One of the lasting examples of the issues within our journalism sector is the extensive career of Jonathan Capehart. The consistently race-centric journalist is an experienced yet not entirely serious senior editor at the Washington Post. He is a mainstay at MSNBC with a modestly recognized weekend show and frequently appears on PBS News. Why he is regarded with such seriousness remains a mystery.
He presents his TV segments with an authoritative monotone designed to project gravity and solemnity, yet his actual words bear the weight of a novice high school newspaper editor. Therefore, the announcement of his career memoir publication appeared puzzling — and as further details from this book unfolded, it seemed quite entertaining.
The book – “Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home” – purportedly holds some significance, but like much of Capehart’s work and career, it seems this is more about obligatory consumption than genuine interest. For example, you seldom hear from the general public about a need to read something J.C. wrote, or about a must-watch segment from his broadcasts. It’s mostly those within the industry asserting his importance.
The Daily Beast proclaims that Capehart makes “explosive racial claims” in the book about an incident at the Washington Post. (Seriously, are these kinds of claims ever described as “tepid???”) This centers on an incident at that paper that led to Capehart quitting his position on the paper’s editorial board over what he called a racial issue involving fellow board member Karen Tumulty over an editorial the paper ran.
She [Tumulty] either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was Black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.”
If this sounds like an excessive response by someone demanding that their opinion holds sway over the others, it is because that is in fact the case. But Capehart, in his dependable fashion, takes the emotional reactions and ramps them up to Broadway production levels of melodramatics.
“Tumulty took an incident where I felt ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity.”
While this all sounds like it is filled with deep significance, let me assure you that this is wading pool depth of seriousness, and the layers of ridiculousness are telling. For openers, this all concerns an incident from two years ago, so this is that classic example of a deeply “explosive “ news item that was able to be held back for years to become an entry in a book release.
Next, the editorial that supposedly robbed Capehart of his humanity is one that actually agreed with him. The paper was covering the Georgia election law that restructured its balloting and voter rolls, and along with Capehart, the WaPo editorial board opposed the moves. But what has the histrionic Capehart so upset is that the board did not agree with him more.
The decision was to scale back on the description of this new law from the hyperbolic levels it had been reported on at the time. Recall this was supposedly the introduction of “Jim Crow on steroids” (with President Biden describing it in head-scratching form as “Jim Eagle”), with all manner of false claims being made, from banning water at polling stations to shortening the hours polls would be open. The new law allowed existing times for early voting to be extended, and actually added more early voting dates.
So Capehart was making his dramatic exit from the board because they agreed with his position, but the members held back from making the typical leftist-media practice of pinning the outrage needle in the red with exaggerated, baseless claims. This was the time that the MLB All-Star game was chased out of Atlanta, and companies like Coke and Delta were feigning outrage – all while polls showed voters favored the law.
Yet Capehart was suggesting Karen Tumulty was denying his personal history, even though he was not around to suffer through Jim Crow, Bull Connor, and all of the other wild historical assertions that were made at the time. He said his humanity had been robbed from him all because they were not willing to shriek and wail in print to his acceptable levels.
And then it gets funnier still. The voter turnout in that election, and in the primaries, set records and the POC numbers were the likes that had not been seen in the state. Going further, the Washington Post previously castigated Stacey Abrams for misrepresenting the details of the legislation, so Capehart should have known already at the time that there were inaccuracies with the reporting on the law.
For him to overlook his own paper’s reporting was bad enough, but here he is selling his new book with brash claims of racism he supposedly experienced – over a minor difference in the same opinion. When considering the election results in that state, most people would recognize that his anecdote exposes how he had been wildly and emotionally incorrect on the matter. However, most people are not racial grievance mongers, so that recognition of facts is entirely absent in the mind of Jonathan Capehart.
