It's In Black and White

The Capital Times recently gave its webpage a makeover. It threw into sharp relief something that I think readers knew: this outpost of the Fourth Estate is lilywhite. T. Herman ZweibelDave Zweifel, Shawn Doherty, John Nichols - a bunch of pale faces all. It's sort of ironic since Nichols enjoys teaming up with his friend Robert McChesney and laying down some vituperative criticism on the corporate media for being homogenous yet he comes home to a stable of bloggers that is uniformly white. (But they have both kinds – men and women!)

Madison is about 80% white so by no means is this city a model of diversity. Yet, while 1 in 5 people here is non-white, 0 of 13 Cap Times bloggers are people of color. Over at the Wisconsin State Journal, things seem much the same. Mary Spicuzza, Clay Barbour, Doug Moe, Chris Rickert – they all look Caucasian to me. Ditto with the gang at 77 Square – Rob Thomas, Lindsay Chrisitans, etc. Isthmus doesn't strike me as a bastion of racial diversity either.

It's not that any of these reporters/bloggers/columnists are, to my mind, unqualified* to do the work they do, it's that I appreciate a little diversity of views. It reflects my own world better. Every morning I go to bed and wake up next to a woman of color. When my father-in-law comes over and holds court, I am hearing not only from a man who simply has a lot more melanin in his skin than I do, but someone who's had drastically different experiences in life, partly because of the color of his skin. The ideas and points of view that these people of color bring into my life are interesting and enriching.

Yeah, there's an occasional column from a national figure like Eugene Robinson and Madison's poet laureate Fabu gets to chime in periodically but the Madison's mainstream print media doesn't feature the work of local people of color on a regular basis despite Madison becoming less white every day.

Contrast TCT to the newest arts and entertainment magazine in town, M.A.D. (Music. Arts. Dialogue.) found by Ray Allen, publisher of The Madison Times, a newspaper which is like the equivalent of the Chicago Defender here.

Unfortunately the publication's "focus is to stay connected to a demographic that is young…" Well, I guess I'm not the target audience. Still, I look forward to seeing the first issue.

*Except Rickert whose columns quickly devolved into pablum generated by a simple Mad Libs-like formula: take a contentious issue, divide people's viewpoints into two simple, extreme groups carefully making sure there is no grey area, show how each has a point, and then emerge victorious by demonstrating how he's smarter than everyone else via taking the middle path.