The donor, the dean and Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Black investigative reporter for the New York Times, spearheaded “The 1619 Project” in 2019 and won a Pulitzer Prize for it a year later. In 2017 she won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Even by White standards she is one of the best journalists in the US – but many on the right oppose “The 1619 Project” for showing how the US was built on slavery and racism.

In 2021, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) offered her the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism – but would not give her tenure! Most schools of journalism would jump at the chance of giving tenure to a White person even half as accomplished. Without tenure protecting her from being fired, she would have little academic freedom.

Enter the donor: Walter Hussman, Jr., (UNC ’68), heads his family’s media empire in Arkansas. In 2019 he promised to give UNC’s journalism school $25 million. So now it is called the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. And, when you walk in, you now see his Statement of Core Values. But for the pandemic, it would have already been carved in stone. Here is #4:

“The pursuit of truth is a noble goal of journalism. But the truth is not always apparent or known immediately. Journalists’ role is therefore not to determine what they believe at that time to be the truth and reveal only that to their readers, but rather to report as completely and impartially as possible all verifiable facts so that readers can, based on their own knowledge and experience, determine what they believe to be the truth.”

Elizabeth Eckford in Hussman’s home town of Little Rock when he was 10.

He said “The 1619 Project” was not objective. For example, it says, “For the most part, black Americans fought back alone” for their rights – but left out the Freedom Riders and other “courageous” Whites. To preserve the school’s objectivity he emailed and called the dean and trustees, opposing her appointment.

Note: He has yet to give the whole $25 million.

Note: According to the Five Rules of Racial Standing, which holds sway in the US, most Black people lack objectivity about race.

The dean, Susan King, stood up for Hannah-Jones:

“I was the first woman in every newsroom. I brought my perspective … to the table. I argued that women’s voices needed to be in the stories that were told. White males ran the newsrooms when I joined the business. Their experiences and judgments ruled the day.  Women made a difference in the newsroom 40 years ago. Journalists with different world experiences make a difference now and must continue to do so.”

Or, as Hannah-Jones herself put it in 2020:

“[Mainstream media] has long tended to operate as stenographers of power, and we’ve taken that to be non-biased, objective reporting. So when white Americans say to me, ‘I just want factual reporting,’ what they’re saying to me is they want reporting from a white perspective … with a white normative view, and that simply has never been objective.”

Hussman seems to miss the irony that he is only proving her point.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: mainly Google Images and my one free article at The Assembly.

Update (July 9th 2021): When UNC at long last offered Nikole  Hannah-Jones tenure, she turned them down and instead took a tenured position at Howard, the nation’s top Black university. What a brilliant move. Ta-Nehisi Coates will be joining her.

See also:

• Nikole Hannah-Jones
  • The 1619 Project
• media:
  • The propaganda model
  • The Vast Talking Machine – the White Anglo male media
    • The New York Times
    • Black people according to The Economist
  • neutral point of view (NPOV)
  • the White lens
  • The voice of colour
  • The Five Rules of Racial Standing
• Jim Crow
  • Elizabeth Eckford
  • Freedom Riders

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