Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism by W. Joseph Campbell

Author:W. Joseph Campbell [Campbell, W. Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, Social Science, United States, Language Arts & Disciplines, Media Studies, Journalism
ISBN: 9780520255661
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-12-15T21:05:00+00:00

“CRACK BABIES” IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The appeal of the thirty doctors and scientists did little to stem the appearance of the term crack baby in the media. It remained in circulation, often invoked casually and idiomatically, as something of a cliché. For example, the entertainer Bill Cosby spoke of “crack babies” during an appearance in October 2007 on the Sunday television talk show Meet the Press. The program was devoted to Cosby’s campaign to call attention to social pathologies in African-American communities. “If I give it to a woman,” Cosby said of illegal drugs, “that knocks her out of doing anything other than being a user. She also can become pregnant, and this goes to her child, better known as ‘crack babies.’ “54

Colbert I. King, a columnist for the Washington Post, casually referred to the term in 2006 in writing about directionless inner-city youths: “Kids by the dozens, if not hundreds, who barely attend school or don’t attend at all. They are, in some cases, crack babies of the ’90s grown up and with emotional and mental disorders they don’t even know about.”55 Another writer for the Post, DeNeen Brown, reported in 2007 that while “the skinny ‘crack babies’ have grown,” crack itself “has hung on, never really left.” Deep into the article of 1,900 words, Brown offered this contradictory passage: “The one light spot in the crack epidemic—if you can call it light—is that recent studies have shown there are really no crack babies.”56

In some ways, the dread associated with “crack baby” has dissipated, and the idiom has been morphed into a slightly eccentric emblem of self-congratulation and self-promotion, a badge of sorts for peculiar accomplishment. That it has became apparent in 2007, when sixteen-year-old Denise Jackson declared during an audition for a spot on television’s American Idol talent show that she had been born a crack baby. Buoyed perhaps by the sympathy that her admission may have generated, Jackson advanced to the next round of auditions before being cut.57

Other self-congratulatory testimonials have appeared in the news media from time to time, about how crack babies had grown up to beat the odds and triumphed over low expectations, how they have entered adulthood with few emotional or psychological disorders and no record of crime and drug abuse. One such triumphant testimonial appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2008. “I was supposed to be an emotional ‘crack baby,’ a problem child, a troublemaker, a statistic,” the writer declared. “I was born in 1983, conceived by two parents who both used drugs at the time. When I was born in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, my mother was asked to participate in a scientific study that would monitor my cognitive reception, intelligence, personality, habits and overall attitude for the next 24 years…. Last summer, I participated in one of the final portions of the study. I impressed the testers in every test I took.”58

More bizarrely, “crack baby” has been associated with nocturnal adventures of Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne.

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