Interview: Howard Witt

For the past four years, the Chicago Tribune's Howard Witt has been based in Houston as a civil rights correspondent and Southwest bureau chief. Witt's stories have probed legal discrimination that has led to uneven justice for whites and blacks in small towns such as Jena, La., and Paris, Texas. Witt has been with the Tribune for more than 22 years with stints as an international correspondent. He also served as editor of the Washington City Paper and briefly joined an Internet start-up. In this edited transcript, the veteran reporter talks with the Maynard Institute about his interactions with bloggers and other journalists regarding his stories on race in the South.

How long have you been Southwest bureau chief for Chicago Tribune?

I've been in [Houston], Texas, four years [and with the Chicago Tribune] since 1982, with the exception of about three years. Twenty-two years altogether. I've been at the Tribune most of my career. From '99 to 2001, I was doing some Internet stuff and other stuff and then came back to the Tribune.
What were you doing Internet-wise?

Pursuing pipe dreams. My timing was really bad: I joined an Internet start-up about three months before the crash, 2000. So that was a disaster. Then I was in Washington, D.C. I was the editor of the Washington City Paper, which is the alternative newspaper. I was there from summer of 2000 until right after 9/11, November 2001.

Were you encouraged or intrigued by the blogger reaction to your stories?

I was. The whole experience was kind of an awakening for me as to the even existence this black blogosphere. I didn't really pay much attention to blogs until early this year. I think I shared the stereotype of bloggers that most mainstream journalists have, which is [that] they were this bunch of lunatics sitting in front of the computer screen at midnight in their underwear expostulating on things. I thought it was a bunch of navel-gazing and a waste of time, but I changed my opinion pretty dramatically after the Shaquanda Cotton story.

[In the spring of 2006, Witt wrote about 14-year-old Shaquanda Cotton, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for shoving a school hall monitor in Paris, Texas. That story led to national criticism of the Texas juvenile prison system.]

That story was published in March of last year, and very quickly a day or two after that I started getting a lot of e-mails from people who were encountering that story across the Internet and I was just curious where they were finding that story. I did a little Google searching and discovered that the story had been picked up on a number of these African-American blogs. They were, generally speaking, quite thoughtful and had interesting things to say. It wasn't at all what I had assumed to be of blogs, which is generally a bunch of narcissistic stuff.

I also discovered that this was a very potent way for my stories to get distributed to audiences who would otherwise never see them. People who would never know about the Chicago Tribune or look at the newspaper were suddenly having access to the story via blogs or e-mails from people who saw it somewhere else.

I was discovering the bloggers I think as they were beginning to discover themselves. What I came to discover later, and what the bloggers themselves started to talk about, [was that] prior to the Shaquanda case they were kind of isolated. While they had a few interconnected links to each other, they were mostly a bunch of individuals kind of giving their thoughts on issues of the day.

What happened with the Shaquanda case is that, with the bloggers, a kind of activism started to take root and the blogs themselves kind of organized in this organic way a petition and a letter-writing campaign aimed at the Texas youth prison authority and also aimed at the governor of Texas, demanding that Shaquanda be released and her case looked at again. In addition, there was some protests held in the town where she lives in Texas, and the word about this protest was kind of spread among these blogs.

That resulted in many thousands of petitions and letters being sent to the governor and the Texas prison authority, and that actually seemed to play a pretty significant role in raising the profile of her case. In less than a month after my first story got published she ended up getting released.

That experience with the Shaquanda story kind of opened my eyes regarding what was out there in this Afrosphere, as they call it. And then pretty quickly afterward I wrote my Jena story.

When did your first story about the Jena Six appear?

I wrote a Jena story May 20. That was the first story anybody had written about Jena outside the small, local paper in the region down there. What I did with the Jena story, now that I knew the existence of these blogs, as soon as it went online, I sent a link out to probably a dozen of these blogs that I had been looking at and was kind of impressed by the level of their commentary and I just said, "Here's another story that you might be interested in." Well, that caused a very quick reaction because the Jena [case] had a lot of resonance too. A lot of people tended to get very upset when they heard about what was happening in Jena, and then that story took off instantly.

