The editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch got a justified comeuppance before the eyes of the nation since we published last Thursday. On Friday, February 10 we posted to our website a letter that Tishaura O. Jones, a candidate for St. Louis mayor, sent to Tod Robberson, Editorial Page editor at the Post, outlining why she would not meet with them – and giving the blunt arguments for change that she did not trust the Post to fairly report coming from her.
Jones has come under sustained attack from the Post throughout this mayoral campaign, which led her rightly to disregard any possibility that the paper would endorse her, the outcome one seeks in meeting with an editorial board. Rather than sit still for what she expected to be more abuse from the Post’s all-white editorial board, she went on the offensive. She accused the city’s daily newspaper of “thinly veiled racism and preference for the status quo” in so relentlessly opposing a strong black woman change agent for mayor.
Very cleverly, in addressing a newspaper that has targeted her personally in a crowded mayoral field (with only one viable white candidate), she made her attack personal to Robberson, a recent transplant to St. Louis. “You just moved here. It isn’t your city, yet,” she wrote, after quoting something Robberson had written about “our” city and its offensive (to him) graffiti. “And graffiti is not what’s killing it. What is killing our city is poverty.”
She then put Robberson in the back of the change bus, as a sightseer who was missing the action in this city that is not yet his. “I think you were in Texas during Ferguson,” she wrote. “If so, you may have missed what happened here: We woke up. Black people woke up. Allies stood up. Young people spoke up.” She wisely named the coalition of voters that has always been vital to her path to victory, regardless of who else is in the race: black people who know her North City roots and remember what a daring leader her father, Virvus Jones, was when the city’s comptroller; allies, the white progressives who keep handing her critical endorsements; and young people who are mostly likely to respond to the most forceful cry for change.
What’s amazing is that America woke up over this scathing letter indicting a daily newspaper’s editorial board. It went viral after cultural legends like LeVar Burton and political luminaries like Howard Dean tweeted the link with enthusiastic comments. Burton – one of the nation’s most beloved and credible public figures, with nearly 2 million Twitter followers – commented, “This is the kind of civic leader this nation needs” above his link to her letter on our site. That was, overwhelmingly, the vote of Twitter, arguably our nation’s most political and activist social medium. More than a quarter-million people have read her letter on our site, with many thousands making supportive comments.
We are gratified that Tishaura rubbed Ferguson in Robberson’s face. The Post’s coverage of this pivotal mayoral election – the first since the Ferguson protests erupted in 2014 – shows that our city’s daily paper was essentially a tourist in Ferguson. They came for the protests and stayed for the well-deserved team Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism. They did difficult and critical investigative work in St. Louis County municipal courts that will, indeed, improve the lives of many African Americans. But in so many ways, the paper wasted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform its own culture and its own primary stance in relation to racial equity and white Democrats’ suppression of black political power in St. Louis.
We saw this first in the behavior of Post staff on the ground in Ferguson. While one of our lead Ferguson reporters lives so close to the Ferguson police station she walked to protests and covered the concerns, literally, of her neighbors, Post reporters never lost the air of having parachuted in among enemy combatants. This perspective was laid bare in a highlight reel edited by the paper’s pictures editor, Lynden Steele. It opens – not with decades of racial oppression and unrestrained police violence in black communities – but with a police scanner reporting that a large black male, who turned out to be Michael Brown Jr. in the last hour of his life, had boosted some cigars from a convenience store in Ferguson. The reel, when we saw it, ended with an elderly white reader complaining in a phone message that she wanted her old Post-Dispatch back.
Unfortunately, in this mayoral election, the Post’s older, majority-white readers got their old Post-Dispatch back. Tishaura Jones was courageous enough to point that out in great detail – detail that was annotated and illustrated by CityLab (www.citylab.com), an imprint of The Atlantic magazine. And now the nation knows yet another of St. Louis’ dirty little secrets – now, no longer a secret. Thank you, Tishaura Jones, and thank you, America, for listening. We hope that St. Louis voters are listening, too.
