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Million Man March's Success: Media Misses the Real Story, Focuses on. Controversy
That great exhaling sound just heard across the nation was the collective sigh of relief let loose by the American journalists of little faith who felt, feared or anticipated that something bad would happen when a million (or 400,000, or 800,000) Black men marched on Benjamin Banneker City.
Just behind the pre-march headlines and reports about the "Louis Farrakhan controversy," the gender "split" and the "racial divide" lay the archetypal American bugaboo of the trouble-making Black male.
The Washington Post reported that bomb-sniffing dogs would be "everywhere," helicopters would patrol overhead and a police "canine explosive-detection unit" would sweep the area.
Meanwhile, Farrakhan was compared to Adolf Hitler, and his supporters described as "goon squads". In the Washington Post, Oct. 15, columnist William Raspberry expressed a "fear" that Farrakhan might "do something to make some of those who endorsed his march wish they hadn't..."
Author Patricia J. Williams was even more explicit. In an Oct. 30 commentary published in The Nation, Williams asked: "(I)sn't there a risk that all it will take is one sorry indiscretion, one set of loose lips, for the antihero of the march to assume the Willie Horton Crown of Media Toms and the march to be declared a riot?"
Latecomers
In many ways, most of the media came late to the march story and seemed not to have been tuned in to...