EVERY once in a while, I come across a news story that defies any attempt to rationalise the casual cruelty it embodies. At a time when identity dominates much of our thinking about politics and culture, most of these stories revolve around race, sexuality or gender.
Such stories abound in the callous age in which we live; indeed, they appear with such frequency that it has become easy to ignore them or dismiss them as yet another example of woke insanity. But the story of Valerie Hoff DeCarlo, an Emmy award-winning journalist who served as an anchor for CNN during the 1990s and who died recently of lung cancer at the relatively tender age of 62, cannot be brushed aside so easily. The injustice done this woman cries out for vindication.
According to her husband, Derrick DeCarlo, she was ‘a strong, capable, loving woman and a wonderful mother’, devoted to friends and family alike. Even as her dreadful illness progressed, she remained active in family events. Just weeks before her death, she was organising a cruise and preparing to host a Christmas family gathering, trying to live as normal a life as possible despite being terminally ill. Sadly, she did not go on that cruise and died before she was able to spend Christmas with those she loved.
By all accounts, Valerie was a remarkable woman, a charismatic anchor for CNN and a dogged consumer reporter and anchor at the NBC-affiliate WXIA in Atlanta where she worked from 1999 to 2017 after leaving CNN. She had led a highly accomplished life, both professionally and personally – the sort of well-lived life that calls for glowing obituaries.
However, the obituary writers of the mainstream press, including the horrendous British tabloids who don’t normally report on the deaths of women like Valerie, thought otherwise. Instead of focusing on her journalistic achievements, her love of family, or her valiant battle with cancer that began in 2013, they chose to focus on one aspect of her life: her supposed use of the N-word, not on air, but in a private online conversation in April 2017, with a black man by the name of Curtis Rivers who had posted a video of a white policeman punching a black motorist.
To use an expression I have come to loathe, the video in question quickly went viral. Countless news outlets sought out Rivers for permission for the rights to use it, including Valerie, who wanted it for a headline story and to illustrate the evils of racially motivated police violence.
Rivers, who frequently used the ugliest of racial slurs on social media, received so many requests for his video that he responded on X by writing that a lot of ‘news niggas’ were trying to track him down for the footage. Eager to get her video, Valerie replied privately to Rivers by describing herself as one of those ‘news niggas’ he had referenced in his original posting. Clearly, she was being ironic, even a little self-deprecating, using language her interlocutor had used in an attempt to appease him, loosen him up, so to speak, in order to persuade him to allow her to use the video.
But Rivers was having none of it. Upon discovering that Valerie was white, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, speculating without any evidence whatsoever, that ‘If she is bold enough to say it to me, being an African American, then I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time she has used that word’.
One thing is for sure: Mrs Hoff DeCarlo never used any racial slurs either on air, or in any public forum. As a woman who wanted to highlight the injustice of racially motivated police violence and rejoiced when the two officers who had beaten the black motorist in the video were fired, it is also highly unlikely that she would ever use racist epithets in private conversations.
Responding to Rivers, Valerie pointed out that she was referring to herself when she used the word. Foolishly, sadly, but entirely understandably given her precarious situation and the current toxic climate surrounding race in contemporary America, she went on: ‘I was quoting something the gentleman said in a public tweet back to him in a private message but that doesn’t make it any less offensive . . . it was incredibly stupid and reckless . . . I was in the middle of a pressure-filled day, trying to chase down the video of a man being beaten and kicked by two police officers, which this particular gentleman had posted on Twitter . . . I repeatedly apologise and continue to do so.’
Of all the ugly aspects of this story – and there are many – I find Valerie’s desperate pleas to be forgiven by ‘the gentleman’ who sought her professional and reputational destruction, when she had done nothing to be forgiven for, to be the ugliest of all. Indeed, I cringe with anger when I read her words of contrition.
Rivers asked her for her manager’s and lawyer’s contact information before posting what had been private messages on social media. In response, WXIA suspended Valerie for two weeks, forcing her to resign soon after. Despite valiant efforts to reinvent herself as a citizen journalist, this energetic and intelligent woman was unable to find work as a professional journalist ever again.
Now the poor lady is dead, memorialised by the New York Post as a ‘disgraced ex-CNN anchor . . . who quit journalism after using N-word’, by the Daily Mail as the ‘CNN star who was forced to resign after using the N-word’; by the Sun as the woman whose career was destroyed by a ‘vile N-word slur’. There are many more examples. Nowhere have I been able to find an obituary in which this highly accomplished and much-loved woman’s life is not defined by a supposed sin against language for which she was, I hope I have shown, entirely innocent.
Valerie’s story has haunted me ever since I came across it before Christmas, the Christmas she intended to celebrate with her family. This poor woman was demonised for something she didn’t do and was horribly defamed even in death. Her story reveals the sheer cruelty and nastiness of those hate-driven hustlers who trade in racial politics.
Americans live in fear of being labelled ‘racist’, including the vast majority of white Americans who hate racism as much as the current author. Valerie Hoff DeCarlo’s outrageous treatment by the media demonstrates beyond doubt that such fears are not to be lightly dismissed.