There was just this huge ferment and attention that was focused on Jena, which as we already know led to more than 20,000 people marching in Jena. The success of that protest owed in very large measure to the attention that was brought to the case by these blogs, which by the time the Jena case happened, we are talking about several hundred blogs on the blogroll. At the same time, these blogs were taking up a lot of other cases. They spent a lot of attention with the Don Imus controversy, and also with the Genarlow Wilson case. And through those cases, basically those are four big cases the bloggers talk about themselves – Shaquanda, Jena, then Imus and then the Genarlow case – those cases seemed to coalesce the existence of this Afrosphere such that they themselves started to talk about the influence they could potentially bring to bear on public policy…

In the future now they're going to have a seat at the table. And the other really interesting aspect about this is there is no single leader. This is not a traditional civil rights organization as such headed by Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. This is an organic, very distributed phenomena. Nevertheless it is incredibly powerful largely because it unites like-minded people and people who are already well-positioned to have an impact on politics. Most of these bloggers are professionals. They have other jobs. They are obviously very tech-savvy and a lot of them work in technology. There's a lot attorneys…

Rather than kind of a scattershot approach, what these blogs do is they put stories of interest and relevance in front of readers who are already inclined to be interested in this story and active about them ... I think that's the power of this stuff.

What role do you think race played in raising the profile of these bloggers? Are black bloggers more influential than white bloggers or leftist bloggers, per se?

Certainly the black bloggers have defined for themselves a particular area of interest and broadly we're talking about civil rights-type issues. I think the difference is, if we're talking about "white blogs," if we're talking about the liberal political blogs like Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, those blogs to me, they're much less interesting. They are basically just regurgitating what they read in the mainstream media, particularly the big-name columnists, Paul Krugman and the rest. It's kind of a hall of mirrors to me, and I find none of it interesting.

But what I find in the black blogosphere you have people who don't profess to be political professionals. They're just ordinary folks coming from a range of interests and professions but they have these very thoughtful takes on the civil rights issues of the day. They bring to bear their own experience and they give voice to a lot of stuff that just doesn't get aired either in the mainstream media or in the kind of liberal blogs. Plus the black blogosphere is not distinguished by a particular political orthodoxy.

It's not like they're all liberals. There's a lot of conservative black bloggers out there who I imagine would vote Republican, but nevertheless they don't hew to a particular political line. They're just interested in issues relating to justice and equality and all that and it's kind of refreshing. They don't read like political screeds.

Interestingly, what the black blogs proved [with Jena] is they don't need for the "white blogs" to pay attention to them for these to become big national stories, to get their story out. They get a lot of attention. They get a lot of results.

How did you get tipped to the case? Was it through Texas activist Alan Bean?

Yeah, Alan Bean saw my coverage of the Shaquanda case, so when he came across the Jena case he was one of the first people from outside Jena to really investigate the case. He went there in January this year, about a month [after] the Dec. 4 beating happened, and he spent about a month down there researching it and finding out it as best he could. We didn't know each other, we never met each other before. He e-mailed me out of the blue and said, "I saw your Shaquanda story. There's this other situation going on in this little town called Jena," and he sent me some links and some information and said, "You might want to check into it." So then I took a trip down there and based on that trip I wrote the story that was published in May.

So, yes, Alan Bean was the guy who first alerted me to that story. But that has been twisted by some of these right-wing bloggers and the local Jena folks as somehow Alan Bean in spoon-feeding me versions of the story. All this nonsense. It's absurd. Alan Bean mentioned the story to me and gave me details in the same way that any source tries to interest a reporter in a story. I then went and did about 60 interviews and spent three weeks researching it and. Alan had nothing to do with it other than alerting me to it.

I talked to him throughout the coverage of the case, I quoted him in number of stories, but I don't think I quoted him in that first story. But he's a source for the story just like anyone else, but his spin or his take had nothing to do with the story I ultimately did.

How difficult was it reporting the Jena case?

When I went there for my first trip -- I spent about four days there -- most of the whites in town refused to talk to me about this case for story. I was able to talk to the mayor but he would only talk to me on the phone for a few minutes. I was able to talk to the school superintendent, but that was only because -- he declined my repeated requests for an interview, so I finally went and stood outside his office in the school administration building and basically said, "I'm not going to move until you talk to me." The family of Justin Barker, the white kid who was beaten up [on Dec. 4] -- they refused to talk to me on that trip and numerous subsequent trips to Jena. They decided that their story was best told by a white supremacist they talked to, a guy named Richard Barrett. They invited this [white supremacist] guy to come and stay with them on the night before the Sept. 20 march. They figured he was the guy the wanted to talk to, so it's like, I can't do anything about that. None of the teachers of the school would talk to me. The principal at the school and the former principal before that, none of them would talk to me. So I approached all those folks, but very few of them were willing to talk.

