Donnell Alexander

You might think the NFL is racist. An insider says he’s about to prove it in court.

Jim Trotter’s new job at NFL.com began with the former ESPN and Sports Illustrated staffer noticing there were no Black people in decision-making positions at the National Football League-backed news website and multimedia hub.

This was five years ago, and at first, Trotter complained to NFL business managers, noting that the NFL’s workforce includes nearly 60 percent Black players. When no Black people got big jobs at NFL.com, he began to complain in media appearances.

Then, finally, he confronted the top boss – NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell – at the Super Bowl.

“When are we in the newsroom going to have a Black person in senior management, and when will we have a full-time Black employee on the news desk?” Trotter asked.

In May, the NFL declined to renew Trotter's contract. In September, he filed a racial discrimination lawsuit with the Southern District of New York. The NFL has until Friday to respond in court.

The Trotter lawsuit is what happens when a man is turning 60, has borne witness to a boatload of racism and he’s grown sick of it all, tired of hearing transparent lies.

Unconsciously, fans believe sports leagues are akin to American utilities. In reality, they’re government-backed business consortiums. A utility might employ an inspector general. A business consortium absolutely will not.

Trotter is a Black journalist by trade and heart. But by joining the NFL’s media arm, did he really think the NFL was going to let him do actual journalism or work for a Black journalism executive who might have different ideas than the league’s party line on issues such as … race?

I remind Trotter that the league only just became comfortable with letting Black people play quarterback, never mind making real-world decisions. That for decades held onto the name “Redskins” as though it were a family heirloom. This is the NFL, I don’t have to remind him, that ignored a concussion crisis at the center of his book on now-deceased linebacker Junior Seau, then relied on a wild racist theory in search of lawsuit settlement savings. This is a league filled with white team owners who in word and deed keep revealing themselves as people who believe Black people are lesser people.

ALSO READ: A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

“They’re all racists,” I tell Trotter with great confidence. If they aren’t racists, they’re magnificent accessories.

“I don’t believe that every owner is racist,” Trotter replied.

“Oh okay.”

“I know owners that I don’t believe to be racist. I know them personally,” Trotter insisted.

So really really, I ask the current National Association of Black Journalists’ journalist of the year: What did you think would happen by working for the NFL? Did you think you could change the culture by revealing how racist a racist league is? I mean, reporting on racism inside the NFL is like exposing the monosodium glutamate inside Doritos. Frito-Lay ain’t havin’ that.

Native Americans protest before the Minnesota Vikings and Washington Redskins game on November 7, 2013, at Mall of America Field at the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, Minn. The team is now known as the Washington Commanders. Adam Bettcher/Getty Images

But Trotter’s plans are even more ambitious now, he explains.

“It’s not enough to say you know these things,” Trotter says. “It’s like the old Training Day line: It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.”

Even a cursory look at his complaint against the NFL suggests Trotter can prove a lot.

Jim Trotter isn’t constrained to seeing the NFL as a bastion of old-school male militarism that preserves outmoded problem solving, a troublesome addiction. Bless his heart.

“History has taught us that there are only two ways that we see substantive change in the NFL,” Trotter said. “One is through the threat of litigation or actual litigation, as we saw in the early 2000s with Johnnie Cochran and Cyrus Mehri, [when they] threatened to sue the NFL for discriminatory [coaches] hiring practices. And all of a sudden the league implemented the Rooney Rule and you saw the number of Black head coaches increase.

“The other way we’ve seen substantive change is through the threat of lost revenue by sponsors. When FedEx and others threatened to pull out of their sponsorship agreements with the Washington Commanders we saw the league and the owners get Daniel Snyder up out of there because it was bad for business,” Trotter said.

Trotter says that in 2021, a reporter on a call with 40 other staffers said that he heard Bills owner Terry Pegula say, “If Blacks think it’s so bad they should go back to Africa and see how bad it really is.”

The news went unremarked upon, and at the meeting’s end, according to Trotter, he asked, “Are we not going to address what we heard here?”

Management said they would get on it, he said, and nothing happened.

Later that year, then-Oakland Raiders Coach John Gruden was found to have said of Players Association chief DeMaurice Smith in an email: “Dumboriss Smith has lips the size of Michelin tires.”

