{"id":384,"date":"2008-04-02T14:00:15","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T18:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/?p=384"},"modified":"2008-04-02T14:00:15","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T18:00:15","slug":"bravo-gawker-bravo-observer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/?p=384","title":{"rendered":"Bravo, Gawker<\/i>. Bravo, Observer<\/i>."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wintour<\/a><\/p>\n

The sole issue more amazing than the blatancy of VOGUE’s having mined crude racist imagery<\/a> for their April 2008 LeBron James\/Giselle B\u00fcndchen cover has been the whiteout of surrounding media on the issue.<\/p>\n

\"Before<\/a>Here, in New York, neither The New York Times<\/em>, The New York Post<\/em>, The New York Daily News<\/em>, The New York Sun<\/em>, or The Village Voice<\/em> have cracked a word on this subject, online or off. Newsday<\/em> wrote something<\/a>, before the direct pairing of the cover and H.R. Hopps\u2019s 1917 Destroy This Mad Brute\u2014Enlist<\/em> poster, right, was widely known. As for television, local and network, zero<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A key portion of this has to do, certainly, with the timidity of journalists, widely, when it comes to dealing with race as a subject. That journalists, generally, are often unassertive, and that even Black ones address race tentatively has been, perhaps, the most pressing fact of my own work as a writer. It’s, in part, why I’ve tended to talk about race the way I have, and as much as I have. It’s why I’ve tended to avoid National Association of Black Journalist soir\u00e9es, with their suck-up careerism. It was, in part, why I took on the title MEDIA ASSASSIN when I started writing in the late ’80s: As a way of distinguishing myself from journalists with whom I shared little than a way of making lunch money.<\/p>\n

In the blogosphere, there’s often less fear, but just as often a lack of skills or training in how to really open up a controversial issue or make sense of it. Far too many bloggers have covered this subject as though it were merely an opinion fight, as opposed to thoughtfully looking at the history of racist imagery, or even addressing why it was that so many Black people, particularly, were having a problem with the photo. Here, “He looks as aggressive as he does on the court,” or “It’s his game face” simply doesn’t cut it. Black people watch enough basketball to know what James look like playing ball, and can tell the difference.<\/p>\n

The people at Gawker.com, however, have done differently, particularly managing editor Nick Denton and, now, night editor Ryan Tate. Denton’s “Time For Leibovitz To Confess” piece<\/a>, in fact, was the first place I saw the cover paired with the Hopps poster. (Even the usually topical Racialicious.con has yet<\/a> to cover this aspect of the James VOGUE cover scandal.)<\/p>\n

Tate’s new piece, “Anna Wintour, Pitiable Monster,”<\/a> though, has reproduced Victor Juhasz<\/a>‘s skillful skewering in paint of VOGUE’s editor-in-chief and Sy Newhouse, Conde Nast’s diminutive CEO, on the cover of The New York Observer<\/em>. (It’s part of an Observer<\/em> package on magazines<\/a> that questions, among other areas, Annie Leibovitz’s apparent photographic self-absorption<\/a>. Of course, the Observer<\/em> is also the publication that, two years ago, famously reported on the most taboo subject in mainstream journalism, the, the dead whale skeleton bleached-whiteness of magazines<\/a> in New York and elsewhere, that being a subject close<\/a> to MEDIA ASSASSIN’s heart.)<\/p>\n

None of this coverage makes any of this O.K. As well, none of these media have tied in this story, as we have<\/a>, with very recent research indicating that many Americans subconsciously associate Black people with apes.<\/a> It beats a blank. How much remains to be seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The sole issue more amazing than the blatancy of VOGUE’s having mined crude racist imagery for their April 2008 LeBron James\/Giselle B\u00fcndchen cover has been the whiteout of surrounding media on the issue. Here, in New York, neither The New York Times, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The New York Sun, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,52,46,51,54,14,15,20,59],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}