Opinion: California Globe’s Biased Attack on Assemblymember Corey Jackson Exposes How Politics and Partisanship Are Corroding Journalism
Hardy Brown | Special to California Black Media Publishers
Assemblymember Corey A. Jackson is my friend.
An outspoken advocate for equity, fairness, public health, and social service resources for our Inland Valley community, I have come to admire and respect Jackson’s grit and his work as a legislator. However, I don’t always agree with his political or policy positions.
That’s why I was deeply disappointed when the California Globe published a scathing, one-sided and blatantly under-reported hit piece on Jackson last week. Written by reporter Katy Grimes, that article
omitted pertinent details, added off-topic information, conflated facts and stretched the truth to suggest that Jackson inappropriately or illegally directed $6 million in taxpayer money to the Center Against Racism and Trauma (CART), a non-profit he founded in Moreno Valley.
Grimes’s article was followed by another takedown written by her that quoted Herb Morgan, candidate for California State Controller, calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Jackson. Morgan’s request automatically suggests that what Jackson did was illegal.
White House correspondent, War Room co-anchor and
outspoken conservative commentator, Natalie Winters, weighed in, too.
“California quietly boosted taxpayer funding for a nonprofit founded by a sitting Assemblyman from $250,000 to $6 MILLION—a 2,300% increase. Its latest IRS return reports zero employees, zero volunteers and only $57,667 in annual expenses,” Winters posted on X.
Grimes’ two articles might raise some questionable concerns about Jackson’s non-profit going from $250,00 to $6 Million. I want to caution you of accusing him of any inappropriate self-serving dealing and putting a stain on his reputation by publicly calling for the Trump Administration DOJ to investigate a Black elected official.
As a community newspaper founder and news publisher in California for over 46 years, aBlack elected school board member for 12 years and a representative for U. S. Congressman George Brown, I know how some journalists who work for the White press work, when it comes to covering Black leaders and the Black community in general.
Too often, over my years as a journalist who has strived to be independent and truthful, I’vewitnessed shocking yet successful smear campaigns, many of them have been brazenly politically motivated. They singled out public figures for their party affiliation or
political statements, and they run their names and reputations through the mud – basingreporting more on optics than evidence.
While Grimes’s article points to things that might raise red flags for any good reporter and prompt her to dig deeper, it fails to adequately investigate those primary findings or connect the dots among them.
Grimes also does not indicate that she reached out to Jackson or others to question the budget allotment to CART. Finally, Grimes inserts information that is completely unrelated to the main topic of the story, in
my opinion, to discredit Jackson’s character: that he allegedly featured “DSA and Marxist figures as speakers” at his events.
If you had reached out to Assemblymember Jackson or me, you would have learned how he worked with Entertainer and Civil Rights leader Harry Belafonte, Jim Brown, NFL Football Hall of Fame, the NAACP
Local and National office helping our youth in civic engagement, as well.
In the Black community we do not have the luxury of ignoring any of our leaders whether we agree with them or not. To use my own experience, I am a Christian, yet I worked with Minister Louis Farrakhan, a muslin and had dinner with him in his home in Phoenix, Arizona to better understand how we could work together in serving our community. Our mission was the same. We just we had different ways of serving.
Another person I met with will blow your mind. It was centered on the first amendment in 1982 where I served as a panelist and George Pepper, the leader of the Regional KKK was in the audience. A few days after the discussion, I received a call from someone who knew me at work. That person said, “Pepper would like to meet with you and talk about the First Amendment.”
We met in public at a restaurant across the street from my place of employment in Fontana. We enjoyed each other’s company, even though, because of KKK bylaws, he could not shake my hand in public. I know he enjoyed our conversation because he came by my Black VoiceNewspaper wanting to talk again.
So, for Grimes to infer that Jackson is something other than who he is, is misleading and is anattempt to smear his reputation and character for talking points and political gains for Herb Morgan, a Republican candidate for California State Controller running against Malia Cohen,the current California State Controller, a Black Female.
In my opinion, her article begins with a lie, and it
builds on it.
It states that Jackson “founded and directs CART, which has been tax-exempt since February2022.” While Jackson may have founded CART, he no longer “directs” it or have any official affiliation with it, according to his office and the group’s website.
I visited CART’s website. It lists an executive director and three board members – no mention of Jackson on there or on the organization’s tax filings.
It is also customary for lawmakers in Sacramento to support the earmark funding for district-focused projects.
Yet, the California Globe builds its report on information that gives the appearance of impropriety but does not provide evidence that Jackson committed any wrongdoing.
While I was let down by the California Globe article, I was not surprised. The publication does little to conceal its right-leaning political bent. Although the California Globe bills itself as “pro-growth and pro-business, nonpartisan and objective,” the content on the publication’s website is highly partisan and political. It also describes itself as an “independent, professional news website obsessively chronicling everything political throughout the state of California.”
If you’re a partisan news media then, admit it to your readers. If you are not, you have to live up to the highest journalistic standards. We must resist allowing our party affiliations orpolitical views to influence our news judgment or compromise the objectivity of our stories.
As the Black Press struggles to produce quality journalism in this age of misinformation,disinformation and the unregulated flow of
information on the internet competing for our readers’ attention, it is incumbent upon those of us who think ourselves as responsible, civic-minded news publishers to hold ourselves accountable. We must do
the due diligence to ensure that our reports are reading information that is accurate, factual, complete and thoroughly investigated.
Anything short of that contributes to the corroding of
journalism’s historic and public role, which is central
to American civic life, especially in the Black community.
