What does the Jack Kelley fabrication scandal at USA Today say about the future of white journalism? That’s what Leonard Pitts asked in the Miami Herald recently (quoted in “Undernews,” April 27): “Did USA Today advance a moderately capable journalist because he was white? Did some white editor mentor him out of racial solidarity even though Kelley was unqualified? In light of this fiasco, should we reexamine the de facto affirmative action that gives white men preferential treatment in our newsrooms?”
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“I traveled to Springfield,” writes David Tanenhaus, to conduct research for his forthcoming book, Juvenile Justice in the Making. “As I entered the state archive, one of its staffers was positioning miniature soldiers on a large map spread across a table. When I asked what he was doing, he explained that he was recreating the Battle of Gettysburg to figure out a way for Pickett’s Charge to have succeeded, so that ‘our side’ could have won the war. That week I realized how Southern central Illinois really was.”
Why mass transit isn’t the answer, according to Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution (“Traffic: Why It’s Getting Worse, What Government Can Do,” January). “Public transit works best where gross residential densities are above 4,200 persons per square mile,” he writes. “But in 2000, at least two thirds of all residents of U.S. urbanized areas lived in settlements with densities of under 4,000 persons per square mile. Those densities are too low for public transit to be effective.”