Trotter went on TV and called Gruden’s exposed insult “just a tree in a forest of NFL racism.”

ALSO READ: National Football League sins: a one-man tribunal to judge them

Trotter also planned to go public with a statement by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones — “If Blacks feel some kind of way, they should buy their own team and hire who they want to hire” — and was talked out of it by bosses. After all, this is the owner who said any player who pulled a Kaepernick, and kneeled during the National Anthem, would be fired. Seemed apt.

Early this year, Trotter says his supervisor told him they could see no reason why his contract wouldn’t be renewed in the spring.

But the Gruden and Jones episodes, coupled with his keeping quiet about the NFL asking players to begin warming up after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin nearly died in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals — the league ultimately canceled the game — took Trotter through the looking glass.

As he explained to journalist Jason Jones, “That was the point, really, Jason, that I was like, I can’t take this anymore. I can’t sit by and go along to get along and accept it.”

The lawsuit showcases problems inherent to covering any employer from within:

“It would be like if you were a political reporter and a member of Congress is paying your salary. There’s just an inherent conflict,” says Aaron Chimbel, dean of the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University. “That’s sort of the whole idea of a free press and the fourth estate: You have people who are disconnected from who they are covering and what they are covering.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t do good work and can’t make efforts to provide important information,” Chimbel continued. “It’s just really hard for anybody in that circumstance to have the freedom that you would be if you were working for an independent news organization. I think you know when you’re employed by a team or an organization that there are inherent boundaries to what you’re being allowed to report on.”

Trotter said that he had been assured upon accepting the NFL.com position he would be allowed to report news involving sensitive issues with owners. Opining on the issues would be off the table at NFL.com, but reportage was valued.

“What I didn’t understand – and you can call it my naivete if you want,” Trotter said, “is that what he meant by that is, ‘We will always report the news if everyone else knows about it. But when we become privy to sensitive things, such as comments by Jerry Jones or the alleged comment by Terry Pegula and no one else knows about it, then we won’t report it.’”

The Trotter case has most often been framed by two press conference responses to Trotter questions, both by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

At the first press conference, prior to last year’s Super Bowl, he appeared to catch Goodell off-guard before the hot lights, cameras and world press.

“Why does the NFL and its owners have such a difficult time at the highest levels hiring Black people into decision-making positions?” Trotter asked.

Goodell stammered:, “If I had the answer right now, I would give it to you. I think what we have to do is just continue and find and look and step back and say, ‘We’re not doing a good enough job here and we are the ones who have to make sure we bring diversity deeper into our NFL and make the NFL an inclusive and diverse organization’.”

When Trotter saw no change in his workplace conditions, he queried Goodell again. This time, it was at the press conference before February’s Super Bowl at SoFi Stadium, up the road from his San Diego home. He introduced himself as Jim Trotter from NFL.com.

“I asked you about these things last year and what you told me is that the league had fallen short and you were going to review all of your policies and practices to try and improve this.”

Black sports fans all over the nation muttered to themselves, Welp, that Negro’s getting fired.

When you listen to the audio, there’s a certain exhaustion inTrotter’s voice that’s as tired as his question itself. (Ain’t no tired like old Black journalist-tired.) It’s important to note the exhaustion, because Trotter is a sports journalism success story, a guy who’s pulled himself up through the ranks — nine years covering the Chargers for the San Diego Union Tribune, an old pro who can smell a lie a mile away.

Before reading the substance of the commissioner’s response, know that Roger Goodell is no CTE-addled ex-player. He’s a polished PR specialist who worked his way to owners’ Top Employee status by navigating them through numerous public crises.

To introduce his comments, Goodell un-narrowed his eyes, denied being “in charge of the newsroom,” and said this:

“We did go back and we have reviewed everything we’re doing across the league. And I do not know specifically about the media business – will check in again with our people – but I am comfortable that we made significantly (sic) progress across the league. That includes in the media room. Those are things we continue to look at and hopefully make real progress to. I can’t answer, because I do not know, specifically what those numbers are today.”

So, not-racist Roger Goodell hadn’t just opted out on repairing the racist exclusions of his company’s media arm, he’d also not even taken Trotter’s born-of-desperation, public-as-possible 2022 question seriously enough to prepare a competent response.

