“From journalists…the greatest need of the moment is sound analysis of the U.S. empire and the focusing of the news spotlight on its far-flung sinister operations.”
Over three days in late June, 1970, the Department of Journalism of Lincoln University, in Jefferson City, Missouri (USA), hosted the National Conference of Black Newsmedia Workers. The conference was organized “to discuss ways of dealing with problems confronting black media workers,” especially the “growing repressive atmosphere” in the United States and the “threat of official harassment and intimidation” of journalists and newspeople. Indeed, that spring, Earl Caldwell, a Black investigative reporter with the New York Times, had been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the Black Panther Party — effectively being forced by the federal government to be an informer against the Black community.
The conference keynote was given by William Worthy (July 7, 1921 – May 4, 2014), a correspondent with the Baltimore Afro-American who had long maintained a radical, independent, and uncompromised stance in his reporting. Worthy had his passport revoked when he defied the US ban on travel to the People’s Republic of China and, without a passport, he travelled to Cuba in 1961 to report on the Cuban Revolution. Early on, he opposed the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and he wrote against US meddling in Iran.
Worthy was, in short, an uncompromising anti-imperialist – a point hammered home in his keynote address at Lincoln University. The keynote was titled “Reporting the News in the Heartland of Empire.” In it, Worthy points to both the increasing political repression in the United States and the fact that most, if not all, mainstream media effectively served as the mouthpiece of US imperialism. He also argues that the threat to a free press was not only political, but also economic: corporate power merged with state power, effectively making journalists the scribes of imperialism and capitalism — both juiced by racism.
Are there any William Worthys in today’s media landscape? While the Black press that he wrote for has been obliterated, the white (mainstream) press has unabashedly embraced corporate monopoly, US imperialism, white supremacy, and support of zionism. Investigative reporting has been replaced by blatant imperial propaganda and media manipulation in support of U.S. and western power exertion. We need only look at the recent white western media frenzy around Iran where the media attempted to provide cover for US and zionist savagery in the form of a color revolution. But we could also mention media coverage of Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, China, and almost all of Africa.
These are dire times for radical journalists and other news media workers. They remind us that, now more than ever, we need an independent, radical Black press — and champions of anti-imperialist journalism like William Worthy.
We reprint William Worthy’s “Reporting the News in the Heartland of Empire” below.
Reporting the News in the Heartland of Empire
William Worthy
In 1935, in Seattle, one of my college professors – a sociologist who has over the decades been fired from three or four schools – heard Dr. Harry Ward, a radical clergyman, say something that is still very contemporary. He said:
The Establishment respects ability, however much it dislikes your views, and it tries to use that ability for its own purposes. The result is that we radicals, we dissenters, we revolutionaries operate in an area of tolerated activity, which the Establishment judges will be unable to interfere with its substantive socio-economic control. But we radicals literally bet our lives that that tolerated activity will subvert the established order.
Last year, in Ireland, in a speech to the Irish Management Institute, David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, said essentially the same thing. He remarked:
Business must continue to be profit-oriented, but at the same time we must keep in close contact with men who are not essentially profit-oriented – that troublesome but creative minority of intellectuals who can help us to identify emerging social problems before they reach crisis proportions.”
In other words, in this complex society they need us. And our problem in a nutshell is to do our work without letting ourselves be used for their counter-revolutionary ulterior motives. In one of her books Hannah Arendt wrote: “He who understands revolution understands the future.” May I amend her remark: “He who understands counter-revolution understands the United States.
In the heyday of the British empire the three most important white men stationed in each colony were the colonial governor, the Anglican bishop and the correspondent of the Times of London. Within the colonial framework each of them had his own clear and distinct function. In discharging those functions each complemented the other, because their bosses back in Britain – the Labor or Tory government, the Church of England, and the owners of the Times of London – were equally committed to the perpetuation of empire.
Let’s imagine that, as each British colony pressed harder and harder for political independence, the Church of England substituted a “native” Epicopalian for the white bishop. Let’s imagine that the Times of London, the voice of empire, had bought a little time by integrating their colonial bureaus with a few “native” journalists. If we think of U.S. ghettos and the Black Belt as de facto economic colonies, we can better perceive the parallel. To avoid being little more than journalistic “natives” in a conservative media milieu, we should take advantage of this conference to organize solidly and to construct a base for our collective integrity and our collective dignity. This is not an impossible task. In its present state of doom and gloom the system definitely feels that it needs us.
My hunch is that most persons at this conference have been hired by their present employers during the last three to five years of internal and external crisis. Within the white media what is our day-to-day role supposed to be? What in reality is our individual and collective situation today? Why is there so profound a sense of distress and so much uneasy soul-searching in our ranks?
We are media workers — with the emphasis on the workers — in a press that tips its imperialistic hand by glorifying in Vietnamese body counts.
