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June 22, 2005
Ken Burns' Jack Johnson
I watched Ken Burns' Jack Johnson documentary again last night on PBS. As Mesh, my wife and my VCR can attest, I am a HUGE Ken Burns fan. I have watched Baseball -- in its entirety -- at least 100 times, and it never gets dull. And don't get me started on The Civil War...
Yes, folks, while you are out watching Lord of the Rings or the latest Star Wars flick, I am often at home watching dramatic accounts of what a musket ball sounded like crashing through a rebel soldier's skull. But I digress...
The Johnson piece was interesting in the choice of quotes that were used to illustrate the racial climate in the early 1900s, namely repeated quotes from New York Times articles and editorials disparaging Johnson based on the fact that he was black, that other people of his race shouldn't feel pride because one of their own won the heavyweight title, and that (after Jess Willard beat him) there would never again be another "colored" champion.
It is quite interesting, that the NYT -- the paper that all of our J-School teachers have always touted as the penultimate standard bearer of respectable journalism -- has such fantastically hateful roots.
Some would argue those roots are still there. That today they are just more cleverly masked for public approval. And aimed -- in a more "enlightened" fashion -- towards things that are more "popular" and "socially acceptable" to be opposed to.
All I know is that, like blood, their ink has always stained the crap out of my hands.
Maybe that's why we always read the Post and the Daily News in my house.
| By colrus | 01:01 AM
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