“And yet, a year later nothing has changed," Trotter said. “When are we in the newsroom going to have a Black person in senior management, and when will we have a full-time Black employee on the news desk?”

Even PR will people tell you who they are, if you let them, and Occam’s Razor very much applies here.

Not only has my emailed interview request to the NFL commissioner’s office gone ignored, the NFL Players’ Association, too, has declined to comment on Trotter’s diversity fight.

Trotter’s former ESPN colleague, Stephen A. Smith – who called Trotter foolish on his podcast – asked Goodell about the case on-air. But when Trotter texted Smith afterward to ask why Smith’s questions, in his opinion, were so poorly informed, Smith sent an angry and caps-laden, exclamation-filled response, Trotter said. (ESPN said Smith would not be talking to me about the matter.)

“If you watch Stephen A,” Trotter told me, “you can see that his approach is different with players – with Black men in particular – versus what it is with powerful white owners and powerful commissioners.”

“You have to understand the landscape,” he continued. “The NFL has a lot of media partners and the NFL has a lot of power and reach. The people in charge, many of whom do not look like me, are going to be more sensitive in how they cover this and what they say. I’m not surprised at all that to this point the coverage has not been extensive.

“I can remember instances at ESPN where I would say something (on air) and get a text message from my supervisor, saying that I had crossed the line,” Trotter recalled. “And I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Really?’”

Trotter’s focus on meaningful change is especially critical, as, across the sports media landscape, diversity numbers increasingly get juiced by former athletes on camera rather than actual journalists who probe — often in uncomfortable ways — uncomfortable truths about the business of sports.

As Trotter reminded me last weekend, a significant lot of these on-air ex-athletes have their questions prepared by managers.

Today, Trotter is employed as an opinion writer at The New York Times-owned The Athletic. He’s won the NFL’s Bill Nunn Award – which comes with membership in the Pro Football Hall of Fame – and the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year prize. He’s going to be just fine.

But most Black football fans don’t think about equity or who truly profits from the inestimable cash cow that is the National Football League. Give us a pre-game Air Force flyover, a dope Super Bowl halftime show and a last-second victory and we’ll shut up. At least our people get to call plays on the field.

But as Jalen Rose – newly unshackled from his ESPN chains after he was laid off – told his Instagram followers earlier this month, the disparities between the Black American-dominated sports leagues remain striking: Dress codes and a salary cap for the NBA, the inability of their athletes to go professional after high school, as in golf, tennis. baseball or hockey.

As anyone who’s seen a Georgia congressional map will tell you, controlling Black power remains central to the American experiment. This is why Jim Trotter’s NFL discrimination suit, despite its doe-eyed, Don Quixote quality, is critical.

Without transparency for the league’s inner workings, and actual change in how those inner workings work, a plantation mentality will remain the league’s go-to trick play that maintains the status-quo and keeps Black people down.

Donnell Alexander is a freelance writer based in California. His West Coast Sojourn Substack newsletter covers the heights of his nation’s sports and culture each Monday.

From Your Site Articles

A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

Last month, I phoned Ronnie Brown at the Atlanta office of UBS, a 150-year-old wealth management company where the former Auburn University gridiron legend has made a name for himself as a big-time financial adviser.

My notion had been to collect Brown’s perspective on baldly racist statements made by his former college football coach, Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

“How did you get my number?” an irked Brown asked when I shared the reason for my call. The Georgia native and Alabama Sports Hall of Famer claimed to know nothing about the widely-reported news stories.

“Would you like me to read the quotes to you?” I asked the retired running back, who played 10 seasons in the National Football League.

“No. I don’t talk about politics,” Brown said, and then he hung up. That a money man like Ronnie Brown, 41, refused to discuss the increasingly embroiled senator was no shock; Brown's virtual Rolodex undoubtedly teems with wealthy Auburn alumni.

I then reached out to the immortal Bo Jackson. No response.

Next, Auburn all-time quarterback great Cam Newton. Nothing.

Tuberville’s most recent observations on race would be condemned by fellow Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell in mid-July. Yet, as I called, emailed and direct messaged dozens of Black players across the last 30 years of Auburn football rosters, an on-the-record perspective could not be found.