By contrast most all of the black folks I approached in town were happy to talk to me. And I am not just talking about the Jena Six families. Most of my reporting was not based on those families. They had an ax to grind too, they were interested in spinning the story their way.

I did the same thing I do in any story: I want to talk to all interested people, but if people don't want to talk with me there's not much I can do about it, but give it my best shot.

What did you think about the 12-point rebuttal of your story by the editor of the Jena Times that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor?

That's one of most irresponsible things I've ever seen. I can go through every one of those points and explain how he left out relevant details, he twisted details, he selected details. It's an absurd one-sided exercise that's been taken up by all the right-wing bloggers as somehow proof that the media has twisted the Jena story.

I give you one example, one of his very first "myths." He says that the nooses were somehow a prank. The white kids were copying a [scene] from "Lonesome Dove." That it had nothing to do with threats or racism or anything like that. And there is no white tree, there is no white side of the school.…

That version of the events ignores every available piece of evidence and everything I did, and everything I saw with my own eyes. For instance, I sat outside that high school courtyard for a couple days, because I wanted to see if it was true that white kids and black kids sat on different sides of the courtyard, and sure enough they absolutely do.

The idea that these nooses were an innocent prank.… He insists they weren't a hate crime. Well, here's the people who disagree with that, starting with the principal of that high school, a guy named [Scott] Windham, who opted to expel three white students for hanging those nooses. He didn't think it was an innocent prank. He was later overruled by the superintendent, who said it was a prank. He decided that he wasn't gong to expel these kids and gave them some suspensions instead. So the principal of the school didn't think it was a innocent prank. The black parents in that town didn't think it was an innocent prank. They decided to go before the school board about a week after it to denounce it and the school board wouldn't even listen to them, it wouldn't give them an audience. A couple of weeks later, they finally let one black parent speak for five minutes or something, and address the school board. They all said thank you very much, and went on with the rest of their business. The black parents didn't think it was an innocent prank.

The U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana didn't think it was an innocent prank. In fact he told Congress, he told the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing in October that this was absolutely a hate crime and the only reason the feds didn't prosecute it as such [was] because it would involve minors, and he said the feds are very reluctant to bring down the weight of the federal government on minors for incidents like that, particularly where there was no victim who was physically harmed.

The district attorney from Jena, Reed Walters, the guy who is aggressively prosecuting the Jena Six, he also said that this was an abhorrent crime and an insult against everyone in the town. He gave a press conference on Sept. 19, the day before the big march where he said, "This was an awful act. It was not a prank, but a vicious and crude statement. The people who did it should be ashamed of themselves and mortified at the havoc they've unleashed on the community."

He also went on to say he opted not to prosecute those white kids for hanging the nooses because he said he couldn't find any relevant statute. Which is a contention other people in the community disagree with, but nevertheless, the district attorney didn't think it was an innocent prank… I mean I'm going through this one example about how distorted that article was, and how it conveniently ignored all kinds of facts and other evidence that don't support its conclusion.

It came from a journalist, though...

I don't know if you would call him a journalist. He's the son of the owner of the local paper in Jena. It's a two-man operation.

Well, he portrays himself as a journalist. But also you have the editor of the Alexandria Town Talk saying he saw in this case some of the most egregious breaks in journalistic practice…

You're talking about the interview he gave to Poynter's Web site. I think he made mention how some in the media were dismissing the Dec. 4 incident as a schoolyard fight. He's right about that. This wasn't a schoolyard fight. This white kid was attacked and knocked unconscious. It wasn't a fight. He was coldcocked.

But the Town Talk editor as well as Craig Franklin [of the Jena Times], they tried to setup this straw man argument. They tried to say, "There's never been a proven connection between the nooses and the Dec. 4 incident." Well, that's true, it's never been that simple. The whole issue of why Jena is a story is because those nooses set off a series of racial tensions in that town, and a series of incidents which culminated in the incident on Dec. 4. And the incident on Dec. 4 was related to the nooses in the sense the kid who got attacked, Justin Barker, was best friends with the three kids who hung the nooses.

