No doubt. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (April) picks this up from columnist Lars-Erik Nelson in the New York Daily News (February 8): “On Friday, February 5, at 10 o’clock in the morning, I telephoned the Pentagon press office and told the colonel who answered the phone that I needed information on duplication in the armed forces. He replied: ‘You want the other press office.’”
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“There is no real interest in bringing diversity into the media,” writes Debran Rowland, a former Tribune reporter and now a Loyola law student, in NewsInc. (March). “Blacks, Hispanics, and women are not in the newsrooms in large numbers because the Powers That Be don’t want us there. We unnerve and frighten them in much the same way that a white policeman unnerves and frightens us when he pulls us over on a darkened highway late at night.
“I went ballistic the day I was asked to write a 21-inch story on a white teenager from the suburbs who had crashed her new car into a tree. It told me a great deal about my newspaper that 22 black deaths had to be crammed into a tiny space like bodies in a mass grave, while the white teen, whose background was familiar to my editor, got twice the space for her obituary.”
Back again? “One Chicagoan recalled giving $7 in a commuter railway station to a man who said he needed money to get home to Kenosha, Wisconsin,” according to Word One (April). “Three days later he saw the same man at the same place, telling the same story. ‘I was annoyed to realize I had been conned, but I was really angry to think I had been conned by a mope not smart enough to realize that in a commuter station the same people go by at about the same time every day.’”