A day after I left messages with the agencies representing Newton and Jackson, a voice from the back pages of Tigers football said not to hold my breath waiting to hear back.

Then-Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville watches from the sidelines during the final minutes of the Tigers 37-15 loss to Georgia on Nov. 11, 2006, at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Alabama. Kevin C. Cox/WireImage/Getty Images

"They're not going to do or say anything,” predicted Eric Ramsey, a defensive backfield starter in 1989 and 1990. “They fear the repercussions. They're worried about the consequences.”

Ramsey — now an actor and business owner in Los Angeles — is offended by the Alabama lawmaker’s perspectives on race and would like an apology, “as a person of color.” Perhaps every other Auburn gridiron standout would also like their old ball coach to apologize.

Bo knows what he wants. But he’s staying silent.

Tuberville and ‘white nationalists’

“We are losing in the military so fast. Our readiness in terms of recruitment,” Tuberville said, according to a transcript of the May 4 interview with WBHM.

His current project is to keep the U.S. Marine Corps without a confirmed leader for the first time in a century while he battles culture wars.

“And why? I’ll tell you why,” Tuberville continues “Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda.”

The interviewer next asked if Tuberville believed white nationalists should be allowed in the military, Tuberville responded, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

This racial whopper was preceded by another stunning quiet-part-aloud moment, last fall.

“They’re not soft on crime,” Tuberville said of Democrats in October. “They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”

If a conservative like Mitch McConnell could criticize Tuberville’s racism — some of which Tuberville walked back after a disastrous CNN interview earlier this month where he defended white nationalists — why wouldn’t the university’s alumni football stars do the same? Shouldn’t some of Auburn’s most visible successes feel confident weighing in with observations that directly affect their communities?

Apparently not: My Southern brothas weren’t spilling the beans. So I settled for the Auburn linebacker-turned-novelist Ace Atkins, who is white, to explain why Black football players are so reluctant to decry Tuberville’s racist statements.

Days after Tuberville’s comments on white supremacy in the military, Atkins tweeted: “What an absolute disgrace. This kind of talk must not be normalized or accepted. #Shameless”

"I'm as far from that [football] world as possible. My contacts didn't do me any good in New York publishing. Maybe that's why I can speak freely,” said Atkins, a member of the Tigers undefeated 1993 squad. "There's more pressure on Black athletes to show they're part of the program. They have to be extra [supportive], and it's a heavy burden."

In The South, “The Civil War is never really over”, according to Atkins, 52. Not only does that mean that Tuberville “knows who his people are, who he’s speaking to” and was being racist in intent, it means that highly-visible Black alumni must be seen and not heard when a Southern football mentor brings rationalized support of white nationalism to the public discourse.

These unwritten rules extend beyond players below the Mason-Dixon Line.

I tried Ball State Athletic Director Haven Fields, who played for Tuberville at Auburn, but he backed out after first saying yes.

A Tuberville-era equipment manager, also Black, did the same, and I finally got the point.

‘Seen and not heard’

“They are free to do everything, but talk,” said Ramsey. “It all goes back to the mentality of being seen and not heard. It's just something that is ingrained in them.”

In 1991, Ramsey surreptitiously recorded Tigers football coaches arranging illegal payments to players. Soon after, head coach Pat Dye resigned. In the new light of the NCAA’s name-image-likeness payment era, with payments for players seen as an end to a model of corruption, Ramsey’s decision takes on a different sheen.

Back then, though? He was fortunate not to be tarred and feathered. At his 1992 graduation from Auburn, Ramsey and his wife were booed, called the N-word and had objects thrown at them.

“I wasn't worried,” said Ramsey, who identifies as a Christian. “I had a higher purpose.”

Wealth in the Southeastern Conference recruiting range is dynamic. If you’re Jimmy Rane — who is to Auburn as Phil Knight is to Oregon — you’re the only billionaire in Alabama and your purview is greater, your power more concentrated than some coastal moneybags. If you’re a powerful Republican like Rane, you control the fates of players who have come through the program on football, business and political levels.

A single uppity critique might have a prospect from an Auburn family playing at 'Bama, the most shameful outcome of all. Even the university might mete out punishment.