And once more, the marchers in Jena boiled it down to something simple, and a chant, "Free the Jena Six." But the point is, I don't hear very many people with a whole lot of credibility who are saying you should just free the Jena Six, that these kids were somehow framed for this attack. You can certainly question the evidence whether all six of those charged were involved, but some of them appear to be involved, and there was this attack that happened to this kid. The people with some credibility say they certainly deserve some measure of punishment for what happened, but there's always been a question of proportionality. It's always been, did what they do constitute attempted murder, which is what Reed Walters charged them with? Were they treated the same way that white kids were treated when they were attacking black kids? And the conclusion of a lot of folks who were looking closely at the case was no, there were disparities there.

And that's what gave rise to the outrage. For Craig Franklin to boil it down and say that the media was somehow was making light of it -- that's not the issue. You're talking about a much more subtle situation. So it's all in how you kind of frame it.

Did it disturb you that it was coming from journalists?

Just because you're a journalist doesn't mean you're a good journalist. I mean Craig Franklin just did a story about a week ago, it was an appalling story. I don't know if you know that these white supremacists are planning on doing a march in Jena on Jan. 21, Martin Luther King's birthday. Richard Barrett. He's this white supremacist guy. He's applied for a permit, he's planning on doing a march for white rights groups, in defense of whites in Jena. … What Craig Franklin decides to do is to write a front-page story in the Jena Times detailing all the slogans that the white supremacists are going to chant. They're saying we're going to have a two-mile-long procession. It's going to be bigger than Sept. 20. It's an absurd claim. He's giving it legitimacy like it's really going to happen and quoting the abhorrent slogans that these guys are going to chant. It's not what a responsible journalist does, it's not what you do. But that's [what] Craig Franklin did. So it doesn't trouble me that he's a "journalist" and he's raising these questions. I think he's not a good journalist and not a very balanced journalist.

What about the Associated Press story saying the truth in this matter is a lot murkier?

I can only be responsible for what I wrote. I think that was the [AP] story that tried to make a big deal about the fact that there [were] only two nooses, not three. When I was down there reporting this before anybody else was there, everybody told me it was three nooses and that's what I went with. Later on everybody said, no, it was two nooses. I say, what difference does it make? It doesn't change the impact of what actually happened. To me that doesn't prove anything.

The AP story [that] somehow tried to debunk this followed another AP story done by a different reporter, which talked about the local barbershop. There's a barbershop called Doughty's Westside Barbershop, where it's an all-white barbershop, and they proudly refuse to cut black people's hair. I went in there a few weeks ago and couldn't believe these guys were willing to say this, and sure enough, the proprietor says, "I'm not cutting n-people's hair. They're not coming in this place. If I were to cut their hair then that would just dirty up my instruments." Just the most vile stuff. So, the same AP did a story about that, but then they decided a month later that they were going to raise questions.

My point is, there's some questions that have been raised about what I reported. I only reported the details as they were told to me and the facts that I could discern. I didn't report things that I couldn't verify. One example is there was this supposed incident where Reed Walters, after the noose incident, went in front of the school assembly and supposedly waved his pen and supposedly looked at the black kids and said, I can erase your lives with the stroke of a pen, some quote like that.

When I was down there, I heard people say that happened. I couldn't find anybody who was at that assembly or who could verify for me actually what happened or what was said. So I didn't report that at all, and that doesn't appear in any of my stories. But yet people are trying to say that's an example that this incident never happened and media reporting it are making it up. Well guess what? I didn't report it, because I couldn't verify it. I couldn't find credible people to tell me what happened.

The role of journalism is to get at the truth, and explore deeply with investigative work. But despite good reporting, it seems in the aftermath of Jena, the situation has been deeply polarizing.

Well, it's only polarized by certain people who are inclined to believe that the media tries to distort stuff. I mean, the story of Jena still stands, largely the way I reported it. That's why 20,000 people showed up there.

