This week, Donald Trump appeared at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, and to say it did not go well is an understatement. Members of the organization, of which I am one, found out that the former president was due to speak a day before the conference started and two days before he was scheduled to speak. The response was a mix of outrage and a more tempered “let’s ask more questions.” Over the next 48 hours, the NABJ president defended the decision, and the conference co-chair stepped down. Everyone from pundit Roland Martin, aka the mayor of NABJ, to a previous NABJ Journalist of the Year was up in arms about the invitation.
Here’s the thing: The NABJ invites presumptive Democratic and Republican candidates to their conferences every four years, which was the NABJ president’s key talking point. Oh, and the follow-up statement that members got from NABJ insisted that Vice President Harris had declined the invitations, which the vice president’s team signaled wasn’t accurate. Some sources said that the Harris campaign offered a virtual conversation during the convention or an in-person conversation later.
But back to the idea that we always invite the presumptive nominees. There is precisely one problem with that, though. Donald Trump is not a typical Republican nominee.
He’s a convicted felon who has bragged about grabbing women’s genitals and who has attacked members of the Black Press viciously. Trump continues to disparage NABJ and its members as I’m writing this. On Wednesday, Trump sat on the stage with three Black women in a room full of Black journalists and peddled lies and unsubstantiated attacks on the first Black and South Asian vice president.
The NABJ convention is a microcosm of this election season. We cannot continue to platform what is unreasonable as if it is reasonable because our very lives are at stake. From election denial, to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, to Trump telling Christians they’ll never have to vote again if they vote for him, our democracy is in peril—and most big media do not care.
If you follow me on Twitter, and frankly, I’m sure you’re not sure you should be there, you will see that I’m not particularly measured in my criticism of other media, though some people try to tell me and Editor Donna Ladd that we aren’t actually allowed to critique other media. I wonder if they tell men in media that?
I’m particularly critical of the New York Times, an outlet that some call a national paper of record as it continues to publish stories and opinion pieces centered on the fallacy of false equivalence and both sides. Last week, the Times ran a piece with a headline that said we need better from both candidates. I didn’t read it because everything is behind a paywall, but the headline suggests that our reasonably measured vice president who had just begun her campaign days earlier is on par with a man focused on the destruction of our democracy. This isn’t that. Her opponent isn’t Mitt Romney or John McCain—a war hero who spent years as a prisoner of war and nearly lost his life defending his country and whom Trump openly mocked.
I don’t know what percentage of the NABJ is broadcast, print or academia. On the face of it, it’s run by broadcast, which is fine. But I know this: National media isn’t going to save us.
I’d wager that at least 40% of the journalists in the NABJ rooms I’ve been in are small to medium shops like ours doing journalism that national media refuses to do, holding the powerful accountable, serving their communities with everything from event calendars to community listening sessions like our signature Solutions Circles.
Many members work with legacy Black media like the Amsterdam News, and others like Lisa Snowden of the Baltimore Beat founded local nonprofits as I did this one alongside Donna Ladd. But the women on the stage questioning Trump were from two television networks and the third from a national website founded by two white men from national media, one the former CEO of Bloomberg Media and the other a former media columnist for The New York Times. This means that important voices in the Black press were not on that stage.
So, I’m asking you to support our inclusive women-run newsroom, which helps protect a free and fair press beyond the sensationalism big media peddle. We do this work not for you but with you.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
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