So much caged expression begs one question: Has the audience he’s serving made Senator Tuberville, with his open white nationalism talk, more transparent than Tommy the Coach?

"If Tuberville was still coaching and having to recruit,” asks Ramsey, “would he still say the same thing?”

From Your Site Articles

Why your left-out uncle hates Dr. Dre’s Super Bowl halftime show

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In the mid-1990s, the producer Dr. Dre began seriously studying piano. He had many millions in the bank and more raw-sounding hit rap records than anyone. By a lot. That’s when he began studying music theory lessons and made The Chronic 2001, which is so sonically superior to the original that it’s not even a conversation worth having.

That’s what jumped into mind upon seeing the Compton-born producer sit at a white piano during Saturday night’s Super Bowl halftime performance. Andre Young’s ambition. Upon possibly the most stunning made-for-TV concert stage I’ve laid eyes on, Dre—presenting as orchestrator of the entire affair—played a few live opening piano notes from his Eminem Peloton crowd rouser “Lose Yourself.”

And this Angeleno was so moved with pride that it genuinely surprised. Not just for Dre was I proud, but for the city’s role in making the worldwide-cash cow and cultural force called West Coast hip hop.

Noisy conservative fans of America’s big game, many of whom were already finding the professional sport too black, were left wishing they had just fired up That Beatles doc, again.

Pride was the last thing they felt.

That magnificent So-Fi stage told the story of hip hop in Dre's early 80s Los Angeles. The sign for Eve After Dark made me gasp a little bit.

Eve is the nightclub where Dre began deejaying, back when suggesting there would become something called the hip hop industry might earn you an Angel Dust-abuse allegation.

I caught Dre’s first group, the World Class Wrecking Cru, on a Sacramento night in January of 1985. A week earlier I had moved to California from Ohio. Less than a week before that I had watched Prince perform at the Coliseum of Richfield. And I didn’t know what to make of what the Cru were doing. The entire show was turntable-based. A unique vocalist named Egyptian Lover wandered on to do some popped on and did some songs. Not quite rapping. A named DJ Yella would go off for long periods of just… scratching.

A rap show on the 50 of any televised football game? Insist upon that reality back when Dre came up and you might have to meet your new therapist.

Mentally healthy people understood there was no map from Compton to what happened in Inglewood this weekend.

There is no pride in feeling left behind.

The NFL doesn’t go for risky music. Whether Prince or U2 or The Who, the halftime acts must pass the corporate muster. The last time this league tried to recognize actual edginess, the singer M. I.A flashed a miss finger and chaos ensued. If your songs aren’t two decades past having an edge, you’re not gracing the world’s biggest stage.

It takes a lot of effort to be blindsided by 90s hip hop’s aesthetics at this late date, Charlie Kirk.

The entrepreneur-MC Jay-Z brought the So-fi show into being. As sure as Mary J. Blige played like a hood energy palette cleanser between rich Black make stylized braggadocio and rhyming urban tales Jay was behind the scenes maestro-ing.

After Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 protests, players had begun speaking out about the Black American predicament. Erosion of conservative fan support followed. Black players pressed for fairness.

The NFL brought in Jay-Z to provide optics and no one was sure what else.

Among fans who say they’ve been turned off by the probgame, the league “doing too much for Black players” is a top reason why. “Too much” by a league that’s the target of a class-action lawsuit on behalf of grotesquely underemployed Black head coaches.

A wealthy manufacturing league that hasn’t approved one Black among 32 owners, despite a workforce that's about 70 percent Black.

Sunday halftime was Jay-Z’s first impression. But what it means is still unclear. Dr. Dre on stage with Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Eminem, and relative youngster Kendrick Lamar—whose intense performance of 2018’s “Alright” must have made Fox News fans feel foreign—was landmark entertainment, but no substitute for fair employment policy.

Even if you bought the iconic Dr. Dre solo CDs, you might not have seen that he was making over the culture with their music. Because the willful could miss it, pretend that music’s changes hadn’t happened. When Dr. Dre made Snoop and then Tupac the most raw stars America ever saw, they could deny that stardom’s definition had been radically redefined.

People say and hear “bitch” far differently than they did when Andre Young was still working Eve, for better and worse.

