In case you didn’t think Washington Post race activist Wesley Lowery couldn’t get any more unbearable, oh, he can. And if you can stomach watching his TEDx talk, you’ll see why.
A word of advice: Stay close to a toilet.
And keep all sharp objects away from your computer.
Wesley’s talk was before a crowd at Shaker Heights High School in Cleveland, where he recently gave an independently organized TED-style talk. He paced and reached into the sinking depths of his 24-year-old being in a red, white and blue gingham style button-down (much like the ones MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough wears) to give you his vast wisdom.
Scarborough is an odd choice for Wesley to unconsciously look to for fashion cues, especially since the pair came to verbal and written blows over his Ferguson coverage when Wesley got detained by cops after an interaction in a local McDonald’s. Scarborough wondered why Wesley didn’t “move on” when the cops told him to. Wesley wondered why Scarborough wasn’t in Ferguson. Strangely, the reporter made no mention of the incident in his TEDx talk.
He started off by telling the students that they can break the rules and take out their phones to tweet about “what’s going on here.” Gee how big of him. As one journalist put it to me, “I want to kill myself with Lowery telling the audience to tweet about what he’s saying: Like ‘it’s ok, you can promote me.'”
In his talk, Wesley, who is African American and Caucasian, demeaned anyone he can get his hands on — his white and female reporter friends at the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the Boston Globe, St. Louis Dispatch, St. Louis Public Radio — as well as correspondents at CNN and MSNBC. He gave a shout-out to St. Louis American, a black newspaper, which he said did a good job.
But to CNN and MSNBC: You’re on the ground reporting in Ferguson was subpar. You hear that Don Lemon, Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, Van Jones, Sara Sidner and Chris Cuomo? Wesley, who you had on “New Day” to talk about Ferguson, thinks you guys did it all wrong. These reporters endured tear gas and rocks being thrown at their heads. Day in and day out, they were amid the heavy crowds of protesters and cops just like Wesley.
So why does he think the network did a poor job?
Because the people of Ferguson said so. “We don’t like this video coverage on CNN and MSNBC that shows this burning building on repeat,” said Wesley, relaying their message.
Not everything the WaPo race activist said was entirely loathsome.
But it’s hard to take insight from a guy who acts like he’s been a journalist for decades instead of a few years and who acts like he’s an infinitely better reporter than those who’ve been doing it far longer. He’s even irked some of his own WaPo colleagues and conservative journalists by using social media to take sides, accuse journalists of racism if they don’t agree with him and create narratives that don’t wind up being true.
“When I got to Ferguson MO in Missouri…one of the things I really noticed is who I was with,” he said, failing to mention his escapade with HuffPost’s Caucuasian Ryan Reilly at a Ferguson McDonald’s. “As I looked right and left, there were always other reporters there … but there was a third group of people who were almost always there. And those people were local residents. They were people who lived in Ferguson. They lived in St. Louis. They didn’t like the media coverage. They didn’t like how their city was being portrayed.”
Wesley said they took out their phones and used their own video footage and tweets to tell their story. “They took it amongst themselves to tell their own stories,” he said awkwardly.
Wesley spoke about the media in a detached manner as though he’s not part of the problems he sees. Being lectured to about the media by Wesley Lowery must be up there with the great tortures of life.
“It’s not that we didn’t want to always tell the untold story,” he said. “…The media didn’t quite always know how to tell that story and we weren’t always prepared to tell that story. One thing we know about media is it that — [WESLEY EMITS A SHARP SIGH] — it skews a little white, and a little male. That if you’re a woman, if you have a little pigment in their skin that you might not be represented by the reporters who are working for your local newspaper or for your local television station. And we know that that means that sometimes the stories of those communities aren’t told the right ways if they are told at all.”
Really, the right ways? So if you’re a white reporter you can’t tell a story involving other races?
For anyone watching his TEDx talk: Since when is there a shortage of women in newsrooms? They’ve occupied a significant portion of any newsroom I’ve ever worked in. And I think there are even a few women working at WaPo. It’s evident that Katherine Weymouth, former publisher of WaPo, is a woman.
As you watch Wesley on stage, it’s really hard not to think to yourself that Monica Lewinsky, a white female who recently gave a really difficult, authentic TED talk, is so much more skillful at this than Wesley Lowery. It was all I could do to not throw my computer out a window as I survived 16 skin-crawling minutes of hell. Is this what heroin withdrawal feels like?
Wesley labored on, actually making a good point about people on the street being his assignment editors. “You now have access in a way you never had before,” he said. “You can tweet at me and you say, ‘Hey Jerk, that’s not what happened.'”
(I could get on board with part of that.)
“We gotta do our jobs,” he said. “The pressure is on us like it has never been before.”
He told his listeners to please keep telling him what to do. “You need to keep up that pressure,” he said. “You need to tell us what stories we’re supposed to be covering. I’m in Cleveland for 24 more hours. Tweet at me and tell me what story I should be writing in the next 24 hours. … You now have that power. You’re my assignment editor in a way you never were before.”
Early on in his lecture, Wesley spoke of a wise editor who instructed him to pause and write down why he does his job everyday. The editor stressed that he hang it in his bathroom so he can see it.
Not a bad piece of advice. Let’s hope he uses it to get off his high horse.
Correction: For whatever reason, I could only see Wesley’s shirt in black and white when I watched his TEDx video. But as he pointed out to me on Twitter, it is red, white and blue. I thought maybe we have another BuzzFeed dress on our hands. But lo and behold, today I can see the red. I’ve corrected the copy above. Wesley Lowery is a great American.