In the eye of the spin.

I started out as a daily newspaper reporter. Among the newsroom minorities I gravitated to, mutual support ran high to push for diversity in news coverage and hiring. A muckraking idealism also characterized many of the journalists I met. I remember one old-timer in particular, a Tijuana bureau chief for a San Diego paper, rousing a workshop of young journalists of color with his passionate invocation of a familiar reporters' mantra: "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."

I began covering an education beat at the San Diego Union-Tribune, eager to storm the ramparts of the journalism establishment. Or at least, that was what I thought I should be doing. In reality, my corporate foray turned into a mostly comfortable routine of attending school board meetings and filing my eight inches of copy for the night. That is, until I attempted to write a major feature, on the disproportionately high drop-out and failure rates among African American and Latino teenagers in San Diego's north county (well known for both its good schools and for being home to the KKK's Tom Metzger).

Without much of a political framework, just following my need to know why, led me into a story that didn't fit the standby liberal narrative of poor academic performance in disadvantaged "inner city schools." These were high-achieving, well-funded suburban schools that still managed to fail their students of color. Within a polarized setting of upper-middle class whites, and small but growing numbers of black professionals and Latino migrant farmworkers, academic performance could not be understood without taking into account factors such as recurring racist incidents (blackface in classroom theatricals), uninformed, mostly white teachers, or the precursor of zero tolerance disciplining. Making the case to my editors that this was news came right up against the wall of resistance toward naming racism as a systemic problem. One white colleague summed it up: "So you want to write about why these kids are doing badly because their teachers aren't nice to them?"

A racial lens, I would discover again and again in my short-lived career as a daily reporter, is hard to apply within the boundaries of traditional news judgment. But it's easy to bash "mainstream" media, and the question of how to understand racial dynamics and to inform the ideas and actions that could contribute to racial justice encompasses more than just debates over mainstream vs. progressive journalism. This is a question about how all of us interpret, create, and contest the meanings of things.

In this issue, we look at several aspects of these battles over thought control: at the power of news coverage to shape opposing perceptions of war in Iraq (p. 11); at more blatant government propaganda aimed at that classic wartime maneuver--defining the enemy to itself (p. 9); at "messaging" during a high-stakes electoral campaign to defeat another racist California proposition (p. 7); and at communications strategies for re-envisioning the terms of public debate over racial inequality (p. 5).

I'm still an idealistic journalist at some level (though I don't believe "the afflicted" need comforting as much as we need power), and my ideal form of journalism is one that shows cause and effect, intimacy and voice, insight and significance. I continue to think that racial issues can and should be covered in an evaluative, responsible, contextualized manner, whatever your media outlet. But what I hope and work for is what Makani Themba-Nixon describes (p. 3)--a vision of media justice that is committed to the content and consequences of peoples' struggles. Without a movement to "plead our own cause," we can't know who we are, where we've come from, and how to act now.