Post-Game

The Gen Y old-timers jokes got a lot out of my attention. But it was Dre’s ambition that kept at me.

A musician from some 1992 sessions told me that Dre wasn’t much of a pot guy then. Mostly just around screwing. But dude told me that Dre burst into the studio one day and announced that his next album would be called The Chronic. Chronic as in weed, an album for riot-era to chill out to.

And I thought of all those uptempo Dre hits from the 50, *and our state of mind. A healing set of Gangsta rap, for those who prefer their tonic ironic. You cannot feel sorry enough for those who missed that.

Donnell Alexander was a 2021 USC Center for Health Journalism fellow. He is co-author of Rollin’ with Dre (Crown, 2008).

Redemption Songs

Whether Dre wants this weekend’s triumph to be viewed as a redemption saga’s culmination or not, it has to be viewed as that.

A drunken abuser who was wildly irresponsible with money and lyrical content, that was set to be his legacy 30 years ago.

Bill Cosby had hits too, you know?

A billionaire now, he followed the Eve After Dark years with a historic relationship with businessman and near-novelty rapper Eric “Eazy-E” Wright. The pairing led to the opening of hip hop in the Midwest and changed hip hop as young people like me knew it.

Team redemption’s core of N.W.A was that engineer who knew a little piano (Dre), the street pharmacist (Eazy), and the high school reporter en route to Arizona architecture school (Ice Cube). Together they made songs like the indelible “Fuck tha Police”—penned by a 10th grader, which says something—and would fuse the ideas of art and commerce like only creatures of Hollywood could.

In Compton, Andre Young and Eric Wright sold vinyl at the local swap meet. Across town, in Beverly Hills, he would team with Tom Petty producer Jimmy Iovine to platform gangsta music so hard that other genre subsets gave up and retired.

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Watching Color TV

This just in: Still hardly any Indians on television.

And Asians have only incrementally better representation. Latinos and people of African descent are doing better, but still looking for more. Never know when those network suits will attempt to roll back progress.

On December 1, representatives of Asian-American, Latino, and Native American media advocacy groups presented their annual "report cards" on minority representation in television. (An NAACP version is due out next month.) Network television, that is. These reports are consistently worth a few column-inches of newspaper space, some cursory web stories, and a "tsk"-flavored 15 seconds of local anchor soundbite time, but their value for effecting real change is still in question.

It would seem that the biggest motivation for change would be the network's own ears to the ground and the cell numbers of producers and agents of color. This year, NBC and Fox declined even to submit numbers for executive and minority-themed project procurements, respectively.

As unduly Caucasian as the television landscape can appear, these reports, staples since the Big Four networks agreed in 1999 to increase diversity, come off more dire and less connected than the television you know and love. They read as though downloading has not yet been invented. This year's reports generally praise ABC for its diversity in casting shows such as "Lost" and "Grey's Anatomy" and the overall Latino vibe of its Wednesday night lineup, which features "The George Lopez Show" and Freddie Prinze Jr. in "Freddie."

Beyond that -- Native Americans aside, of course -- idiot box progress is presented as mixed yet hopeful. Again.

In fact, television has never contained a greater percentage of colored faces and programming written and produced by such people. Myrka Dellanos, Sujin Pak and Dave Chappelle are, for small example, television personalities of large influence and heat among certain segments of American culture. Such actors and personalities aren't included in the report cards, which are compiled and presented by the Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition.

The reports count primetime network presence and ignore all else, although this year a reality show category has been added. Under those criteria, the partially Spanish-language children's phenomenon that is "Dora The Explorer" goes unrecognized. Likewise, Peter Chung's mid-'90s MTV phenomenon "Aeon Flux," one of the greatest influences in the TV animation movement, would not have been counted.

"Programming and networks that rely on young audiences are more likely to show diversity," said Neal Justin, television critic for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and a member of the Asian American Journalists Association. "Let's give credit where credit is due."

Cable representation isn't monitored "because it takes a helluva lot of time, energy, and resources," said Alex Nogales, CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. Limited resources also result in the advocacy groups opting against counting news and sports programming in its diversity studies.

Karen Narasaki, chair of the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition, said her organization has had UCLA graduate students count the screentime accrued by Asian talent on cable.

