Monday’s article on the Martin Luther King Unsung Heroes event offers little glimpse into the evening’s transpired events, nor does it address the recipients themselves, much less Risa C’DeBaca’s inspired ‘mic-check’ after receiving the award and her call to ‘Evict Mayor (Stephanie) Miner!’

Although the talent and professional qualifications for the journalist Andrew Feldman are not in question, it is almost a glaring form of ‘self-censorship’ to exclude the recipients’ own words and focus exclusively on the guest speaker. There is much substance in the revolutionary character of King to merit more stalwart attempts at investigative journalism or news reporting from The Daily Orange. Many professionals and academics that I have spoken to have expressed concern about the deliberate ‘watering down’ of King’s message in the context of the events, not least the tragedy-into-irony scenario seen as C’DeBaca was awarded the MLK achievement for her work with the Ida Benderson Center and Occupy Syracuse as Mayor Miner sat in the audience. (Miner was unitarily responsible for both of these evictions.) 

Yet The Daily Orange is just as guilty as The Post-Standard for printing what amounts to innocuous ‘puff’ on the MLK event. After reading The Post-Standard’s article, I emailed the author to express my concern with the direction of the article. She emailed me back, kindly, to let me know that her job was to cover a story on Mayor David Bing rather than the recipients of the award (a previous article published weeks earlier mentioned more broadly the recipients). I can imagine that this is similar to the reply I will get from The Daily Orange. That is, that the reporter was merely handling an assignment handed down by The D.O.’s editor. 

I don’t intend this letter to be a personal grievance, however. It is much more than a mere peccadillo or political vendetta that I am suggesting. 

In one of King’s last major speeches delivered some four days before his premature murder, the social organizer and activist reminded us that ‘… one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.’

We must remember that King was an internationalist, a revolutionary and a caustic critic of economic disparity and the military-industrial complex. If he had lived to the present, he would have most certainly addressed the 14 million plus unemployed citizens in the United States today, the 2 million prisoners in our jail system, the 40 percent unemployment rate for black youths, the 1 million deported by the Obama administration, the soaring suicide rates for Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans, and the more than 5,000 arrests of Occupy activists to date, and he would certainly be one to criticize events to which his name is honored. 

I hope The Daily Orange will find it more indicative in the future to harness the enormous creativity and intelligence that Syracuse and Newhouse students possess to pursue more substantive stories. 

Thank You.

Sincerely,

Adam C’DeBaca

Outreach Coordinator

St. Thomas More Campus Ministry

John G. Alibrandi Catholic Center

Syracuse University/ SUNY-ESF 

Published on January 25, 2012 at 12:00 pm