Everyone was wearing black T-shirts that day, on the front of them they usually [had] a version of "Free the Jena Six" or [an image of] the tree. But on the back of the T-shirts from a whole bunch of folks they reprinted my story. People were walking around Jena with my story on the back of their T-shirts. It was kind of fun. I was amazed when I saw it.

So as far I'm concerned, my version of the events still stands. People can raise as many distortions as much they want. You talk about that [Jena Times'] timeline and the whole Craig Franklin thing, the whole Mychal Bell trial, but when he was put on trial in June you won't find that out by reading the Jena Times, or even the timeline that he puts out. That trial was just rife with irregularities, stuff that just makes you scratch your head and say, what the heck. None of that was reported by Craig Franklin.

For instance, it was an all-white jury. Craig Franklin, in one of his "myths," says the media never says it was an all-white jury because blacks didn't show up. Well, sure, that's probably true, by the point is, why wasn't the jury pool expanded and why wasn't the defense attorney, who did a shockingly bad trial for Mychal Bell, when you read through the voir dire, the jury selection process, which I've done because I have the whole transcript of that trial, it's shocking. Juror after juror is asked, "Do you know the victim in this case?" "Yes." "Do you know the prosecutor in this case?" "Yes." "Are you friends with the family of the victim?" "Yes."

The jury was stacked with people who openly admitted in court that they were either friends with the victim, Justin Barker, or friends with his father, or friends with the district attorney. But the defense attorney declined to challenge any of that and [said], "Okay. Thank you very much. Look forward to having your service."

It was shocking.

Then the trial happened. Who does Reed Walters call as a witness? One of the witnesses they call against Bell is one of the white kids who hung the nooses to begin with. Nobody points that out. The defense attorney doesn't say anything. So you're going to allow one of the guys who created the climate against which this whole racially fraught situation happened, you're going to allow him to testify. That doesn't seem right.

The defense attorney called no witnesses. Put on no defense. Made no arguments. He basically sat down at the end of the prosecution and basically said, "Thank you very much." And of course Mychal Bell is convicted. That conviction was ultimately overturned on appeal and sent back to juvenile court, but nevertheless. None of what I just told you appears in the Jena Times account of the trial. Why? Because it doesn't fit his version of what he wants the world to think about what happened in Jena.

It's part of why I tell you that he may claim to be journalist, but he's not any kind of journalist that I am accustomed to working with.

You are white, correct?

I actually find it entertaining. A lot of the bloggers think I am black, and they give props to brother Howard Witt. And you know, I'll take that as an honor. But, no, I am Caucasian.

What do you think of your role as a white reporter covering this story?

I honestly don't think it makes a difference one way or another. I am a reporter. I go and ask people questions and try and find out what's going on. And whether I am black or white or Indian or Asian or whatever, I just don't see where that makes a difference, one way or another.

People will choose to talk to me or they won't, but I don't think it's based on the color of my skin. I think it's based on the kind of questions I am asking or whether they think it's in their interest to talk to me, whether I scare them or put them at ease or whatever. I work with many black colleagues, they do the same thing I do. Certainly, my skin color has nothing to do with the fact that I think these are interesting and important stories that should be told. I don't think that skin color determines the beat you're going to cover, or the stories you're interested in.

I can certainly make use of my skin color when I am talking to racist yahoos because many of them will assume that I must be sympathetic to the nonsense that they're spewing. Had I been a black guy walking into that shop, [the owners] would not have used the n-word. He would not have been as forthright. He probably would have been more circumspect. But by the same token, there's people that a black reporter can talk to that I can't talk to and get the same degree of candor.

I feel when I talk to African Americans in these towns, they're willing to share with me and talk to me about their experience. On the other hand, I don't know what they're not telling me, because, perhaps they're suspicious because the color of my skin. I don't know what more a black reporter would get in a similar circumstance. So that stuff works in your favor, sometimes works against you.

You've been an assignment editor. I wonder if that's a good strategy to employ in covering a story?

Maybe. That might be a factor sometime, but for the most part, no. Your race might be a factor, or it might work against you in one interview, and it might hurt you in the next interview an hour later. I would be much more inclined to send a reporter who I thought had the skills and sensitivity to go do a story like that, and it wouldn't matter to me what race the reporter was. If they're a good reporter, a) it's not going to affect the way they're going to do the story and it's not going to make them biased one way or another, and, b) it might help you in one case and hurt you in the next.