"If you look at MTV, for example, they do a better job than the networks on any given night," Narasaki said. "The same is true of Lifetime."

Most of the channels -- cable or broadcast -- are owned by the same media companies, which means they deserve some blame for keeping the color in cable. If Viacom, for example, thought its Comedy Central and MTV stars would keep their advertisers and audiences satisfied, the corporation would find a place for them on primetime network shows, which play to much larger audiences. Stars, producers, and writers of cable shows are generally paid less than their network counterparts.

"I don't think we should downplay the problems with broadcast networks," Justin said. "They're still doing a crummy-to-mediocre job."

Justin used the example of NBC's "ER" and its depiction of Asians.

"In Chicago [where the drama is set], you can't avoid an Asian doctor," says Justin, yet he estimates that only two have appeared on the show. This, he says, is due to the politicization of television minority representation, as well as black scriptwriters' relative success in breaking Hollywood's color barrier. On the positive side, he cited an episode of "Grey's Anatomy" in which the title character "had a one-night stand with a South Asian, and there was no reference to it. That's just the way it was. You gotta give that props."

The fact that media observers even have to count the odd instance of apparent color-blind casting makes Narasaki, a fourth-generation Japanese-American, chafe. The media monitor said primetime shows about high school fail because network writers lack experience with integrated public school education and sketch portraits that bear little resemblance to actual life. This ignorance filters down to minor characters who aren't incidentally Asian, whether they're walking in airports or working in office buildings.

"I should be able to see myself in any role," she said. "I'm looking forward to the day when Asian-Americans are just like any other people."

The Asian and Latino reports generally give the four major networks B-to-C grades. CBS -- traditionally the lowest scoring, according to the Asian Coalition -- earned a C-, and ABC scored highest with a C+. The Latino media council also gave ABC its highest grade, a B, while CBS, Fox and NBC all earned C+ grades. Native Americans in Television and Film gave all of the networks failing grades. And representatives from the networks said, again, that diversity is important and they will try to increase it.

Despite the impact of cable television, which pioneers more daring shows and is generally more integrated, the monitors of the TV Report Card are going to continue to hammer away at network TV.

"The reality is that the networks have a lot more of the audience," Narasaki said. The monitors take umbrage at the assertion that their approach is dated. They're not going to shift their attention from the single-digit channels on your TV, where network programming is, to the cable channels. And they're not going to stop focusing on prime time.

"It's not in sports. It's not in news. It's not in children's programming," Nogales said. "It's in primetime. You have to go to where the most eyeballs are."

The Way of All Weeklies

Merry Christmas, Los Angeles.

The present's in the mail. Word got out and blew from Phoenix to New York and back out west beginning on Labor Day: The long-rumored corporate takeover of "alternative" news-on-print is indeed on order.

After the holidays, Phoenix-based NT Media takes control of The Village Voice, which in 1994 bought L.A. Weekly. NT Media - or, more familiarly, New Times - would assume the Voice name and take over not so long after one of the most shameful chapters in domestic alternative print press history: the 2003 Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against the L.A. Weekly and New Times ownership. Now they're no longer merely in bed together. They're hitched up like a stateside Charles and Camilla, and valued at $400 million.

The L.A. Times is also in some flux, with a new editor in local news- hound Dean Baquet and rumors of suitors sniffing about. Take into account the emerging cultural relevance of this publication, and you've got on tap a Goliath vs. Goliath (vs. David) newspaper fight unlike anything this town has seen. An old-fashioned journalism war. In lieu of pro football.

At stake is the future of progressive journalism. The unofficial truth has seemingly been forever under attack by major multinationals and short attention spans. Its politics are heavier than big media allow, and its formal freedom queers pollsters and consultants. Like its nephew the Internet, the best of the nation's weeklies (The Stranger, Willamette Week, The Boston Phoenix) are charged ions. Now a group of libertarians disguised as Men Without Politics are preparing to set the tone.

Full disclosure: I was a former staff writer and union local president at the L.A. Weekly. The publisher of CityBeat once toiled for the New Times chain. And a whole mess of the editors used to be at the Los Angeles Reader when it was bought and summarily flushed by New Times. The 2003 Department of Justice Consent Decree that ended the antitrust suit literally refers to this paper as an "Interested Party." And this writer hates to lose.

