Black Business and Professional People, More Unfair News Coverage

I saw in the Philadelphia Daily News last week that the Nutter administration seems to have a plan to take contracts away from businesses that received them during the eight-year period that John Street was mayor of Philadelphia.

Sounded like "business as usual” in the public sector. When the old administration is replaced, the new one generally sweeps out those who had been given politically appointed jobs or politically influenced contracts by their predecessors. The problem is, however, that the one Street-era business that the newspaper chose to focus upon to make the case was that owned by Lana Felton Ghee, one of the hardest-working black businesspeople I’ve ever met.

The thing that struck me in the story, which featured a big, old, unflattering picture of Lana, was that if the Nutter administration and local media were truly interested in cracking down on businesses that received contracts while John Street was mayor, logically, they wouldn’t have started with Lana Felton Ghee, or with any other black-owned business, since businesses owned by white males received 96 percent of the contract revenue from city contracts during that period. Pitifully, the story focused on a contract that paid Lana’s firm less than $32,000 a year, over four years.

Why in the world was Lana Felton Ghee made the “poster child” for the previous administration’s contractual cronyism? If the newspaper had any interest, at all, in being fair, weren’t there, literally, hundreds of businesses owned by people who were not black, and who had significantly larger contracts, that should have been featured first?

In that same vein, every time I start to get comfortable that our City’s media coverage is becoming fair, balanced and "post-racial," some reporter, at some newspaper, will bring up “Billy Boy’s” name in a negative context.

It happened again just this past week.

"Billy Boy," God rest his soul, passed away much too soon, at age 55, from pancreatic cancer, in late 2004, and yet, because local media have developed a lingering pattern of casual disrespect for black Philadelphians, his name continues to be routinely dragged into stories about “pay-to-play.”

Those of you who didn’t grow up in our neighborhood, back in the old Richard Allen housing projects in North Central Philadelphia, may not even know who "Billy Boy" was.

Let me briefly explain: He was a hero where I came from. He was an example to people in the neighborhood that you could go to SpringGarden Elementary School on 12th Street between Parrish and Poplar, that you could graduate from Ben Franklin High School, that you could be a
"corner boy," right there at 12th and Poplar, and be intelligent at the same time, that you could earn a scholarship to a prestigious private university and go on to graduate from an even more prestigious law school, that you could open and run one of the largest and most successful black-owned law firms in Philadelphia, that you could become a confidante to the City and State’s most powerful elected officials, that you could create scholarship programs for people in the neighborhood who came behind you, that you could provide jobs in your firm for those who needed them, and that you absolutely never had to be ashamed of where you came from, nor to forget about your old friends.

That’s who "Billy Boy" was and still is, to us. That’s why his image, even now, is painted on a “wall of respect” down at 8th and Parrish Streets. That’s why those of us who grew up with him and those who came to know him later in life still get very angry about the blatant unfairness of news reporters who have reduced his entire life of significant achievement to an icon for corruption in public contracts.

Most Philadelphians knew him as Ronald White, Esquire, the young African American who essentially learned to “swim with sharks,” professionally, and then got publicly castigated and legally indicted for doing so.

I will always believe that "Bill" thought that he was simply “doing business” in the same way that other successful lawyers, businesspeople, and elected officials had always done, here, and across the country, for as long as anyone could remember. He raised money for elected officials, using legally established and registered Political Action Committees, he became a master at professional “networking," and he sought business opportunities for himself and for his clients.

When the negative news coverage about him kicked in, it was ferocious and incessant. "Bill’s" picture was routinely splashed across virtually every local newspaper, the most intimate details of his family life were exposed in an unfair and damaging way and transcripts from his personal telephone calls somehow found their way into news stories, repeatedly. I will always believe that the stress of being made the target of that unprecedented, negative, news barrage, virtually every day, through the last few years of his life, contributed to his untimely death.

As I said, just when I thought all of that had been put to rest, last week the Obama transition team announced that former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson had agreed to step down from his appointment as Secretary of Commerce in the next presidential administration, because of the disclosure that he was involved in a federal “pay-to-play” investigation having to do with a company named CDR Financial.

CDR, which, according to media accounts, has advised clients on more than $158 billion in transactions since 1986, is, also, a huge, national, political player. The company’s principals have a history of raising funds for elected officials across the country and, not surprisingly, have done very well for themselves in landing public-sector contracts--not only in New Mexico, but also, right here, in our own backyard. The company, apparently, still has contracts with the City of Philadelphia and with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the name of Governor Rendell has been mentioned unfavorably in conjunction with those contracts.

I’m sure Ed Rendell can take care of himself and, when the smoke clears, I'm sure he'll be just fine. The thing that is so unsettling about this national story is that, in the midst of all the talk of "hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits" the company realized through contracts with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and $1.5 million in fees paid to the company by the State of New Mexico, during the time it contributed $110,000 to Bill Richardson's PAC's, there was, also, gratuitously, in my opinion, an additional negative reference, more than four years after his death, to the man the newspaper described as "powerbroker Ron White. " By the way, the same media also confirmed that "Bill's firm was working against a “$5,000-a-month” retainer, as a consultant to CDR.

A “$5,000-a-month retainer?” Was that it? Is it somehow inherently illegal for a black person to be a paid lobbyist? Was that even a material sum of money in the overall scheme of things, justifying dragging his name into the story, in the first place? Why do his family members still have to cringe when they pick up a newspaper, even four years after his death? Remember, Ron White was never actually convicted of any crime related to the charges of being a political "powerbroker."

No matter how you cut it, it seems unfair, it seems unbalanced.

I’m sorry, Lana. I’m sorry, Bill. It seems like there should be something we could do about changing all of that.

So far, we've all done a horrible job of correcting it and, so, the "beat" goes on.



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