Two rooms at Brooklyn Borough Hall packed with hundreds of black and brown people, dozens of which are at risk or who have already lost their property to a runaway city agency and you would think the New York City media would be on it like white on rice.
But that’s not how it went Friday, and as a longtime journalist covering this city, I have to ask myself is it because New York’s mainstream media is racist?
The bulk of the three-hour long legislative hearing was centered for the next course of action against the Third Party Transfer Program (TPT) under the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).
KCP has been following this story in a long multi-part series, including coverage of this meeting, and last week’s Federal class action lawsuit filed against the city, which if successful could cost the city tens of millions of dollars.
With just about every story we’ve written on this, it has drawn thousands of shares, but like the crowd at Friday’s hearing the shares have come from mainly the black and brown community. Two black men made a video about it, which we posted on Friday, but I have yet to see coverage of the meeting or the Federal lawsuit anywhere else.
I’m not tooting KCP’s horn here. I’m issuing an SOS. We’re a bit undermanned and underfunded at the moment. There are all kinds of hard investigative angles to this story that deserves serious journalistic attention.
I think part of the problem is that newsrooms are run by whites, and among whites race is seldom part of the conversation, and that includes white journalists. Unless it’s cops shooting or choking a black person it doesn’t fit the racism narrative. But let me be painfully clear. What’s happening here is citywide institutional government racism that is wiping out generational wealth in these communities of color. It’s an economic lynching.
To be fair, Errol Louis from both his NY1 and Daily News platforms has repeatedly addressed this issue, but other than Louis, it has been like howling into the wind.
And don’t even get me started on the New York Times, whose metro section is so lost in the ivy of Columbia J-School, and sniffing de Blasio’s yoga jockstrap that they sent their ace black metro government reporter, Jeffery C. Mays, to follow de Blasio on the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire.
Mays, who is an experienced reporter, knows all about what is happening with the TPT story and has continually ignored it. I get it, Jeff, you’re in the major leagues now – the money, the perks, the prestige – but my good man, grow some gonads. Your people are hurting.
It would be easy to blame this lack of coverage on the state of New York City journalism itself. You don’t have to look further than social media to see we’ve become a bunch of self-congratulatory, incestuous, herd-mentality, one-and-done scoop-oriented reporters.
But in this case, I don’t think it is the state of journalism. It’s racism – pure and simple. Black and brown people are worried to death that the city will take their hard-earned property, and most of the media ignores it.
Not exactly Tweet worthy, but something to think about.
