|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
Anatomy of a Story
Holley is a free-lance writer who lives in Austin, Texas
On Tuesday, January 2, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that a fire that destroyed a rural church in the area the previous Saturday appeared to have been set intentionally. Further, the newspaper reported, the burning might be related to fires that had destroyed three other black Baptist churches in western Tennessee in early 1995, nearly a year earlier. Two of the previous fires had been ruled arson; the third was of undetermined origin but remained under investigation.
"We reported it as spot news," the Commercial Appeal's city editor, Jesse Bunn, recalls. Other papers throughout the South had also covered church fires as spot news, if they covered them at all.
Less than a week later, on January 8, fire broke out in Knoxville, across the state from Memphis, at the 400-member Inner City Church. According to the Nashville Tennessean, the Knoxville fire was the fifth fire set intentionally over the past year at Tennessee churches with black memberships. "Investigators don't believe the fires are linked, but the FBI is trying to determine if there is any evidence of civil rights violations," the Nashville paper reported.
In retrospect, the Knoxville fire appears to have been the catalyst — the incendiary element, if you will — that transformed spot news in various papers across the South into big news across the nation. Within a matter of days, the burnings at black churches became one of those soaring stories that occasionally burst onto the national radar screen, seemingly out of nowhere. Like child sex abuse at day-care centers and recovered memory, to name two, they quickly command national attention, acquire immense symbolic significance, and inspire a spate of national soul-searching. Weeks, months, sometimes years later, they fade, leaving questions in their wake: Was the problem solved or did the media merely lose interest? Had the media at last discovered a phenomenon that had been going on for years, unnoticed and unreported? Or were the media so alert that, in this case, the fires attracted attention as soon as they began flaming up? Or was the whole thing a product of media hyperbole?
The story of the fires at black churches in the Southeast commanded headlines for seven months and evolved through three distinct stages. First was the trend stage, lasting less than a month, in which reporters began to see a pattern. Second was the major-story stage, in which the national media began connecting dots, raising the possibility that the phenomenon was fueled by an atmosphere of surging racial animosity, or even by a nationwide conspiracy concocted by white racist organizations, or by some awful combination of the two. This fevered second stage lasted approximately five months. The third stage, set in motion by a newspaper not known for its investigative prowess and a wire service whose raison d'ętre is spot news, was a time of sorting out and assessment.
The black-church-burning story is a textbook example of what can happen, both good and bad, when journalists are tempted to connect the dots. It's an example of how the media can be distracted, even misled for a while, but, given time, are able to right themselves, regain their balance, and tease out the complex truth.
Reggie White is an all-pro defensive end for the Green Bay Packers. He is also the associate pastor of the Knoxville church that burned in January and the man who, more than perhaps anyone, helped boost the church-burning story to the second stage. When his multiracial church went up in flames, White was preparing for the biggest game of his eleven-year NFL career, a conference championship game against the Dallas Cowboys. Articulate and outspoken, he had the ear of news organizations around the nation, and he wasn't reluctant to see larger and sinister forces at work.
"Until this country starts dealing with organizations that do things like this," White told sportswriter Michael Madden of The Boston Globe, "then we're still going to have problems. I think it's time for the country to take this stuff seriously. It's time to stop sweeping this stuff under the rug because progress in race relations hasn't been made."
"When is America going to stop tolerating these groups?" White asked in a January 12 column by another sportswriter, Thomas George of The New York Times. "It is time for us to come together and to fight it. One of the problems is that the people financing and providing the resources for this type of activity are popular people with money who are hiding under the rug. Some of them may be policemen, doctors, lawyers, prominent people who speak out of both sides of their mouths. That makes it difficult to stop but not impossible. Not when we come together as one force against hate."
When flames consumed three small black churches in the small town of Boligee in rural Alabama, the football player-pastor seemed prophetic, and the national media were ready to run with the ball. "The destruction of the three churches in Greene County, long recognized as one of the poorest counties in America, follows a series of attacks on black churches both in adjoining Sumter County and in nearby Tennessee," Sue Anne Pressley of The Washington Post reported. "It raises anew the disturbing specter of a time when the civil rights movement was at its most heated."
Pressley, based in Austin, Texas, was covering Barbara Jordan's funeral in Houston when she was dispatched to Alabama. She noted that church burnings in Alabama "have a particularly dark historical resonance. In a pivotal tragedy in the civil rights movement, four black girls were killed during Sunday School on September 15, 1963, when whites firebombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, about 100 miles east of Boligee."