We are media workers in a profit-making press with a built-in conflict of interest. Why should we expect the press branch of the U.S. Establishment to have any strong professional desire to report on the marauding activities of other segments, brother segments of that same U.S. Establishment — in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, in the Middle East. At a Nieman seminar a dozen years ago Ed Lahey of the Chicago Daily News pointed out the system’s interlocking relationships when he joked about “the State Department and its affiliated oil companies in the Middle East.” There are wheels within wheels that never get reported to the U.S. public. In 1960, “Yanki, No!”— an honest documentary film on the Cuban revolution on which I worked with an honest camera crew — was almost barred from network television because a top news executive with business connections at United Fruit Company didn’t like our factual presentation. In the year 1970 it is the part of wisdom to assume that the Central Intelligence Agency has infiltrated its wheels into fairly high positions in all the important media.
We are media workers in a press that has the audacity to put quotation marks around the word “U.S. imperialism” in order to convince the people that no such thing exists — and this at a time when that very U.S. imperialism is waging and escalating one of history’s filthiest and most brazen colonial wars. For three hundred violent years the people who have molded U.S public opinion, including many in the press, have been masters of indoctrination, masters of counter-revolution, masters of intrigue.
After World War II, the old European empires were too weakened to carry on. U.S. neocolonialism, already strong in Latin America, came into its own in every corner of the globe. Twenty-three years ago, the CIA was established in order to globalize, to institutionalize, to formalize, to tighten up the process of counter-revolution, the process of intrigue, seduce and then plunder the entire world. Those who run the U.S. empire assigned to the CIA a very broad and indispensable jurisdiction: To forestall, to abort, to buy off and to crush anti-imperialist revolution on every continent. Since imperialism is a racist racket, its pious beneficiaries are reduced to spouting gangster logic to sanctify the plunder and the violence. The heartless enforcers of empire use Mafia methods.
The 1947 law setting up the CIA barred the agency from operating within the U.S. Only the naive could have expected obedience to that restriction once the Muslims and the Panthers and SNCC and SDS began adapting a strong anti-imperialist line. Especially in the darker countries the CIA for 23 years has bribed and assassinated inconvenient men of color – including editors and reporters. And five years ago here at home, in front of 500 witnesses, Malcolm X was boldly cut down in a hail of CIA bullets.
Given the reactionary drift of events and given our professional duty to communicate to the public the significance of what is going on, the day will surely come when one faction or another in the CIA will decide that some of us participating in this conference must be “liquidated.” They’ll probably pay a cut-rate Jim Crow price to some Harlem gangsters to carry out the “contract.”
We are a handful of underpaid media workers – a handful of hired hands – in a country where the Far Right is spending an estimated $50-million annually. That money is used to bamboozle a bewildered public opinion with false and simplistic answers to political complexities on 10,000 radio broadcasts each week.
We are unarmed media workers in a country whose top brass has gone berserk in the face of defeat in Vietnam and is now thrashing around in all of Indo-China. James Boggs of Detroit believes that in late April the military presented Nixon with a fait accompli in Cambodia. If this is a correct surmise, it would help explain those tricky contradictions in Nixon’s speeches of April 18 and May 1.
Let’s not be naive about U.S. generals. Just as the CIA moved logically from assassinations in Africa to assassination in Harlem, so the military is quite capable of staging many Mylais, many “Pinkvilles,” on militant campuses and in zones of resistance here at home. We have our notebooks and typewriters, and history tells us that in the long run we are likely to win. But they have the guns, and sooner or later, as the crisis of empire deepens, those guns have to be turned on any of us who disseminate the truth to the American public. Imperialists, said [Indonesian] President Sukarno, will always be imperialists – which means they will always be violent, always be crooked, and eternally be treacherous.
While sympathetic and understanding of the Black Panthers, I have tended to be strongly critical whenever they have precipitated shoot-outs and other confrontations that could only end in calamity. And I condemn those white radicals who have cheered the Panthers on to self-destruction. I hope that new young militant journalists can skip that juvenile stage of “proving manhood” with ghetto hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric. I also pray that new young militant journalists will steer clear of that disastrous white thing called “drug culture.” If you are stupid enough to get sucked in and if you get caught, DON’T come to me for sympathy, support or a contribution to your bail fund. I have more worthy causes to rally behind. Under proficient leadership, the people of China fought one of history’s major revolutions in order to free their country from the white man’s sordid dope, and here we have the ludicrous spectacle of college-educated American youth extolling the “glories” of these enslaving narcotics.
From journalists young and old the greatest need of the moment is sound analysis of the U.S. empire and the focusing of the news spotlight on its far-flung sinister operations. Thanks to the press for which we work, thanks to the education system and the government, the people of this country don’t even know they are living in the capital of a vast and violent empire. They don’t realize that they are living on the backs of most of the other peoples of the world. News is just beginning to leak out that the military-industrial-political Mafia in this country has been secretly handing over tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to the political Al Capones who rule Thailand and South Korea, and that these sub-Mafia thugs then dispatch mercenaries to help guard South Vietnam, Cambodia and other “turf” and territory claimed by the U.S. empire.
