The Color of Coverage
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Howard Kurtz noted in the July 2 Style article "Black Reporters on the Beat of Michelle Obama" that "no one raises questions when an Irish American male reporter covers a pol named Murphy." So it's puzzling that the issue of whether black women are biased toward Michelle Obama warranted a long article from The Post's media critic.
Why do "racial and gender identification" threaten the neutrality of black women but not white men? It is odd that the question posed in the article's subtitle, "Does Race Play a Role in Coverage?," was never asked when the disproportionately white reporters of yesteryear covered Michelle Obama's predecessors. The tone-deafness of this article bordered on prejudice in the explicit mistrust of the perspective of reporters who hail from a different background than the presumably objective Howard Kurtz, a white man.
This article is an excellent example of how biased the media's coverage is -- toward the perspective of white men, who are a minority of the population and who should not be presumed to be either more or less objective than white women or people of color of either gender.
NABIL HASSEIN
Alexandria