The Boligee fires also attracted the attention of the Los Angeles Times's Eric Harrison, based in Atlanta. "Church fires are lighting up the night in this isolated corner of the state," Harrison wrote. "The echoes of civil rights-era violence they evoke have been just as shocking as they are painful to the targeted African-American congregations." Harrison quoted Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Birmingham office: "None of us wants to go back in history. Let's hope it's not that."
"But what else could it be?" Harrison asked rhetorically.
Suddenly, black-church arson was one of those stories that cause the back of a reporter's neck to prickle. It was an important story with national implications; it offered clear-cut issues of good and evil, heroes and villains, and the intriguing, unanswered questions of a criminal investigation; it resonated with the heroic tones of civil rights history, particularly when the dateline was Alabama.
Reporters covering the South know that when a story involves civil rights, poverty issues, or criminal justice, one of the most useful clearinghouses of information is the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Alabama. A nonprofit agency that tracks hate groups and promotes racial harmony, the center is inevitably quoted in stories that range from black-church burnings to skinhead activities to a bomb at the Olympics. It has earned a reputation for reliability and well-researched information.
Spokespeople for the Southern Poverty Law Center were reluctant to ascribe widespread church burnings to any kind of organized, wide-ranging effort on the part of white racist groups (even though in one church arson in South Carolina the organization would later file suit against the Ku Klux Klan). On January 19, for example, the center's well-known founder and head, Morris Dees, talked about the Boligee fires to Ronald Smothers of The New York Times's Atlanta bureau. Dees noted that Greene and Sumter counties, both overwhelmingly black, were not areas where white supremacist groups would thrive. He told Smothers that the incidents might be more the result of casual racism than organized racist attacks. "This is deer-hunting season, and you have a lot of hunting clubs up there and a lot of drunk white boys who might be angry at not getting a deer," Dees said. "It's still bigoted, insensitive, and intimidating," he added, "but it's not organized."
But spokespeople for another, lesser-known clearinghouse of information, the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal, were not so circumspect. The CDR, originally called the National Anti-Klan Network, held a press conference in March to release a preliminary report showing a drastic increase in black-church burnings beginning in 1990. "You're talking about a well-organized white-supremacist movement," the Rev. Mac Charles Jones, a CDR board member, told The Christian Science Monitor. On CNN, he called it "domestic terrorism."
Other church leaders and civil-rights spokespeople did not raise the CDR notion of an organized conspiracy by racist organizations, but some of them did view the church fires as fueled by a rising and pervasive atmosphere of racism, an atmosphere nurtured by right-wing politicians.
In its June 3 issue, Newsweek ran a story quoting the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who blamed a "‘cultural conspiracy' — a seeping intolerance fed by white politicians' attacks on affirmative action and immigration." In its July 1 issue, Time alluded to "the national epidemic of violence against black churches" and quoted the National Urban League president, Hugh Price: "The flames of bigotry and intolerance are soaring higher than they have in a generation." In a column that ran in the March 18 issue of Time, national correspondent Jack E. White wrote that the church fires were most likely incited by the resentful, fear-driven rhetoric of Pat Buchanan and other conservative politicians.
The influential New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who writes frequently on race, poverty, and criminal-justice issues, also saw a force at work in the church fires, but a force as old as the Republic. In his May 24 column, he focused on the particularly poignant story of the St. John Baptist Church in a rural area outside Columbia, South Carolina. The little country church, founded by freed slaves, had been viciously vandalized, "KKK" carved into the front door, its pews riddled with bullet holes, its piano destroyed, its Bible and hymnals ripped apart, and the figure of Christ over the pulpit ripped down and torn apart. A brand-new sacrament cloth had been spread open and defecated upon, and graves in the nearby cemetery had been partially dug up.
That vandalism, Herbert pointed out, occurred in 1985. Vandals continued to strike periodically for the next ten years despite efforts by blacks and whites to rebuild and protect the church. Finally, in August 1995, someone burned the church to the ground. For Herbert, the St. John story was an example of how black churches throughout the South had been targeted for years, without anyone outside the affected communities taking notice.
Herbert noted that congressional hearings (convened days earlier by Representative Henry Hyde, a conservative Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee, at the request of Representative John Conyers of Michigan, a liberal Democrat) had been helpful in giving "a little more exposure to a terrible problem that had had a difficult time catching the attention of the media, and therefore the public."
Herbert alluded to the bigger story. "The attacks are not occurring in a vacuum," he wrote. "They are the work of twisted individuals who flourish in an atmosphere that is inflamed, in Mr. Conyers's words, by ‘the rhetoric of hate and blame.'"
