OPINION | With Marcus Green Taking Over as Interim News Editor at The Stranger, Seattle’s Most Progressive Newsroom Has a Chance to Connect With Overlooked Communities
On Friday afternoon, I opened Twitter to a flurry of outraged tweets over the news that Rich Smith, longtime news editor for The Stranger, had been let go. In response to the announcement, one post read: “The Stranger is excited to tell you that Amazon actually already pays too much in taxes, and that Sarah Nelson would make a great Mayor!”
An iteration of this thought arose in my mind as well. It’s a natural assumption to make for anyone who’s paid attention to Seattle media over the years, as millionaires and business interests have effectively defanged any semblance of true progressivism across the vast majority of the city’s media landscape. The Stranger had somehow managed to maintain its integrity, and its bite, while the watered-down political opinions and social commentary being produced by legacy media were soaked in the motives of the Chamber of Commerce and the feelings of the Greater Seattle area’s waterfront homeowners.
But a tweet from Real Change staff reporter Guy Oron, leaking a new piece of information, added an interesting layer of context for me: Marcus Harrison Green would be taking over as interim news editor at The Stranger — a claim which turned out to be true.
For many people, Green’s name is more quickly associated with his work as a columnist for The Seattle Times, but I know him as the founder of the South Seattle Emerald. In this pale city of ours, which consistently ranks in the top 10 (and typically top five) whitest cities of the 50 largest cities in the nation, the South End, which encompasses Southeastern Seattle, has always been exceptionally diverse. So much so that an urban legend about 98118 being the most diverse zip code in the U.S. has been around for decades. The South Seattle Emerald is a grassroots media outlet that was created to celebrate the fullness of that diversity.
Shortly after I moved back home to Seattle in 2019, the value of the work being done at the Emerald became quickly evident to me. It’s the kind platform that honors the lives of pillars of our communities. One that has an understanding that the people best equipped to make the case against unqualified candidates are often trusted voices from the communities that those candidates claim to speak for. When I read the Emerald’s coverage of the issues that are most pressing to Black and Brown communities, I saw names of community members that I recognize and know to really be in the community. Hopefully Green will be able to bring these values to the newsroom at The Stranger.
When I connected with Green to get a comment about his new role at The Stranger, which he emphasized was a temporary position, we first discussed what led him to create the Emerald.
“I was in this community that didn't really have control over its own narrative when it came to how it was viewed by the rest of the city,” he told me. “The South End was looked at as this place that was crime-ridden, decaying, and sort of a specter of urban blight.“
While we talked, he shared a story with me about a conversation he’d had with an older Black gentleman at Columbia City Library. In response to him telling the man that he’d left the Seattle Times and was now at The Stranger, the man had said to him, “Aww man, they don't ever report nothing about Black people.”
“And while that’s not exactly true,” Green said, “that certainly is a perception about the paper. That it's progressive, but it's missing a few shades of progressivism.”
This is something that many of us can attest to. The reality is that many of the People of Color who care deeply for their communities, and who are politically engaged, do not feel like The Stranger resonates with them. Even when our communities are the most impacted by the backward policies, which are regularly and rightly skewered by The Stranger, it’s rarely our perspectives that are framing the coverage. This is something that I feel deserves some scrutiny.
This isn’t a suggestion to simply add more faces of color to the newsroom to check diversity boxes. We should all be wary of the emptiness of representational politics, as well as the potential dangers that come with it including its capacity for counterinsurgency — which we’ve witnessed nationally and here at home. It should also be taken into consideration that it’s much easier for people in positions of power to traffic conservative politics into Communities of Color, from people who look like them, when there’s little effort being made to pull these communities into progressive coalitions.
I often think about the 1994 Crime Bill and the support it had from the Black community, which is often exaggerated but still existed. And it existed because those communities were made up of real people who were feeling the unbearable effects of crime, exacerbated by systemic racism, in its many forms. Today, Black communities are still disproportionately impacted by crime. And today, just like in 1994, the solution to this shouldn’t be to flood the streets with more cops or give police departments even more obscene amounts of money. That part is something that The Stranger, our city’s most prominent progressive media outlet, understands very well. This stance has remained strong, even in the wake of most local media pinning crime on imaginary police defunding.
But if people in our communities are calling for more police presence, I want to read more stories about why that is. I want to hear more real analysis from Central District and South End natives about the ways in which gentrification has worked to dismantle close-knit communities and how that’s weakened people’s feelings of accountability to one another. I want deeper discussions about the ways in which Communities of Color are pitted against each other, and the root of that, and how we move forward. I’d love for our city’s most progressive newspaper to one day have the range to dissect the U.S. government’s siege on Black radicalism and how we’re seeing that play out today.
How much further can the paper go to not only include the commentary from people who are often overlooked but to also create space for them to tell their own stories? Beyond this, as Green touched on in discussing why he built the Emerald, how can The Stranger advance the pursuit of presenting these communities in their full humanity, and splendidly so? And that’s not to say that this is something that The Stranger has never done, particularly with the arts, but I’d like to see them go deeper.
Our shared political goals, and our desire for safer and more healthy communities, depend on us developing a stronger and more expanded progressive coalition. I believe The Stranger can be influential in bridging the social divide between younger political leftists, and the Black and Brown community leaders who’ve dedicated their lives to fighting for the improved material conditions of their communities.
I’d be remiss not to note that this piece is in no way meant to be dismissive of the people who are upset about Rich Smith being let go, or to celebrate it, in any way. It’s also not meant to trivialize the output of The Stranger’s newsroom. I’ve always been a fan and a supporter of the work they do.
Sometimes, though, when a big shift like this occurs, it makes you consider the possibilities of what that shift could yield.
In his recounting of The Emerald’s origin story, Geen said that “the essence of the Emerald is to try to speak loudly and boldly to the power structures. But not just to them. It’s also to speak as confidently and affirmatively as possible to folks who have been made to feel powerless.”
He believes that, foundationally, this has been the essence of The Stranger, as well. It speaks directly to the city’s renters, people who work two or three jobs to make ends meet, artists, creatives, and small business owners. And also to the people who are fighting to change the status quo. These are the people, Green says, whose voices must continue to be amplified.
“I can sit here and give 1,000 reassurances but, at the end of the day, it comes down to what’s going to be produced,” he said, as a message to The Stranger’s readership who are concerned about the future of the paper. “The politics will be the same but more inclusive than what some people have thought it was in the past.”
This sentiment was echoed by writer and South Seattle Emerald board member Ijeoma Oluo.
“We desperately need more local publications with community-focused integrity that work to ensure that ALL voices are heard,” Oluo wrote in an email. “That is why Marcus founded the South Seattle Emerald and why we've been such a trusted community partner for the last decade. I'm overjoyed to see him bring that love and integrity to The Stranger. It is a truly hopeful moment for those who have long felt underrepresented in Seattle media.”
Politically, I believe The Stranger has always excelled at covering the issues that Black and Brown communities care about and are acutely affected by, in a way that doesn’t sell them out, unlike many other media outlets. My hope is that we’re entering a new era of the paper creating space on their platform for these communities to have more control of their own narratives.
The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.
The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.