Issac Bailey, a 2014 Nieman Fellow, is a journalist, race relations seminar creator and facilitator, and the author of “Why Didn’t We Riot? A Black Man in Trumpland” (Other Press, October 2020). He is also the author of “My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South” (Other Press, 2018). He has contributed to Politico, CNN.com, Time, and The Washington Post. He is a former columnist and senior writer for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and he was a 2011 recipient of a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for stories about a child protection case. The state subsequently revamped the way it handles such cases.
I had increasingly intense visions of harming my wife. That’s not quite right. I had been having off-and-on images of violent events for years—seeing myself raped in prison or impaled during car crashes—and they finally became visions of hurting my … Read more
An “AP Explains” piece illustrates just how difficult it is to get racial nuance right in the Trump era, even when journalists set out to bring much needed context to maybe the most vexing issue we face. The first clue … Read more
CNN has the right to change its mind. It can reasonably believe it is unnecessary—right now—to name a man at the center of a controversy sparked by President Donald Trump’s tweeting of … Read more
I was thinking about dedicating this column to what happened in New York, with the decision by the Times to jettison its public editor position. But what happened in Denver deserves just as much attention. What … Read more
The media, along with former FBI Director James Comey, helped Donald Trump become president. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has detailed why. But it doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that critical reporting in the final days … Read more
The media are making good on their promise to spend more time in Trumpland, to explore more deeply the animating thoughts of the millions of supposedly previously overlooked Americans who voted to make Donald Trump president. As the articles and … Read more
The federal government implemented a policy that helped reduce the deficit and how much senior citizens had to pay for drug prescriptions they otherwise couldn’t afford. The policy made it easier for everyday Americans to make ends … Read more
It wasn’t all that long ago that top U.S. journalists seemed most concerned with explaining why the decision by tens of millions of Americans to vote for Donald Trump made them neither racists nor bigots, despite Trump’s penchant for open … Read more
A discussion of journalistic ethics is supposed to involve journalism, so maybe I’m on thin ice writing about BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the dossier about Donald Trump – because that decision had nothing to do with journalism. Read more
James Comey’s reputation may never recover from a few decisions he made during the 2016 election cycle, and maybe it shouldn’t. His choices, though, weren’t materially different from the thinking used by most major media outlets to write stories based … Read more
