On Wednesday Sept. 6, my article about an African American community event’s displacement appeared in an academic blog. By the end of the day, Decatur, Ga., blogger Dan Whisenhunt’s Decaturish.com website published two updates to a feature about the previous weekend’s Decatur Day celebration that appeared one day earlier. Those two updates included reporting about the allegations by Decatur Day participants of racism by Decatur city officials in the decision to relocate Decatur Day from a city park in the Oakhurst neighborhood to a downtown greenspace.
I wonder where Mr. Whisenhunt and his colleagues might have learned about those allegations of racism? The two blog staff persons who attended the event, writer Zoe Seiler and photographer Dean Hesse, didn’t include any reporting about it in the original post-event feature. Neither did Seiler’s tweet the day after Decatur Day.
Seriously, how could Seiler have spent any time at the event and not heard the widespread talk about the perceived racist intent behind the move? She tweeted that she “heard some powerful stories,” yet she apparently missed the most powerful story of them all. And, how could she have spent any time reporting in that community in the weeks and months before the event and not heard about it? Decatur (pop. 24,338) isn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis like its neighbor, Atlanta (pop. 499,127).
One week before Decatur Day, I queried one of the people I interviewed why I, a writer sitting at a desk in Pittsburgh, Pa., could be asking questions about Decatur Day and racism while none of the local press seemed to be. One of the people I interviewed for my article said, “They don’t want us to talk about it. But it’s got to be addressed and it’s got to be known.”
Could the information that led to the Decaturish.com updates have originated with my article? Probably. In fact, I’d bet on it. I could have made a boatload of money betting on the prediction that none of this would appear in local media accounts either in advance of Decatur Day or afterwards. I even anticipated it in my article. Go figure.
Yet, Mr. Whisenhunt — a former newspaper journalist who as a blogger has spent a decade haranguing and harassing metro Atlanta news outlets and national newspapers for failing to give him the credit he thinks that he’s due — didn’t see fit to credit my article in his updates.
It’s not that I want to be mentioned in his blog; I don’t. It’s more about Mr. Whisenhunt’s role as Decatur’s news gatekeeper and his site’s apparent lack of transparency and accountability, two key tenets from the Society for Professional Journalists four-part code of ethics.
It’s almost as if by magic the site decided to add interviews with city officials and Decatur Day planners about the allegations of racism.
For Mr. Whisenhunt, it appears to be ethics for thee but not for me.
