Putting race top of her agenda
By Azadeh Moaveni |
February 6, 2011, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CNN reporter Soledad O'Brien is the daughter of a white Australian father and a black Cuban mother. This heritage bequeathed her an immigrant's ideals about America's promise, as well as a striking appearance that has shaped her experience of "the land of possibilities." Both these themes --- her roots and her looks - run through O'Brien's memoir, "The Next Big Story," as she charts her lifelong effort to forge a singular identity out of her biracial background. Her account is also a reporter's reflection on the television news business, which in the span of her 22-year career has swung from largely ignoring issues of race to often stoking prejudice with bombastic, personality-driven coverage.
By the time O'Brien attended high school in the 1980s, the racism her parents had faced two decades earlier (they'd lived in Baltimore but had to marry in Washington because interracial marriage was banned in Maryland) had mellowed. Yet in suburban, middle-class Long Island, O'Brien's appearance (origins unclear, but nonwhiteness evident) marked her as undatable in a school where race silently mattered.
O'Brien went on to study at Harvard but left before graduating, enamored with journalism after an internship at a Boston TV station. Soon she landed at the NBC affiliate in San Francisco, where as Oakland bureau chief she stewed with frustration covering neighborhoods whose problems, stemming from deep poverty, got short shrift in the media. Her bosses didn't like being lectured on what to cover, and she lacked the clout to pitch stories more difficult than the usual schools-and-drug-bust fare. Realizing that her anger connected her to the story but was a liability in the newsroom, O'Brien embarked on a quest to build the stature she needed to tackle controversial subjects. Today, it is clear she has been altered by the process, her anger polished down to the point where she is now the establishment big shot frustrating young activists and critics.
"The Next Big Story" is at its perceptive best when O'Brien grapples with race and immigration. She writes of her former CNN colleague Lou Dobbs with a calculated diplomacy, but her overview of his reporting leaves the distinct sense that CNN sought to play it both ways: expand its audience through programs like O'Brien's "Latino in America," while reaping the ratings benefit of Dobbs' anti-immigrant vitriol and sizable fan base.
In a book that often treats issues of race candidly, however, O'Brien turns naive when dealing with critics who question whether she is "black enough" to report the documentary series "Black in America." She writes that "the big surprise for me about skin color is that it matters so much to black people," as though shades of blackness haven't been central to African-Americans' experience of racism for centuries.
As memoir, O'Brien's book keeps the reader at a distance. If her chaotic job has ever strained her family life, we don't learn about it here. Although she takes a discreet shot at "heroic action figure" colleagues for their eagerness to cover wars and disasters, she remains very much the heroic action figure on the news front, propelling herself into the next big story.
By the time O'Brien attended high school in the 1980s, the racism her parents had faced two decades earlier (they'd lived in Baltimore but had to marry in Washington because interracial marriage was banned in Maryland) had mellowed. Yet in suburban, middle-class Long Island, O'Brien's appearance (origins unclear, but nonwhiteness evident) marked her as undatable in a school where race silently mattered.
O'Brien went on to study at Harvard but left before graduating, enamored with journalism after an internship at a Boston TV station. Soon she landed at the NBC affiliate in San Francisco, where as Oakland bureau chief she stewed with frustration covering neighborhoods whose problems, stemming from deep poverty, got short shrift in the media. Her bosses didn't like being lectured on what to cover, and she lacked the clout to pitch stories more difficult than the usual schools-and-drug-bust fare. Realizing that her anger connected her to the story but was a liability in the newsroom, O'Brien embarked on a quest to build the stature she needed to tackle controversial subjects. Today, it is clear she has been altered by the process, her anger polished down to the point where she is now the establishment big shot frustrating young activists and critics.
"The Next Big Story" is at its perceptive best when O'Brien grapples with race and immigration. She writes of her former CNN colleague Lou Dobbs with a calculated diplomacy, but her overview of his reporting leaves the distinct sense that CNN sought to play it both ways: expand its audience through programs like O'Brien's "Latino in America," while reaping the ratings benefit of Dobbs' anti-immigrant vitriol and sizable fan base.
In a book that often treats issues of race candidly, however, O'Brien turns naive when dealing with critics who question whether she is "black enough" to report the documentary series "Black in America." She writes that "the big surprise for me about skin color is that it matters so much to black people," as though shades of blackness haven't been central to African-Americans' experience of racism for centuries.
As memoir, O'Brien's book keeps the reader at a distance. If her chaotic job has ever strained her family life, we don't learn about it here. Although she takes a discreet shot at "heroic action figure" colleagues for their eagerness to cover wars and disasters, she remains very much the heroic action figure on the news front, propelling herself into the next big story.
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