NORMLIZER - FAILURE OF THE PRESS

In 1992, Richard Cowan was the director of NORML. He was often asked why cannabis prohibition had endured since 1937, despite the commercial popularity and general social acceptance of cannabis in America. Cowan’s two-word reply: “Bad journalism.”

Back then, I wasn’t sure this was entirely accurate. But 15 years later—after archiving tens of thousands of cannabis-related news articles, columns and editorials, as well as being personally interviewed thousands of times in the mainstream media—I believe Cowan to be largely correct. Reading The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation (Alfred A. Knopf) only confirms this belief.

The Race Beat exposes how one of the biggest domestic news stories in the history of American journalism—the injustice of segregation, and the daily toll it took on the lives of black Americans—remained largely ignored by the American press for decades, until media-savvy civil-rights organizers finally developed a strategy for forcing it onto the front pages. Authors Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff believe that an important early turning point in the struggle was a major report written by a Swedish scholar named Gunnar Myrdal, who was hired by the Carnegie Foundation in the 1930s to write a study about race in America.

In an interview on National Public Radio’s On the Media, Roberts said: “To this day, it is probably the most comprehensive study of race in America ever done …. The most important finding was that the press wasn’t covering the story, particularly the Northern press. And [Myrdal] felt that if the press ever started writing about the problems of segregation, that the nation would be so offended that it would demand change. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Strategy-minded civil-rights leaders of the ’50s—especially the younger activists, who became, in Roberts’s words, “serious students of the American press”—realized that the mainstream media of the day was not going to provide regular, sympathetic coverage of the daily discrimination and inequality suffered by the black community. However, the press would cover major, well-conceived public protests against race murders, or major boycotts of city services, like the Montgomery, AL, bus boycott, or tense stand-offs like the attempted desegregation of the University of Alabama. Energized by an informed and engaged media, the nation eventually rose to the moral imperative, and passage of the federal Voting Rights Act soon followed. Commitment to social change and effective, coordinated action by stakeholder/activists got the job done.

The parallels to cannabis prohibition should be clear. Dozens of drug-policy reform groups in the US, including NORML, are challenging the injustice of prohibition and promoting common-sense alternatives. But will the Carnegie Foundation (or a similarly situated, well-respected organization) fund a Gunnar Myrdal type to report on the failure of the American media to accurately report on this nation’s eight-decade war on such a large percentage of its own people: citizens like you and me?—Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of NORML

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