Race-Baiter by Eric Deggans

Author:Eric Deggans
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

SHE’S BEEN AN ADVOCATE FOR DIVERSITY in media for many years. But Lyne Pitts didn’t really figure out the best way to make her case until, as NBC’s vice president of strategic initiatives, she was sitting at a corporate seminar held by General Electric.

“Somebody said diversity was one of GE’s five guiding principles,” she recalled. “It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s good business.”31

Pitts, who already had worked in TV news for 30 years serving as executive producer for the weekend edition of NBC’s Today show, senior producer for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, and executive producer of the Early Show at CBS, felt a lightbulb go off.

“I realized I had been trying to beat my head against the wall to say ‘Why doesn’t the broadcast medium that I work in, look like the world that I live in?’” Pitts said. “And I said, you know, ‘I am tired of trying to tell people what they ought to do.’ The nation’s changing. The population’s changing. I have to convince people there’s a way to make money by doing the right thing.”

As a battle-scarred veteran of media diversity struggles, Pitts has her stories. Like the executive at one cable channel who didn’t understand there was a black middle class living somewhere between the worlds of the Cosby Show and Good Times, watching as much or more television than its white counterpart and ready for news and commercial messages that spoke to it.

So Pitts commissioned a marketing study to learn what might move the needle with black audiences. Her discovery: Influencers—people in their lives whose recommendations and opinions they respect—count for a lot.

“They’re more likely to do something if their pastor tells them to do it or if [popular African American radio personality] Tom Joyner recommends it . . . much more than an advertisement in the New York Times,” she said. “You put a four-column ad in the New York Times for MSNBC’s Joe [Scarborough] and Mika [Brzezinsky] on Morning Joe on the back page of the New York Times and that doesn’t do anything for the African American audience.”

Instead, Pitts developed a 2008 meeting where five black pastors came to NBC News’s Manhattan headquarters for a “Day of Dialogue,” featuring bishops Charles Blake, Sedgwick Daniels, and T. D. Jakes, along with pastors A. R. Bernard and John Borders III, to speak with NBC News executives and top anchor Brian Williams about issues facing their congregations and possible stories worth covering.

“It was really just a way for us to hear what was on the mind of the African American community, because these are the kinds of people who have their hands on regular folks,” said Pitts, who is black. “It was also a way for them to take back the message that NBC is a good place.”

Savvy marketing, meet the Right Thing to Do.

Pitts also recalled championing an MSNBC documentary, Meeting David Wilson, about a young black man who tracked down the descendants of the white family

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