From Steve Montiel: Hurricane Katrina forced us to see injustice through the
lenses of race and class. How long the journalistic energy stirred by Katrina will
last remains to be seen.
For some time, it has been difficult to sustain journalistic
attention to race, especially the intersections of race and poverty in America. Before Katrina, news organizations with the largest
audiences made it easy to ignore the consequences of racial discrimination. And
there was little appetite for stories of poverty or the poor, whatever their
race.
At USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism, our
was not to wonder why so much as how – how best to support in-depth journalism
about race, justice and injustice in this new world of the 21st
Century.
Our approach is to:
- Identify
journalists who care about depth and context. - Make
them more knowledgeable. - Give
them access to a network of colleagues so they won’t feel alone. - Support
their work, and distribute it across multiple media to multiple audiences. - Use
any exemplary journalism that results to inspire and teach others to do
great journalism.
So we have high hopes for our 12 racial justice fellows meeting at Harvard this week in a program co-sponsored by us and the
Nieman Foundation.
On our first full day, Tuesday, our fellows, joined by some of this year’s Nieman fellows and
visiting journalists, will learn about inequities of health care in America
from Brian Smedley of The Opportunity Agenda, and how the way Americans and
American society deal with race hurts health and costs lives – from Harvard
Professor Ichiro Kawachi, director of the Harvard Center for Society and
Health, and from two documentary filmmakers working on a PBS series, “How
Society Makes Us Healthy – or Sick.”
Our partnership with the Nieman Foundation
provides our fellows access to leading scholars not only in
health, but also in education, the law and science. This blog is an
effort to share these sources with journalists and others who can’t be
at Harvard with us. We will also be webacastingon our site “Race, Class
and Katrina” seminars on Thursday, Sept. 22, beginning at 1:15 p.m. EDT.
Let’s hope this kind of sharing of knowledge, together with
the passion that makes the best journalists want to keep learning, will make it
more difficult for news organizations to neglect news of race and justice long
after Hurricane Katrina.
Montiel is director of the USC Annenberg’s Institute for
Justice and Journalism.
