OUT FRONT The Race Card

Dear Wick:

Your column in the May issue incorrectly and unfairly takes Channel 8 to task for supposedly mis-identifying Diane Ragsdale as a “concerned parent” in stories we broadcast last October about statements made by Ms. Ragsdale and others at a contentious DISD board meeting.

We checked our tapes. We identified Ms. Ragsdale on screen as a concerned “citizen, ” and in a later story as a former member of the Dallas city council Both identifications are accurate. We never identified her as a parent.

You speculate that whoever wrote the con-cerned parent tag (that we didn’t write) “moved here last month from Omaha, ” implying that the news you watch on Channel 8 is produced by “nice folks” who are “as ignorant as dirt about Dallas, ” a city that has become “nothing more than a bus stop on the way to LA.”

I did some checking. The Channel 8 reporters and producers who worked on the story included Dallas native Brett Shipp, with more than a decade of street reporting experience, including 31/2 years in this market; producer Holly Shannon, eight years with News 8; producer Rick Thompson, six years with News 8; and veteran reporter Doug Fox, with 22 years reporting experience in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Do we ever make mistakes? Surely. No one, not even columnists for D Magazine, can claim to be right all the time. But we’re not ignorant, we do care, and last I checked we’re not holding any bus tickets to the coast.

Sincerely,

John Miller, news director, WFAA-TV



THANKS TO JOHN FOR THE CORRECTION, AND my apologies to Channel 8 for the mistake. And my congratulations on the longevity of its staff.

But there’s something going on here that requires further examination.

I’ll grant to John that the tag-writer who described Diane Ragsdale as a “concerned citizen ” did not move here last week from Omaha. But what about the viewer who moved here last week from Omaha? Did Channel 8 serve that viewer well when it blandly identified Ragsdale-one of our city’s most notorious racial rabble-rousers-as a “concerned citizen?”

While that viewer was watching the contentious DISD board meeting, could Channel 8 have provided some better context and given a hint of some underlying motives at work ? A “concerned citizen” is one thing. A “radical activist” is quite another thing.

But this isn’t about one tagline on Channel18. The point of my column was to wonder aloud why our daily media so often miss the boat in reporting controversial stories, and I specifically cited the Townview/TAG crisis.

Our media seem scared to death to report anything about any controversy with racial overtones, whether real or invented, except at face value. Their attitude seems to be to just deliver the facts, no matter how superficially, and let the matter lie. Thus Don Carter is called a racist by Lee Alcorn, the head of an almost non-existent organization-the local NAACP-and it makes a good headline. Neither the reporter nor the editor seems to ask, “Who the hell is this Alcorn? How many people does he speak for?” On the flip side, in the midst of yet another controversy, a black city official tells the News that he has been receiving anonymous hate calls at his home and is told by an editor it will not be reported because it might “stir racial tensions,”

In both cases, as in the Diane Ragsdale example and the Townview/TAG crisis, our media do themselves and this city a disservice. Their tiptoeing around racial matters makes some people seem more important than they are. It overblows some stories and underplays others, Real problems aren’t confronted, and concocted problems-usually concocted by John Wiley Price-are allowed full play. The race-mongers get the headlines, and the racial peacemakers are left scratching their heads.

Our city will be a better place when the media stop hiding behind facts and start delving into and reporting the truth. Start with the basics. We’re adults. This is a big city. There are black people, brown people, and white people. There are good guys, and there are bad guys. There are straightshooters, and there are con artists. There are smart people, and there are fools. And Diane Ragsdale is not a “concerned citizen.”