jena Times, says the media ran with a great story about 6 oppressed kids. But he says that the version of events that circulated around the country, bringing protests to far off places (including the TU campus), were wrong.
"The media got most of the basics wrong," he wrote in the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday. "In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice."
Read his story. Do you agree? The guy to the left does.
Who is right here? Is the guy from the Jena newspaper just trying to make his town look good, or did the media really mess this up? Is this good journalism or a spin job? Did the media do a Richard Jewell job on the town of Jena, as Herb Denenberg suggests? Or is the Jena Times writer a good old boy who can't recognize racism in his own backyard?
Is there any way to ever resolve these questions? Is there any way to make sure the media gets the entire truth next time?
2 comments:
At this point, I don't think anybody is going to know exactly how everything surrounding the Jena 6 happened, whether the facts are coming from a journalist from Jena or one from Philadelphia. Craig Franklin wrote his story based on how he saw the events and who he talked to about them, and other journalists did the same. A lot of his "12 Myths" are also purely speculation. Look at Myth 2 about the nooses not being aimed at black students. Okay, so the expulsion committee says they weren't aimed at black students, and maybe they weren't...but I have to question what high school kid could be ignorant enough to completely miss the fact that hanging nooses in a tree, for whatever reason, is horribly offensive to blacks. So it didn't meet the criteria for a hate crime, but it's not debatable...what they did was wrong.
Also, I never even heard about some of these so-called myths, so I find it hard to believe that the media blew them out of proportion so badly. I think if all 12 of these things were twisted as terribly as they were, we would all know about them.
Like I said, I don't there is any "right" version of the truth for this story. Think about it...there are so many sides - to Mychal Bell, the truth is probably that he was prosecuted injustly, but to the white kid that got beat up, it's something totally different. With multiple parties involved, there will be multiple versions of the truth, and I believe journalists do their best to get bits and pieces of every version for stories.
I disagree with where Franklin generalizes, saying that pretty much every journalist (except himself, of course) that covered the story was wrong about it. I just think he didn't like the version of the truth that some journalists portrayed. He did the right thing by putting out what he saw as the truth, but the wrong thing by pointing fingers and sayind everyone else was wrong.
After reading Craig Franklin's article, I must say that I believe he is trying too hard to make light of the Jena 6 situation.
In myth number 2, Franklin claims that the white students that hung the nooses had no knowledge of the racial symbolization of a noose. If this truly is the case, this just goes to prove that Jena, La. and Jena's school system must be racist enough to leave out important facts of history and segregation. Franklin goes on to say (in myth 11) what a nice place Jena is to live in, and although it may not be the MOST racist place in America, if important parts of history, such as lynching, aren't being taught in schools, there must still be some kind of racial boundary between whites and blacks in Jena.
Also pertaining to myth number 11, which states that Jena is a wonderful place to live, for both blacks and whites, Franklin never bothers to justify the myth that there is still a "whites-only" barber shop in Jena, where the barbers told journalists that they have never cut a black persons hair. If this is the case, Jena isn't really the picture-perfect-non-segregrated place Franklin is making it out to be.
It seems to me that the fact that Franklin took such offense to the supposed myths surrounding the Jena 6 reports, enough offense to list and "justify" each of the "false" allegations that reporters and journalists have made, show that he is hiding something beneath his report.
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