Study Assails Nyc News Media on Black Anti-semitism Treatment in School Strike

New York’s News media are accused of badly handling the issue of Black anti-Semitism raised during the New York City teachers’ strike from Sept. 9 to November 18 last year and of failure to “hold the accusers accountable for their words and their deeds.”

The criticism of the press, TV and radio was made in a lengthy study in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review published quarterly under the auspices of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. The author is Fred Ferretti, a member of the staff of the New York Times, who was a WCBS-TV correspondent during the strike and covered it for his station.

The author charged that the depth of Black anti-Semitism was greatly exaggerated and accused Albert Shanker, president of the United Federation of Teachers, of major responsibility for raising and pressing the issue. He said the strike originally began over the decision to give communities control over their schools on an experimental basis. Opponents of the educational experiment, he said, “needed something to demonstrate that it couldn’t work, something to obscure the educational nature of the experiment. Black anti-Semitism became that ‘something.’ “

It was, according to Mr. Ferretti, “an issue fearful enough to make the liberal group which favored educational reform back away, it was, moreover, an issue which, once discovered by the UFT and its president, Albert Shanker, could be neutralized only by an alert and responsible press. As we shall see however, the communications media in most cases repeated docilely the utterances of the sowers of hate; they merely recorded hysterical accusations usually made just prior to deadline, giving them credence beyond which they deserved; and in general, they failed to hold the accusers accountable for their words and their deeds.”

The newspapers and other media, Mr. Ferretti asserted, made no efforts to make Mr. Shanker define the terms “extremists” and “vigilantes” which, the writer said, he used “at every opportunity.” He noted that when the New York Civil Liberties Union issued an investigative report which, he said, accused Mr. Shanker of having systematically tried to “sabotage” the experimental school program, “it received scant attention, except in Harlem’s weekly Amsterdam News.” Ironically, he said, the report was “bigger news” early this year when some members of the NYCLU protested it as political and forced a debate on whether it should have been issued.

According to the writer, the media gave considerable prominence to a report issued by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith charging widespread Black anti-Semitism during and after the strike and accusing the city officials of doing nothing to check it. But, he said, a critical analysis of the ADL report by Prof. Leonard J. Fein, associate director and director of research for the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, “received no public circulation.” Prof. Fein is also chairman of the commission on community interrelations of the American Jewish Congress.

According to the writer, “there was, with the predictable exception of Harlem’s Amsterdam News, no real effort made to present the black man’s side of the conflict.” Mr. Ferretti concluded that “the pattern, then, is one of sobering shortcomings in media initiative and perspective, one which demonstrates the frightening ease with which clever demagogues can manipulate a sensitive issue in a vast metropolis- one, in short, which should discomfit all media in the media capital of the nation. The question now is what lessons have been learned, and which will be applied? Surely the answer cannot be ‘none’. For the lessons are too clear to be missed-and the social cost of ignoring them is far too high.”