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The Missing Mainstream in Jena: What Story Are You Overlooking?

Did mainstream journalism miss the story of the so-called Jena Six? If you had to click on the underlined words back there, you already know part of the answer. The crush of coverage that rose up the past month, when it was clear thousands of protesters would arrive in a tiny Louisiana town, provides a sharp contrast to the virtual media blackout that preceded it.

So, yes, the story that had the history of U.S. injustice written all over it went largely untold. For a year. But it may be too charitable to say most news organizations "missed" the story, and it's important to talk about what, exactly, they "missed."

Read Thomas Huang on
Digital Diversity in
Journalism with a Difference

Coming Tuesday,
October 2: Al Tompkins interviews Paul V. Carty,
executive editor of
The Town Talk.

In case you don't know and didn't click earlier, here's the time-challenged reader's chronology of this tale: At an assembly in August 2006, a black student asked the principal if it was OK for black kids to sit under the tree where white kids sat. And then ...

I keep stumbling after that sentence. Before we get to the nooses three white students hung from the tree after the assembly (the Jena Three?), might journalists find any poignancy, pathos, conflict -- choose your news value -- in the black student's question?

Can we sit under the tree where the white kids sit?

Doesn't it carry a hint that there might be a story about race relations under that tree? Might the question have some resonance in the segregated lunchrooms and schoolyards of your community? Are we finished telling the story of color and kind when there's a question about who owns the shade?

Back to the chronology:

People raise their voices in protest because the school didn't report the nooses (and the implicit threat of lynchings) to police, and the school board won't expel the noose-hanging white students (they do get suspended), and tensions rise, and somebody burns a big chunk of the school down and scrawls graffiti on the walls, and fights break out in town and black students are assaulted by white adults and then a white student gets jumped in school and beaten senseless by six black schoolmates.

That all happened in Jena by December 5, 2006, all without notice from CNN or The New York Times or National Public Radio.

So the non-story continues: Minor charges are filed against the white aggressor in an early fight (even though the man tried to get a shotgun to end the fight), then the six black students are charged with conspiracy to commit second degree murder -- murder, I said -- for a school fight. It was a brutal, unfair fight, six against one, but conspiracy to commit murder? One 16-year-old student is tried as an adult and convicted and the conviction is overturned.

And there was hardly a word from anywhere -- even neighbors in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Shreveport -- until May 2007. No USA Today or Los Angeles Times or "60 Minutes." Did the national media miss the story?

Here's the thing: Most of what I know of the case (and didn't hear in the barbershop), I learned from the mainstream media -- or, at least, from The (Alexandria, La.) Town Talk, a link in the nation's largest newspaper chain, Gannett. Alexandria is about 40 miles southwest of Jena, and the newspaper covered the story extensively. The Associated Press put stories on the wire from the very start. Local and regional television stations representing all major networks carried the story.

Producers in TV and online, wire editors, mid-level editors and others make the daily decisions about what makes it onto the air, the Web site and into the newspaper. They're the same people who decide which missing child or runaway bride breaks out of small-town anonymity and goes national.

Surely some missed the evolving story on the wires. The rest had to make a choice. And they took a pass.

Available to any journalist with any news sense were 10 openings to report on a race relations drama guaranteed to ring familiar back home:

The question. The nooses. The fire. The fight. The charges. The trial. The conviction. The buzz. The reversal. The march.

Most of the country's news organizations joined the story only after this tale got a name: the Jena Six, which borrows its galvanizing syntax, not accidentally, I suspect, from some of the most notorious cases of racism in U.S. history: The Little Rock Nine. The Scottsboro Boys (a.k.a. the Scottsboro Nine). The rest of the media arrived in Jena after black bloggers and radio hosts took up the cause and declared the birth of the new Civil Rights movement.

Here's an embarrassing truth: Before the majority of us in this nation heard about what was happening in central Louisiana, people were reading about it in China Daily, The Observer of England, and The New Zealand Herald.

I've heard it argued that the story is just too complex -- victims who are also villains; villains who are also victims. My Poynter colleague Al Tompkins lays out a case for critically separating fact from myth in the evolving tale.

Neither excuses the silence. There is a huge story here -- of uneven justice, racial estrangement, unexamined suspicion and unabated bigotry. It is the story of our everyday lives. If it's complex, then it's inherently more interesting. If it's confusing, then the media should do what they're there to do: help us figure it out. Today, the story is in Jena. But it's not just there. It's everywhere people share history and space. That would be everywhere.

It was there in August of last year. It's there now. It'll be there tomorrow.

Don't wait for the next noose.

Poynter Librarian David Shedden provided research for this column.

Posted by Keith Woods at 10:58 AM on Sep. 28, 2007

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