Journalism still has a race problem, prominent black journalist Gwen Ifill said on Thursday at Emerson College.
The host of PBS’s “Washington Week,” Ifill spoke in front of about 200 students and faculty at the Paramount Theatre as part of Emerson’s Communication Week, during which the four departments of Emerson’s School of Communication staged a series of events to discuss their respective fields.
Ifill, a Simmons College graduate who has reported on politics for NBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post, said her race has been an obstacle throughout her career from when she started at her first newspaper job at The Boston Herald. One day, Ifill said, she arrived at her desk at The Herald to find a note that said “n–ger go home.”
In newsrooms, racial equality remains a long ways off, Ifill said. While blacks may be appearing in front of the camera, Ifill said that those making the decisions behind the scenes are predominately white. And as many news organizations in the industry are downsizing, blacks may find it even harder to become journalists, Ifill said.
“We are the last ones in and the first ones out,” she said. “Sadly, to me, television news looks the same to me as it did when I was nine years old.”
As moderator of the last two televised vice-presidential debates, Ifill stressed that she always tried to avoid becoming part of the story and let the candidates speak for themselves. She recalled one moment in the 2008 debate when former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced that she “may not answer the questions that either the moderator or [Vice President Joe Biden] want to hear.”
“I thought, I could say something like “what?’ – which crossed my mind, but I realized the headlines the next day would all be about me,” Ifill said.
However, Ifill was unable to stay out of the headlines in the days before the debate, as some questioned whether she could be a neutral presence while working on a book titled “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”
“I think this was a clever, concocted way of trying to discredit me,” she said.
Former ABC News anchor and Emerson’s journalism department Leader-in-Residence Carole Simpson introduced Ifill. In her introduction, Simpson slammed her former employer for choosing foreign reporter Christiane Amanpour over Ifill to replace George Stephanopoulos as host of ABC’s Sunday morning political talk show “This Week.”
“This is no disrespect to Christiane, but she’s a foreign correspondent. She’s never covered Washington,” Simpson said. “Christiane will do fine, I’m sure, but she ain’t the best, and I know the best.”
Ifill addressed the speculation in a question-and-answer period that followed, confirming that she did talk with ABC officials about the job, but said “they couldn’t figure out what they wanted to do with it.” She said ABC’s announcement of hundreds of layoffs in their news division had made the network “a pretty massively unhappy place.”
“I was prepared no matter what they offered to stay exactly where I am,” she said.
When asked about the public’s perception of media bias, Ifill said she doesn’t take those accusations very seriously.
“People have murked up what we do,” she said. “People don’t make the distinction between Keith Olbermann and Jim Lehrer.”
Ifill said that she was proud of not being a pundit.
“We have to zealously protect our right not to form an opinion,” she said.
Laura Morel, a junior in Emerson’s print and multimedia journalism program, said she could relate to Ifill’s story about applying to over 50 newspapers after graduating and not hearing back from any of them.
“It was motivating to see someone who’s made it in the industry, especially when she talked about how hard it was to get a job,” Morel said.
Emerson first-year graduate student Alexandria Burris said her dad first introduced her to Ifill, and as an aspiring black journalist herself, she’s looked up to Ifill ever since.
“There’s not a lot of role models for us out there,” she said. “When I found out she was coming I got a little star-struck.”
Burris said she thought Ifill has handled the role of being one of the few well-known black female journalists very well.
“You don’t have to be the face of a population,” she said. “You just do your job and do it fairly.”
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