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Playboy headline misleads readers
By JASON WHITLOCKThe Kansas City Star
Chris Napolitano, editorial director of Playboy magazine, is committed to stirring a racial controversy in the next issue of Hugh Hefner’s favorite publication.
Napolitano, No. 2 behind Hef at the magazine, intends to use a 5,000-word column I wrote challenging the wisdom of America’s drug war, world-leading incarceration rate and brutal prison system as an excuse to fan racial flames and distract readers from the real issues raised in the piece.
It’s all eerily similar to the Golfweek-noose cover of a few months ago, except Napolitano’s scheme is more calculated and deliberate.
He’s going to do this over my objections and the strong disapproval of his executive editor, Lee Froehlich, the man who worked with me crafting the piece. Napolitano is going to do this being fully aware that he is being completely unfair to the sources who took genuine risks working with me on the story. He’s been told that his framing of the story will prevent the majority of people from digesting the substance of what was written.
He doesn’t care. He has a sexy headline he wants to promote and magazines to sell.
So on May 9, this headline will greet Playboy readers on the cover: “Jason Whitlock, The Black KKK.” On the inside of the magazine over my column, the headline will read: “The Black KKK.” A subheadline will state: “Hip Hop is killing Black America, and it’s time to do something about it.”
The story isn’t about the Black KKK. The words do not appear in the 5,000-word column. None of the sources quoted in the story or spoken to on background ever heard those words come out of my mouth, and they never spoke them to me. The story isn’t about hip-hop killing Black America.
The story is about the astronomical financial and cultural price we all — black, white, brown and yellow — are paying for locking up 2.3 million of our citizens. The piece focuses on California’s penal system, the state’s too-powerful prison guard union, Jim Brown’s anti-gang-violence organization and Mexican-black hostility.
The column is a desperate plea for America to change course from its lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key criminal justice system. The approach doesn’t create safety. It breeds corruption and gang culture. And it is currently crippling state and federal budgets. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently proposed a $7 billion budget for his state’s prison health care. You have millions of Americans going without health care, and California needs to spend $7 billion caring for prisoners.
The column screams that the foundation of our democracy is under attack from within, and Napolitano incredibly and irresponsibly wants to sabotage the message with a headline — “The Black KKK” — chosen to provoke, distract and distort.
Not only that, Playboy plans to mount a significant media campaign promoting its out-of-context headlines. On April 23 Jessica Sigelbaum, a representative of the magazine’s public-relations staff, e-mailed me the letter Playboy intended to send to television networks encouraging them to interview me.
Among the many crimes of the original pitch letter was its deliberate attempt to single out Barack Obama for special criticism: “With thug life destroying black America and prisons taking on an increasing number of inmates, Whitlock questions presidential candidate Barack Obama’s political ability to address this issue. Whitlock says it is a sensitive subject for Senator Obama to address without seeming too nonwhite.”
The letter alerted me to the potential problem. Without getting nasty or confrontational, I immediately raised my disapproval to Froehlich. He responded promptly and wrote in part: “I concur with you on the Black KKK title, but our editorial director prevailed on this as the title. He felt it was provocative, which it is, even if it isn’t strictly accurate.”
Wow. Napolitano obviously had a preconceived notion about what he wanted me to write. I’ve criticized aspects of hip-hop music and culture since the early 1990s (and supported local rap star Tech N9ne). Last year, when robbers gunned down NFL safety Sean Taylor in his home, I wrote a column for Foxsports.com that analogized black-on-black crime and neighborhood violence with the KKK, suggesting that black gangbangers were the new KKK terrorizing black communities.
Those were/are my opinions, and I stand by them. That is in no way the thrust of what I wrote for Playboy. And I would never attach those opinions to the name of others without warning them beforehand.
When Froehlich contacted me late in 2007 about writing for the magazine, I was thrilled and honored. Some of the world’s top journalists and writers have been published in Playboy, including Alex Haley, Margaret Atwood and Vladimir Nabokov. Froehlich told me the magazine wanted a “cultural piece,” and I was free to come up with the angle.
I’m positive Playboy contracted me because of the explosive columns I wrote a year ago about Don Imus, NBA All-Star Weekend Las Vegas and Sean Taylor. It’s apparent that Napolitano had a very surface-level understanding of my perspective. He made it up in his mind long before I agreed to write the piece that I would be doing an article castigating the “Black KKK.”
I don’t work that way. I wouldn’t waste my opportunity to speak to 3 million subscribers by repeating things I’ve already said. I look for opportunities to advance the conversation, take things to a higher level of discourse. I don’t choose sides. I try to follow the truth wherever it leads.
It took me several months to formulate a column idea partially because Playboy’s initial inquiry came during the middle of football season. By February, after several follow-up e-mails and phone calls from Froehlich, I pitched Froehlich on my idea to examine the cost — socially, culturally and economically — of incarcerating one in 100 Americans. He signed off on it and agreed to allow me to travel to California to do the reporting.
I filed the first draft of the column around March 10. I added a spicier lead and a couple of anecdotes, and my work was done by March 16 —almost two full months before the magazine would hit newsstands.
The column speaks for itself. The May issue of Playboy teased the article as the “All America Crisis” and included a picture saying that San Quentin prison was the “cause and effect of America’s crisis.” When I talked with Froehlich on April 23, he told me he lost a battle with Napolitano about what to call my story. Froehlich said I had two options: 1. Refuse to cooperate with the media campaign; 2. Criticize Playboy for the headlines in subsequent interviews.
Froehlich also promised to have Napolitano call me and explain his decision. Napolitano did call me that day. He expressed regret that we had had poor communication during the process of writing and headlining the story. I responded that I talked with Froehlich consistently and filed the story well in advance, giving Playboy plenty of time to digest the story and properly headline it. I also explained that besides being totally inaccurate and exploitive, the headlines were unfair to the sources that cooperated with me on the story.
Napolitano, again, expressed regret but assured me it was too late for Playboy to change course.
He knows what he’s doing. He knows people will be hurt by his actions. He knows that Jim Brown, Harry Edwards, three ministers, a Los Angeles school teacher, longtime employees of the California Department of Corrections and several others will feel totally betrayed. He knows that a serious issue will be ignored. And he knows the people who actually worked the story strongly disagree with him.
This is no accident. It’s big business at work. I’m embarrassed to play a role in it.