I Am These Truths by Sunny Hostin

Author:Sunny Hostin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Dream Deferred

By the time I’d outgrown Sesame Street and The Flintstones in the early 1970s, it was no longer rare to see African Americans on the small screen. But I still felt a ripple of excitement when I flicked on the TV and saw that black people like me were there.

Though books were the main source of entertainment in our home, Mom, Dad, and I watched 60 Minutes, the iconic news show, every Sunday night, and we took particular pride when Ed Bradley, the debonair African American journalist known for his sharp inquiries and rich voice, reported one of its segments.

As a kid, I would sing along to the theme of The Jeffersons, a sitcom about a black family that ran a successful business and moved to an Upper East Side high-rise. And when I was at SUNY Binghamton, I’d skip out on a game of spades in the Union to rush home and watch the latest life lesson preached by Clair and Heathcliff Huxtable on The Cosby Show.

I recognized the power of images, and when I began studying communications, my desire to help shape them grew.

I enjoyed writing, but I really felt alive when I stitched together pieces in the SUNY communications department’s edit bay. One of my class projects was to put together a video promoting the Equal Opportunity Program, which gave me financial aid and provided assistance and tutoring to other students of color, many of whom were the first in their families to go to college. It was fascinating learning how to tell a story through video, which in the 1980s was still a relatively cutting-edge medium as TV transitioned from film.

I leaned in to broadcast even more when I got a gig at the campus radio station, WHRW, which could be heard throughout the county. My partner was a guy named Fritz, and with the prime-time slots already claimed by older students, we took over the midnight to 2:00 A.M. show, bantering back and forth in between spinning love songs by Luther Vandross and James Ingram. By my senior year, I was heading to the studio and broadcasting three mornings a week.

Even though my mother later made it clear that a future for me working in media terrified her, she did help me land an internship with the broadcasting trailblazer Carol Jenkins. Jenkins was one of the first African American women to be a television anchor in New York City, starting at WNBC in the early 1970s. Mom had taught her daughter in elementary school, and she asked Carol if I could shadow her on the job. Carol was gracious enough to welcome me, and I trailed her as she prepared for on-air interviews with local politicians and covered fires, scandals, and other local breaking news.

It’s funny. There are times when I can’t stand local news. I feel that some of those broadcast shows truly follow the disparaging adage “If it bleeds, it leads,” topping the newscast daily with death and destruction. In

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