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Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6922
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 01, 2008 - 11:46 pm: | 
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CNN's 'Black in America' opens with a look backward
By JOANNE OSTROW
THE DENVER POST
An ambitious multipronged, multiplatform, big-deal initiative from CNN has great potential to really amount to something. Maybe even a multisomething.
"CNN Presents: Black in America" is intended as an overarching TV and digital project for the news network's brand, a four-month push beginning on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., including six hours' worth of documentaries and additional reports.
The project is supposed to reveal "the real lives behind the stereotypes, statistics and identity politics that frequently frame the national dialogue about black America."
You've seen nightly news reports about inner-city violence, and you've heard analysis of how blacks voted in specific primaries. Now CNN intends to look beyond all that. Supplementing the documentaries, weekly updates are scheduled for April and June on topics including childbirth and marriage rates among blacks, high rates of HIV/AIDS, achievement gaps in education, careers, and disparities in life-expectancy rates between blacks and the general population.
All worthy and potentially informative topics.
But the opening volley of "Black in America" is distinctly backward-looking at a time when America may be on the verge of historic change.
Maybe they should have started in the multimiddle.
Soledad O'Brien anchors the first documentary, "Black in America: Eyewitness to Murder -- The King Assassination," on Thursday. Reviewing the era and the case, looking beyond the initial suspect, James Earl Ray, to a range of conspiracy theories, FBI spying and J. Edgar Hoover's personal hatred of King, the documentary revisits the questions that "have festered for 40 years," according to O'Brien.
Another question festers as we watch. What is happening for black America right now, when 2008 brought the most historic speech on race since King's?
O'Brien reviews the era when blacks were dying at twice the rate of whites in Vietnam, when an FBI memo described King as the country's "most dangerous Negro," when FBI phone taps and other surveillance of the civil rights leader were not even subtle.
In a recent interview, Andrew Young, one of King's close associates, concludes that it was determined "in very high places" that the movement had to be stopped. The FBI, the Memphis police and the U.S. military are all suspect, Young suggests.
Was the Mafia involved? Was Ray framed by the still unknown "Raoul" who provided the rifle and who may have manipulated Ray? It's a compelling mystery, complete with an interview with Ray's younger brother -- a creepy high point of the film.
But this mystery is old news (at times it feels like a "Dateline" melodrama) compared with what's happening in the country today, with the first viable black presidential candidate making history.
It's a fine retrospective with some good interviews and educational value, but there are more pressing concerns -- or at least parallels -- that deserve attention now. Am I the only one who, while watching the King documentary, has Obama on the brain?
Mark Nelson, vice president and senior executive producer for CNN Productions, responded: "If that were the only thing that CNN were doing, you'd be smart to ask that question."
When CNN President Jon Klein and Nelson discussed how black men are portrayed in the mainstream media, "It occurred to us that so much of what we report is drugs, gangs, leaving family, welfare, crime and prison," Nelson said. "It's got to be more than that." They determined to undertake a network initiative.
" Nelson's long-range goal is not to do the individual documentaries in a vacuum. As the marketing process begins, he said, viewers will recognize that this is just one component.
Contact Joanne Ostrow at jostrow@denverpost.com.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
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