The Dangers of Reporting on Your Hometown

Perhaps his sensitivities were off kilter from being around too many Connie Chung-wannabes.

Or maybe, given the limitations of mainstream journalism, my friend had simply covered too many mundane stories that turn one into a calcified pro, what I call "news-stone." Cover enough routine press conferences and it’s hard to imagine the death of a journalist ever rising to the status of "assassination." Why waste the bullets?

Surely, "assassination" was a word preserved for the deaths of people who really matter in our democracy, like presidents, advocates, idealists and believers. But a journalist?

Then again, my colleague didn’t know Chauncey Bailey.

Chauncey was a journalist with a capital "J," the kind who still have the nerve to go deep into a project, doggedly root it out and write a story that can strike fear in the hearts of his subjects. The truth has a way of doing that.

Most mainstream journalists don’t do news the way Chauncey did. But Chauncey was a man of the community, not a man of comfort.

And what he did know killed him.

A 19-year-old handyman with North Oakland’s Your Black Muslim Bakery, Devaughndre Broussard, was arrested a day later when Oakland police raided the bakery on unrelated warrants, and police say he has confessed to Bailey’s murder. In his confession, police say, Broussard said he was angered by an article Bailey was working on that was critical of the bakery. The article has not yet been published.

The murder of Chauncey Bailey—one of the first American journalists to be killed in this country in many years for working on a story—made instant headlines and topped news broadcasts and talk shows around the world, and quickly made Bailey the most famous Oakland-born journalist since Jack London.