CBS News National Correspondent Byron Pitts says he is “clear and comfortable with the notion that many people, when they see me, they will see my race first.” Still, the media’s treatment of race can get to him. “When Ed Bradley died, I was struck how in many of the national articles written about him, in the first sentence was the fact that he was an African-American man. I was stunned by that. When Peter Jennings died, nobody said one of the premiere white journalists, or one of the premiere Canadian journalists. They didn’t point out in the first sentence that he didn’t finish college. No one said that.”
Because for Pitts, while noting someone’s race is problematic, equating being black with being uneducated is just fine.
When the Topic Is Race, Media Turns Uneasy Lens on Itself [PublicEye]