The TV networks were also on the story. In May, ABC's Nightline devoted an entire week to race relations, including the latest on the black-church burnings. Nightline's coverage and almost every story — whether newspaper, newsmagazine, or network news — made the point that no evidence had been uncovered that would suggest a regional or nationwide conspiracy, but almost every story also included what The New Yorker's Michael Kelly, in a July 15 article, would call "clear conspiratorial overtones."
In some of the coverage, these two levels of conspiracy — rising hatreds fueled by right-wingers, and organized terrorism — seemed to fuse somehow, as sources, politicians, and journalists labored to explain what seemed to be a widespread epidemic of church burnings.
Newsweek noted in an article headlined "Fires in the Night" (June 24) that "many of these cases remain unsolved, and no one has evidence of any national or regional conspiracy. But the sheer number of black church arsons, which now equals the worst years of white racist terror in the 1950s and '60s, suggests a spreading virus of copycat malice."
"The fires just keep coming, one after the other, mostly in southern states. . . ." U.S. News & World Report observed on June 24.
An epidemic of church-burnings is a compelling issue for politicians, particularly in an election year, and in the House Judiciary Committee's hearings on the fires, which began on May 21, lawmakers heard testimony from officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Black lawmakers and church leaders criticized the government for not taking the fires seriously enough. The New York Times quoted Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat: "I'm concerned at the politeness of this hearing. You've got burned churches and burned history. You have intimidated communities."
The Times also quoted Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, president of the SCLC, and a well-known civil-rights veteran: "We're not surprised by the feeble response to the church burnings. It just represents the fifty-first state in this nation: the state of denial."
Lowery added: "We are witnessing a serious and frightening assault on African-Americans in this country. We must hold accountable the racist groups that fan the flames of intolerance."
Stage two of the church-burning story reached its crescendo in early June, as President Clinton invited a group of southern black ministers and other church officials to the White House, and then used his weekly Saturday radio address to discuss "a recent and disturbing rash of crimes that hearkens back to a dark era in our nation's history." The president mentioned the Matthews Murkland Presbyterian Church, in Charlotte, North Carolina, which had burned to the ground two days earlier; according to the president, it was the thirtieth African-American church damaged by suspicious fire in the South over the previous eighteen months.
"We do not now have evidence of a national conspiracy, but it is clear that racial hostility is the driving force behind a number of these incidents," Clinton said.
It was a reasonable assumption and possibly true, but there were complicating factors in this particular case. Two days later, the authorities in Charlotte arrested and charged a suspect. Although the suspect was white and, according to USA Today, held anti-black attitudes, she was also emotionally disturbed and thirteen years old. There was apparently no connection between the fire she allegedly set and other fires.
The Charlotte incident was one of several telling indications that the church-fire story was more complicated than much of the coverage would suggest.
Of all the news outlets covering the church burnings, it was USA Today that first devoted the time and attention needed to lay out the important subtleties, the complex detail, and the basic facts. As reporter Gary Fields recalls, USA Today started working on the church-fires story one afternoon in February when the editors, prompted by the fires in Boligee, Alabama, and western Tennessee, were about to assign the story to its nightside team. "I'd been on nightside," Fields says, "and I knew what it was like to get stuck with a story like that after five p.m., when all the offices you need to call are closed." Fields, a veteran police-beat reporter at the Shreveport Times and for one year at The Washington Times, was covering the Justice Department at the time. He persuaded editor Dennis Cauchon to let him cover the story.
On that February afternoon, Fields talked to people at Justice and got information about the three fires in Alabama and the four in western Tennessee. He remembers asking one last question: "Are you guys investigating any more fires?" He remembers a pause; they didn't seem to know. "We'll have to get back to you on that."
"By the time they got back, I had found seventeen," he says. He set to work making calls, just as if he were on the police beat back in Shreveport. Taking advantage of the different time zone in some of the southern states, he called NAACP and SCLC offices, state fire marshals, local police, and little volunteer fire departments that don't always turn in records to state authorities. Well ahead of the pack, he was able to report, in late February, that twenty-three black churches had been set afire in the previous thirty-four months.
By April, USA Today had run some twenty stories related to the black-church fires. At that point, Fields recalls, "the editors called in the cavalry." Fields and a dozen additional reporters fanned out across the South. They conducted more than 500 interviews, examined fire records in every southern state, and visited the sites of forty-five church arsons. The paper published the results of its investigation in its June 28–30 weekend edition.
