Columnist Eugene Kane speaks at Race & Media Forum
Flashpoints and Transition

By Jonathan Gramling

Eugene Kane, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist, is a lightning rod on racial issues in the Milwaukee area. Race is what Kane talks about most of
the time in a community that has been termed one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. and there is no dearth of reaction that Kane gets from mostly
White readers in Milwaukee’s suburbs.
Kane came to Madison April 22 to speak at a Race & Media event sponsored by the Center for Democracy in Action at CUNA Mutual.
Kane’s talk, Media Images and the History of the Noose, wasn’t really about nooses and didn’t dwell a great deal on media images. Rather, Kane spent a
good deal of his talk discussing the campaigns of Louis Butler and Barack Obama.
In an interview after his talk, Kane talked about Butler and Obama and the transition print journalism is making to the electronic age.
In the upcoming general election, Kane is expecting the discourse to be as down and dirty as it was in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race. “I predict some of
the ads will probably be as down and dirty as they were here for that state Supreme Court race,” Kane said. “I think that is where a lot of these politicians
are right now. They are doing as much as they can. They have enough money. They have all of these special interest groups who can do it so that the
smear doesn’t have to come from the candidate. It can come from these shadowy interest groups because all of that big money is represented in it. So
that is the main comparison that I would probably see. How much of a factor race is going to play and the fact of how dirty the campaign is going to get
remains to be seen.”
While the reality of the national incidents concerning race or other issues is very complex, the incidents often times serve as the medium for a broader
discourse on race or other issues that sometimes become disconnected from the incidents themselves. “That’s the news business,” Kane said. “Something
happens that makes news. Then usually the incident itself is not as newsworthy as the dynamics behind it. It happens most often in cases of race, but it
happens in politics and even in some sensational crime stories. Take these polygamists down in Texas. The story is all of these kids who were rounded up
by authorities. But the dynamics look at these kinds of marriages and that kind of religion and everything else. So I have often seen the media use
flashpoints as a way to provide more context for the bigger stories. I’ve seen that happen in all kinds of stuff that is happening now.”
The conversion of The Capital Times to a twice-weekly insert and a daily online publication has served as a reminder that print media is going through a
transition to the electronic media age. While some have been in a sense of panic and alarm over these developments, Kane is taking it all in stride. “I’m
blogging now because I understand people get a lot of information off the Internet,” Kane said. “So I do a regular blog at my newspaper. My attitude is
newspapers are changing. The newspaper columnist role is changing. But I don’t think good journalism is changing in that on the Internet, you still need
to have some kind of content to provide for the Internet, whether it’s videos, pictures or words. I’ve always been a word guy. So I think that as long as you
become excellent at words and basically tell people about the world we live in through words, you’ll find an outlet. The Internet doesn’t scare me like it
scares some of my colleagues who are my age because I don’t think they have really gotten into it or appreciate the swiftness. The technology can tell a
story and give you a quicker reaction from people. I do a blog now and sometimes I will get a reaction in 10 minutes whereas if I write a column, I usually
have to wait 24 hours for anyone to even respond to it. That’s going to be the new age. It’s going to be lightning quick type of stuff.”
And while Kane has been a traditional print kind of guy for most of his career, he obtains a lot of his news on the Internet. “I read conventional newspapers
on the Internet,” Kane said. “I read The New York Times and the Washington Post. I have some web sites I look at like Richard Prince who is a Black guy
who does a journalism website. I even go to the Romenesko page, which is good for the newspaper industry in general. I even read Gawker, TMZ and all of
these celebrity blogs because I’m the kind of person who can read a lot on the Internet. I actually probably do go back to 4-5 regular sources. I’ll read CNN’
s webpage because they update that a lot.”
And so, while print journalism is undergoing a dramatic transition, Kane would still encourage young people to pursue a journalism career. “The only
thing that is in danger is print journalism,” Kane emphasized. “And print journalism is going to make a move to the web. So if you look at it in terms of
providing content for the Internet, there isn’t anything to be afraid of because good journalists are still going to be necessary. We’re still going to have to
have journalists covering stuff about the Iraq War and the economy. Only they are going to do it on the Internet. They just aren’t going to do it for your
daily newspaper anymore. Or they will do it for your newspaper, but the newspaper will be online more.”
So while Kane is an old-time journalist who stirs the pot to create community discussion about important issues that the community, at times, may not
want to deal with, Kane is also adapting to find newer and faster ways to get his point across. Kane is getting ahead of the curve in the new information
age.