Who's the head white guy?

That quote came from Jay Leno (at least, according to Joseph H. Brown in the Tampa Tribune) in his comic monologue in the aftermath of Michael Richards' recent racist outburst. Richards, it seems, sought out Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his effort to apologize to blacks in this country that were offended by his comments (and, presumably, to salvage some chance at a future career).

Why are Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson the de facto "spokespeople" for the entire black community in America? As the Tampa Tribune points out, this presumed lack of diversity is "more racist" even than Richards' epithets.

And, Mark Byron adds an additional perspective on his blog (which got me thinking this direction in the first place)... evangelical Christians have such purported spokespeople, too, spokespeople that most of the evangelical Christians in my community could care less about. Why are Pat Robertson and (to a lesser degree) Jerry Falwell still quoted so consistently? I can understand James Dobson... he certainly is a massively influential leader. I can understand Rick Warren, too. But Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell?

I'm sure other groups of every political stripe have the same not-necessarily-representative spokespeople appointed for them in the media. It's an issue of convenience, I'm sure, and the need for quick turnaround and attention-grabbing soundbites, that drives the trend. But it's not benign by any means.

I would love to see news reporting that, even (or especially) in the early stages of a story, is focused on fact-gathering and confirmation of details, and minimizes the "opinions and reactions" angle. For example, consider the recent story of the six imams getting kicked off a US Airways flight. I still don't have a clear picture in my head of what happened, because the news reports rushed out without sufficient detail, or without confirming what they were told, and focused on opinions and reactions from various involved individuals or national advocacy groups. How can we evaluate those opinions without knowing what happened?

Were the six imams led off in handcuffs, or not? For quite a while I heard that they were, then more recently I heard that they were not. Did they cooperate with airline personnel with regard to their seating arrangements or not? Were they praying in the terminal or on the airplane, or both? Why exactly did the pilot determine that they were a risk to the safety of the flight? What is their explanation for getting seatbelt extenders that they didn't use?

And why were none of those questions answered (and most of them not even asked) in the news reports I read and heard? With so many witnesses on the plane and in the terminal, why did news organizations have such a hard time getting reliable eyewitness reports, correlated with other eyewitness reports, to determine what really happened, even within the first day after the event occurred? As far as I know, that didn't happen, and misinformation was propagated for days before much-belated corrections became available.

For a much worse, costly, even disastrous example of how such sensational, uncorroborated reporting can go awry, one need only look at the situation in the Superdome in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

I wish we as a society could learn to care more about questions of fact, more about the "what really happened", than about the sensationalism of the offended parties, the politically-motivated spin of the advocacy groups, or the staged debates on "news" programs between uninformed "experts" spouting opinions that are as controversial as possible in an effort to be sensational and get more viewers. They'll keep doing it as long as we're watching.

Mark