That initial four-page report, perhaps the longest and most comprehensive story USA Today has ever published, included a half-page chart listing arson or "suspicious" fires at black churches since January 1, 1995, with the number of members at each church, when it was founded, the time and date of the fire, damage, insurance, arrests, if any, and other facts. The chart included eighteen fires previously unreported by federal authorities.
why are the churches burning?, the paper's lead headline asked, and its story, by Fields and fellow reporter Richard Price, demonstrated that the answer was far from simple.
In analyzing what it found to be a "surge" in black-church burnings over the last eighteen months, USA Today ruled out "any possibility of a national or even regional conspiracy," and went on: "The evidence, in fact, suggests the opposite: there is no one answer to the frightening collection of torched churches across the South, black and white. The crimes stem from teenage vandalism, public drunkenness, derangement, revenge, insurance or other frauds and, to be sure, open or latent racial hatred. But no single thread runs through the black church arsons."
Yet secondly, the paper's investigation did isolate "two well-defined geographic clusters or ‘arson zones' where black church arsons are up sharply" and the "patterns suggest racial motives." One was a two-hundred-mile oval in the mid-South that encompasses western Tennessee and northwestern Alabama, and the other "stretches across the Carolinas, where the rate of black church arson has tripled since 1993."
Outside those two clusters, which along with possible "copycat" burnings accounted for the recent upsurge of fires, the paper said its investigation "dispels the notion that an epidemic of racially driven arsons has swept the South the last two years. Of the sixty-four black-church fires examined, only four can conclusively be shown to be racially motivated. Fifteen others — most of them in the arson clusters — are consistent in some respects with racist burnings. Ten arsons clearly were not racist and evidence is strong that another seventeen had nothing to do with race." Of the remaining eighteen, USA Today found that four appeared to have been listed erroneously and the other fourteen offered no real clues.
USA Today also presented profiles of some church arsonists. They appeared to have acted from a variety of motives, the paper reported on July 1, and most of them were poor, white, uneducated, and often drunk.
In a phone interview some weeks after the investigative report, Fields was justifiably proud of the enterprise reporting he did on the church-burning story. He strongly believes that churches have been burning for a long time and that journalists never smelled the smoke. Yet he and Price uncovered another factor that complicates any racial calculations.
"The recent concern has risen in part," the two wrote, "because the nation stumbled upon a phenomenon that's gone on for decades and mistook it for something new. The phenomenon: churches of every color are a traditional favorite of arsonists. Although the pace has been declining in recent years, arsonists still torch an average of 520 churches and church-owned buildings a year, a rate of ten a week."
Another national news organization, The Associated Press, followed a week later with an equally useful and thorough piece of public-service journalism. Based on a review of six years of federal, state, and local data, AP's report also questioned what had evolved in the preceding three months or so into the conventional wisdom about black-church burnings.
"Amid all the frightening images of churches aflame," the wire service reported on July 5, "amid all the fears of raging racism, a surprising truth emerges: There's little hard evidence of a sudden wave of racially motivated arsons against black churches in the South. . . . There is no evidence that most of the seventy-three black church fires recorded since 1995 can be blamed on a conspiracy or a general climate of racial hatred. Racism is the clear motivation in fewer than twenty cases."
"If you want to know anything in regard to being counted, go to the insurance people," AP national writer Fred Bayles, who led the investigation, advises. Bayles is part of the AP's special assignments team, one of two new units the wire service has created in the last year and a half. The special assignments team, whose focus is computer-assisted reporting, and the twenty-six-member enterprise department both focus on the news behind the news. On the black-church story, as on most stories the teams do, there was considerable crossover between the two teams. As Bruce DeSilva, head of the enterprise department, recalls, the church-burning investigation grew out of a discussion at one of the team's weekly meetings about how a lot of questions about church burnings had not been answered.
The investigation lasted about four weeks, with most of the reporting concentrated on state offices throughout the South.
The Associated Press spelled out its findings:
• Largely because of a few nights' work by serial arsonists, there had been an eighteen-month jump in the number of church burnings. Such fires are relatively rare in most states, so arson sprees quickly alter the statistical picture. Louisiana, for example, had seven cases of black-church arsons all year; four of them occurred in one night in the Baton Rouge area.
• The number of white-church fires also has increased. Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Virginia have seen more fires at white churches than at black churches since 1995.
