April Ryan’s latest book, Under Fire, carries the subtitle: “reporting from the front lines of the Trump White House.” As Trump’s late 2018 insult spree directed against women journalists of color showed, this subtitle represents more than mere rhetoric.[1] Discharging venomous words as sharp as poison darts, Trump attacked CNN’s Abby Phillip for asking a question about Robert Mueller’s probe, saying: “What a stupid question… you ask a lot of stupid questions.” He accused PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor of asking “a racist question.” And he referred to Ryan, White House correspondent for Urban Radio Networks, as “a loser” who “doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.”[2]

Ryan, Phillip, and Alcindor represented a triptych of Trump opprobrium that inspired syndicated political cartoonist Ed Hall to recall a piece of photojournalism history. That memory became the basis for Hall’s cartoon “The New Black Power,” which he gave the AEJMC History Division permission to reprint. In an email message, Hall explained: “I wanted to use an image that I knew would be immediately recognized, and something that spoke truth to power. So the classic photo from Life magazine photographer John Dominis was the first thing that popped into my head. The comparison: a sitting President, belittling and mocking three strong black women who were just trying to do their jobs, echoed across 50 years of racism and inequality. It seemed an obvious comparison.”[3]

Dominis’s photo of U.S. Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the Black Power salute while the national anthem played for the 200-meter sprint medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City is doubly a story of American journalism. Dominis, an acclaimed war photographer renowned for his work for Life magazine, shot the photo through his lens as the American-born son of Croatian immigrants.[4]

While women of color have been Trump’s frequent targets, journalists as a group have been under fire from Trump since the reality TV star gave his first campaign stump speech. And while many previous administrations have shown that they have no love for the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” as the later disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew once so alliteratively put it, the current administration’s attacks on the media are more frequent, more vitriolic, and in the case of women and particularly women of color, more targeted at diminishing their professionalism, competence, and intelligence.

Prior to his attacks on Alcindor, Phillip, and Ryan, Trump’s condescension and efforts to diminish journalists of color were on display in early October, when he told ABC’s White House Correspondent, Cecilia Vega: “I know you’re not thinking, you never do.”[5] Unruffled, Vega went on to ask her question, which Trump dodged.  As Vega told New York magazine’s Jessica Boddy, she believes that her presence as a Mexican American woman in the White House press corps is significant. It “impacts how you ask questions, the stories that you push on, the narratives that you don’t want to let go as a journalist.”[6]

These issues clearly aren’t new. It’s as if we have stepped into the WABAC machine in an episode of “Peabody’s Improbable History.”[7] More than fifty years after release of the 1968 Kerner Report, and 72 years after the Hutchins Commission called on the media to offer “the projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in society,” U.S. news organizations remain largely white.[8] And while some journalism programs now have a student body that looks more like the nation, the ranks of journalism education and its governing bodies remain overwhelming white.

In recognition of this seemingly intractable status quo, the Columbia Journalism Review in October 2018 published an entire issue devoted to the demographic disparity between the media and the communities the media purport to serve. Appropriately titled, “The Race Issue: Unfinished: The Stories Left Untold in American’s Newsrooms,” the issue did note some successes, such as BuzzFeed News, which, as a national outlet, is almost alone in maintaining a staff that is at parity with the U.S. population. The issue included voices from a wide swath of the national demography and offered some historical context, particularly about the black press.[9]

And there has been some progress since 1947, when Alice Dunnigan became the first African American women credentialed as a White House reporter, followed by Ethel Payne.[10] At times, however, attitudes seem to have advanced little beyond a postwar mentality. Amnesty International’s December 2018 research report on Twitter abuse against women journalists and politicians is exhibit “A” in this regard. Compiled with the help of crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence software, Amnesty’s study showed that women journalists and politicians were abused on Twitter every 30 seconds, with women of color taking the brunt. Black, Asian, Latina, and mixed-race women were 34 percent more likely to be mentioned in abusive tweets than white women. And black women journalists and politicians were 84 percent more likely than their white counterparts to be mentioned in abusive tweets. Amnesty International defined Twitter abuse to encompass sexual and physical threats, and racial slurs.[11]

Of course, women journalists aren’t the only ones who have been attacked in the current political climate. CNN had to file suit in November 2018 to get White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credentials restored after the White House argued (variously) that Acosta, the son of a Cuban refugee, had manhandled a White House intern during a press conference and had been disrespectful to the president.[12] During Trump’s campaign, Trump also had a celebrated dust-up with Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, a naturalized American citizen from Mexico, whom Trump ejected from a news conference.[13] And of course, Trump has repeated his Stalinesque referrals to the media as “enemies of the people” and has applauded violence directed at reporters.