By and large, even the racial minorities in this country are woefully ignorant about the workings of the U.S. empire. They cannot move effectively and cannot struggle intelligently toward liberation until they have the facts and the correct interpretation of the facts. Only when we as journalists do our jobs properly and help to raise the level of popular understanding will the liberation struggle move upward to a higher level from its present pathetic and ostentatious rut of dashiki, drums, egoism, comb and hair pick.
There are endless stories about the empire at home that are not being covered. CIA agents in college faculties and administrations. CIA agents swarming over poverty programs and community organizations. To give the devil his due, it is considerably easier in 1970 to publish well-researched, fully documented reports and exposes on "sensitive" subjects than it was ten or even five years ago. These incredible resistance fighters in Vietnam have made such a mess of this country and have so thoroughly demoralized our rulers that serious and informative articles now get published in mass circulation newspapers and magazines, and revealing television documentaries reach tens of millions of Americans. Among a people hungry at last for understanding and clarification there is today a market for meaningful news, and the profit-oriented lords of the press are out to satisfy that market to some degree. As one of the old Bolsheviks observed before the Russian revolution, when it comes time to shoot all the capitalists, one of them will sell us the guns.
Amongst ourselves, we can encourage relevant journalism by demonstrating total solidarity with an Earl Caldwell for his highly principled position on the sanctity of a newsman’s sources of information. I also think we should consider establishing an annual William Monroe Trotter award for those in our ranks who most clearly and forcefully reveal the vital links between the foreign racket of neo-colonialism and colonial wars and the domestic racket of racism. Monroe Trotter, who harassed Woodrow Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, had a world view. An anti-colonial award bearing his name would be most appropriate.
And however much the white press may deride and ridicule us, I for one feel we would be well advised to establish now a standby investigatory committee on domestic CIA assassinations, in order to have machinery immediately at hand when the inevitable day arrives. We 25 million children of slavery are so badly divided and disorganized that we never launched an investigation of Malcolm’s assassination while the leads were hot.
Earl Caldwell may well have some concrete suggestions as to how we can best support him. Perhaps the conference can adopt several standby plans of action – such as a call for a one-day work stoppage by us and our colleagues all the way from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Boston Herald, from KQED to WGBH, from KCBS to WCBS, from WLIB in Harlem to its counterpart stations in Los Angeles and Seattle and the Bay Area. The work stoppage could be called if and when the day comes when Earl Caldwell is hauled into federal court for sentencing. Even a small-scale occupational general strike, involving at the most several thousand of us, would focus world attention on the Caldwell case. It would perhaps inhibit a judge from imposing more than a nominal suspended sentence, and it would suggest the valuable technique of political work stoppages to other occupational groups and to other occupational caucuses – black, brown, yellow and feminine.
The Vietnamese and Cambodians know that Nixon, like Johnson, has locked himself into a long and hopeless war, and they are prepared to struggle for decades. Even though we are not white, we share the typical white American characteristic of great impatience. We want instant peace, instant equality, instant cleansing of the environment, instant revolution. To us even a month is a long time. If I were to make a bet, I’d gamble that the Vietnamese, the Koreans, the Cubans, the Chinese, the Indonesians will demolish the U.S. world empire abroad well before we dismantle racism at home. Many years ago an editorial in the Boston Globe remarked: “...To fight well in confident expectation of victory is the proper valor of youth; the virtue of mature years is to fight equally well in the face of strong prospect of frustration.” And in this social system that hardly seems to budge, we are going to be frustrated again and again and again.
In the crystal ball one can find no firm guarantee that we will win. The possible combinations of variables and circumstances leading to defeat are endless. But if we are self-respecting and hold a commitment to humanity, we have no choice but to struggle and to adopt a hard, tough line for that struggle. Winning is not everything. As Alfred North Whitehead used to tell his philosophy classes at Harvard, “the process itself is the actuality.” That great truth may help us understand why China underwent a cultural revolution in order to save her revolution. The Chinese leaders know that economic and social reconstruction will not be completed for decades, and that meanwhile everything could easily go sour if a huge bureaucracy was allowed to snuff out the people’s revolutionary elan. I don’t know if Fidel Castro has ever read Whitehead, but the Cuban leadership has certainly been aware that “the process itself is the actuality.”
As we contemplate the beacon role we can play as journalists over the next few soul-testing decades, we ought to be able to perceive a clear obligation in this society so urgently in need of regeneration: Individually and collectively, we must “raise a standard to which all honorable men may repair.”
“Reporting the News in the Heartland of Empire,” keynote speech by William Worthy, correspondent of The Baltimore Afro-American, at the first National Conference of Black Newsmedia Workers, Lincoln University, Jefferson City, Missouri, Friday evening, June 26, 1970, 7:00 PM.
Photograph: “Worthy tries renewing his passport again” ( 1964).
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