• Evidence points to racially motivated arson in twelve to eighteen of the seventy-three fires the wire service counted since 1995, while racism is unlikely in fifteen of those black-church fires. (Black suspects were named in nine of those fifteen; another six of the fifteen churches were burned as part of arson sprees that included both white and black property.)
• In the remaining dozen cases where there have been arrests, the question of racism is more subtle. The gallery of suspects includes drunken teen-agers, devil worshippers, burglars, and three separate cases where firefighters are accused of setting blazes they then helped put out.
Right-leaning commentators, both print and electronic, were quick to use the USA Today and AP findings as proof that the six-month-long focus on black-church burnings was a concoction of the liberal media. White churches also burn, they pointed out, and black church members have been known to start fires as well.
Under the headline a church arson epidemic? it's smoke and mirrors, Michael Fumento wrote on the July 8 op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal that "this supposed ‘epidemic of hatred' is a myth, probably a deliberate hoax. There is no good evidence of any increase in black church burnings. There is, however, compelling evidence that a single activist group has taken the media and the nation on a wild ride."
That group, charged Fumento — an attorney formerly with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and now a columnist and the science correspondent for Reason Magazine — is the Center for Democratic Renewal. "The CDR's agenda," Fumento wrote, "goes well beyond rooting out genuine bigotry; the group tars mainstream conservatives with the same brush as racist criminals."
Fumento, who acknowledged that "arson committed against a house of worship is a heinous crime," relied on figures from the National Fire Protection Association that showed a dramatic drop in the number of incidences of church arson in recent years. He also charged the CDR and the media with encouraging copycat arsonists.
"Here lies the ultimate irony," Fumento concluded. "By claiming there has been an epidemic of black church burnings, it appears that the CDR and the media may have actually sparked one. They have also fomented tremendous racial division and caused great fear among southern black churchgoers. What the Ku Klux Klan can no longer do, a group established to fight the Klan is doing instead."
It isn't necessary to agree with all Fumento's charges to argue, as Michael Kelly did in his July 15 article in The New Yorker, that the media were fanning flames. Kelly, soon to be editor of The New Republic, wrote that black-church burnings were happening in the Southeast for many months before the mainline media and the politicians of both parties paid any attention. "Then," he wrote, "in a case of overreaction that seems to have been inspired in roughly equal measure by genuine concern, guilt, and self-interest, they leaped on the bandwagon with a near-hysteria as misplaced as their previous indifference."
In his view, President Clinton and his administration, the congressional leadership of both parties, the national media, religious groups, and political-interest groups from both sides of the spectrum "have lent credence to the idea that the country is in the grip of what the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Deval Patrick, calls ‘an epidemic of terror' — an orgy of black-church burnings, inspired by a resurgence of racial hatred and with clear conspiratorial overtones, that may properly be compared to the attacks on black churches during the civil-rights years." Kelly seemed to see almost a conspiracy to simplify.
Now that the glare of an airline explosion and a bomb at the Olympics have captured media attention, the truth we are left with about arson at black churches seems to be this: there has been an increase in the reported number of black-church burnings in the South. In some of those fires, racist hatred was the motive. But other causes also came into play, including vandalism and pyromania. White churches also burn. The Associated Press, in fact, counted seventy-five white-church fires and seventy-three black-church fires since 1995. If there are, as presumed, more white churches than black churches in the nation, the wire service pointed out, those numbers "suggest a bias." Yet there does not seem to be a widespread organized racist conspiracy, despite the efforts of some to portray one.
Comprehending the more complex truth, as USA Today's Gary Fields points out, required healthy skepticism in the face of large claims, and good old-fashioned reporting. And it took hurry-up journalism's missing ingredient: time.
Claudia Smith Brinson, an editorial writer and columnist with The State in Columbia, South Carolina, points out another requirement for parsing out the facts: knowing the community. Brinson, who has closely followed the vandalism and fire at St. John Baptist and at other churches in the Columbia area, says that journalists, whether working on church fires or domestic violence or any other complex story, "should keep working backwards until they get to deep beginnings."
As July became August, as USA Today's Fields was asking questions about TWA Flight 800, and as the AP's Fred Bayles was resting up for the rigors of the Republican convention, it happened that a black teenager in Greenville, Texas, site of a cluster of fires in June, including two black-church fires, confessed to setting them. He did it, he told the police, because he was angry at his mother for not letting him stay with her, and because he claimed she used drugs.
The fires in Greenville had "deep beginnings," to use Brinson's phrase, in the experiences of a troubled youngster, experiences not unrelated to racism, perhaps, but not nearly so visible and obvious as the fires he confessed to lighting.