Trump also occasionally has condemned white male journalists, though his wrath has been by far more heavily leveled at journalists of color, most notably women. While attacks on journalists of any background are a threat to the bulwark of democracy, attacks on journalists of color are something more. Because minority journalists are still an aberration among the white press corps status quo, they are visible representations of their racial and ethnic communities—whether they like it or not. To attack journalists of color, therefore, is to make attacks on the capability, credibility, and character of all people of color.

As journalism historians, we are in a unique position to insure that the full historical perspective of our media past is brought to bear on our understanding of media present. Teaching Chair Kristin Gustafson and the members of the PF&R Committee will be working to develop a compendium of resources to advance our research and teaching in this area.

Through it all, we must remain aware that we can’t tell the stories of journalists who were denied access to jobs because of the color of their skin or their accents. The journalism history that we have to plumb is historically circumscribed and truncated by the nation’s racial inequities, by the bar placed across the newsroom door that said “whites only” need apply, if not in so many words. We can’t tell the stories of the people who weren’t hired, or who weren’t promoted, or who didn’t get the breaks. We can, and we should, however, move beyond the usual suspects to tell the untold stories of the journalists who have been rendered invisible by history.

To that end, I proposed the History Division add an award for the outstanding conference paper submission concerning underrepresented groups in journalism history. These may be biographical sketches of minority figures in journalism history; historical analyses of minority-related issues in media coverage, production, or ownership; and/or other related themes. Submissions will be considered for the 2019 History Division paper competition, with the first winner receiving a plaque and a $100 prize at the Toronto, Canada conference.

Historian Jon Meacham, among others, has noted that the nation’s original sins are slavery and the genocide of Native Americans. Race and ethnicity remain the rawest nerve in this nation. In light of that, I would add a third original sin, the failure to document, preserve, and interpret a truly inclusive canon of American journalism history. As the late, great journalist and publisher Robert C. Maynard said, “this country cannot be the country we want it to be if its story is told by only one group of citizens.”[14] Likewise, our journalism history cannot be what we want it to be if it is told only about one group of people.

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[1] April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting From the Front Lines of the Trump White House, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

[2] Paul Farhi, “ ‘What a Stupid Question’: Trump demeans three black female reporters in three days,” Washington Post, November 9, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-a-stupid-question-trump-demeans-three-black-female-reporters-in-two-days/2018/11/09/272113d0-e441-11e8-b759-3d88a5ce9e19_story.html?utm_term=.0d3d4fce0a65

[3] Email from Ed Hall to the author, Jan. 1, 2018.

[4] The John Dominis Photographic Archive, Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. https://www.cah.utexas.edu/news/press_release.php?press=press_dominis

[5] Josh Hafner, Trump Insults Female Reporter: ‘You’re Not Thinking. You Never Do,’” USA Today,  October 1, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/10/01/trump-insults-abc-reporter-cecilia-vega-you-never-think/1493105002/

[6] Jessica Boddy, “How This Reporter Stayed Focused After a Trump Insult,” New York magazine, November 20, 2018. https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/how-i-get-it-done-cecilia-vega-abc-white-house-reporter.html

[7] “WABAC Machine,” Wikepedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WABAC_machine

[8] The Kerner Report: The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). The Commission on the Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947).

[9] “The Race Issue: Unfinished: The Stories Left Untold in America’s Newsrooms,” Columbia Journalism Review, Fall 2018. https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/media_race_representation.php

[10] Carol McCabe Booker (ed.), Alone Atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan: Pioneer of the National Black Press (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). James McGrath Morris, Ethel Payne: The First Lady of the Black Press, (New York: Amistad, 2015).

[11] Amnesty International, “Troll Patrol Findings: Using Crowdsourcing, Data Science & Machine Learning to Measure Violence and Abuse against Women on Twitter, December 18, 2018.

[12] Michael M. Grynbaum, CNN’s Jim Acosta Has Press Pass Restored by White House,” New York Times, November 19, 2018.

[13] William Finnegan, “The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down: How Univision’s Jorge Ramos Earns His Viewers Trust,” New Yorker, October 5, 2015.

[14] Sally Lehrman, “Diversity Toolbox: How to Cross Your ‘Faultlines,’” Society of Professional Journalists website, https://www.spj.org/dtb2.asp