It happens, once every 3,000 blue moons. Sometimes the arrival of a chain is good. And, as objectively as can be stated under the present circumstances, New Voice Times will be good for journalism in Los Angeles.

Journalism backwater

Unless you're hauling your telephoto lens around stars' back fences, Los Angeles is an absolute journalism backwater, an amorphous, misunderstood collection of municipalities with as much day-to-day reporting buzz as, say, Tampa. New York is royalty; on a second tier are the Phillys, Chicagos, and San Franciscos. But our town has no competition at the daily print level, and Hollywood owns TV. That's why L.A. Weekly, established back in 1978, is iconic among hip people of a certain age. Some of the most important reporting and criticism in alternative-press history has come across its pages.

At the same time, it's important to know that parts of this article were composed on New Times computers. CityBeat was, in part, built out of that 2003 Dept. of Justice decision mentioned above. Village Voice LLC, owner of six papers, and New Times, which has 12, were made to sell off some of their assets more than two years ago, after the media companies shut down competing operations here and in Cleveland. Actual competitive journalism was happening in the two cities. And, as actual competitive journalism is something like a war, it costs money.

"Rather than letting the marketplace decide the winner," Acting Assistant Attorney General H.R. Hewitt Pate said, in the 2003 federal consent agreement, "these companies chose to corrupt the competitive process by swapping markets, thereby guaranteeing each other a monopoly and denying consumers in Los Angeles and Cleveland the continued benefits of competition."

If one listened closely enough that day, audible was I.F. Stone doing a half-gainer in his crypt. Could there be a bigger fuck-you to the ideals of a free and independent press than to conspire against alternative voices in two of the nation's greatest cities? And to commiserate this way during the run-up to war in Iraq?

There's a luxuriant romance to how we regard these weeklies. Truth is, Michael Ventura and Norman Mailer don't come 'round much anymore. The Weekly and the Voice have long been run by investors who contribute to Bush, who sell pet food, not to mention having been run by Rupert Murdoch. Voice Media greed is not unexpected. That brand sells as culture product for Manhattan and Hollywood, and it's not completely absurd to speculate that, if the hot publishing trend became Boiled Negroes Monthly, they'd at least explore the option.

A pioneering newsweekly

New Times is supposed to be different, though: It's the ultimate college newspaper story. Back in 1971, Lacey, an ace reporter and peripheral Arizona State student, and his business-minded partner Larkin started a newspaper in large part to provide honest reporting in Phoenix about Vietnam. Arizona State's New Times was a slap in the face for disenchanted Arizona Republic readers. Over the course of years, this endeavor developed into a pioneering newsweekly - Larkin and Lacey played with their newspaper category as they found the word "alternative" to be too tied to leftism. New Times papers have generally been happily tin-eared in their culture section, but in that the papers sounded specifically like Larkin and Lacey and racked up national ad revenue.

"They never bought the 'alternative' thing," said Lisa Davis, a former staff writer at NT Media's Phoenix and San Francisco papers. "In that way, they were alternative."

Lacey and Larkin, both in their 50s, purchased the Denver paper, Westword, in 1983, further establishing the company. Engagements with investors began by the '70s. A decade later, this sort of activity stepped up a level with an early effort to buy the Voice, which was followed by a purchase of the SF Weekly. This meant that such purchases and investments (such as its ad juggernaut The Ruxton Group, which sells to 26 "newsweeklies") had to be extremely streamlined. NT Media's business model was at the time the envy of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

The chain blew into Los Angeles in 1996 and bought up the Reader and Village View for a total of nearly $4 million. In putting together a competitor to the Weekly, whose politics Lacey and Larkin openly abhorred, they paid twice what the properties were worth. But that was Lacey. As a journalist, he'd throw thousands of dollars and hours at stories. Here was a passionate man who wanted Los Angeles. And he evidently didn't care who he stepped on to get it. According to eyewitness reports, Lacey marched into the office of the Village View and simply announced in person that nearly everyone was fired.

Former L.A. Reader managing editor Erik Himmelsbach wrote about Lacey's grand entrance there in a piece published in the L.A. Alternative Press in 2002:

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