Jonathan Capehart: Amplifying Intersectionality Through Prolific Media Presence
Jonathan Capehart attends The Hollywood Reporter Most Powerful People In Media Presented By A&E (Ben Rosser/BFA.com)
Like most commencement weekends, the mood was festive and upbeat one June weekend on the stately campus of Carleton College, a small liberal arts school just south of Minneapolis. The graduates, in everything from bright dresses and heels to shorts and sneakers beneath their gowns, filed into seats arranged in a grassy, tree-ringed field ironically called The Bald Spot.
Seated among the Carleton deans and VIPs in formal academic garb was Jonathan Capehart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political journalist for The Washington Post and a national media personality. Clad in a doctoral robe, blue satin hood and gold-tasseled cap, Capehart’s trip outside the Beltway to the Land of 10,000 Lakes held special meaning: A member of Carleton’s Class of ‘89, he was the day’s commencement speaker.
With an origin story rooted in The Carletonian newspaper and radio station KRLX, the college’s student media outlets, Capehart’s message to the Class of 2023 was optimistic and hopeful. Their generation, he said, is prepared to take on unimaginable challenges. But he urged them to view the world with a critical eye, asking not only why things aren’t better but demanding how they could be better.
The moral arc of the universe may bend towards justice, “but it doesn’t bend on its own,” Capehart said. It takes determined people, he said, “with an idea of what justice should be” who are willing to do the work to “bend the arc of the moral universe in the right direction.”
It’s a declaration that could describe Capehart’s personal mission statement. And if the pen is mightier than the sword, then Capehart -- arguably the most visible and influential Black gay men in the news media -- wields a weapon more powerful than most.
“My columns put a spotlight on LGBT issues that show Black and brown people are part of the story. And on my MSNBC show, we are very conscious of who is telling the story among our guests.”
In addition to writing columns for The Washington Post, Capehart also hosts two eponymous weekend political talk shows on MSNBC on Saturday and Sunday mornings (he’s also an MSNBC substitute host, and is a regular on the network’s highly-rated “Morning Joe” talk show.) He also appears with conservative columnist David Brooks of The New York Times on “PBS NewsHour” in a point-counterpoint-style segment on politics and he guest-hosts a public-radio call-in talk show on New York public radio. That’s not counting the live, in-person newsmaker interview sessions he frequently moderates for The Post.
Viewed objectively, it’s an exhausting schedule, to say the least. But that broad media portfolio and Capehart’s access to Washington’s power elite -- former Attorney General Eric Holder officiated at his 2017 wedding, and he name-checks former President Barack Obama in his Carleton commencement address -- has given him the space, and the juice, to bring Black-gay intersectionality to an audience of millions every week, sometimes merely in the form of his very presence.
“What’s that saying: ‘Show, don’t tell’? That’s what I’ve tried to do,” Capehart says in an interview a few weeks after his commencement speech in Minnesota. “My columns put a spotlight on LGBT issues that show Black and brown people are part of the story. And on my MSNBC show, we are very conscious of who is telling the story among our guests.”
For example, “on my Pride special this year, “Defending Pride,” we had Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign who is a Black woman,” Capehart says. “And we had Oklahoma State Rep. Mauree Turner, the first non-binary state legislator in the nation, who is also Black.”
But the work at the intersection of race and sexual orientation hasn’t been easy.
Truth As A Foundation
Despite his success, Capehart is among just a handful of high-profile Black gay journalists working in a profession that doesn’t have a great track record with people of color, let alone gay ones. According to a 2022 survey by the Pew Center for Research, of the roughly 12,000 working journalists in the US, 76% are white, 8% are Hispanic and just 6% are black. And while exact statistics aren’t handy, the employment website Zippia says just 10% of all working journalists identify as LBGTQ, a category that isn’t subdivided by race.
His relatively meteoric rise notwithstanding -- within 8 years of graduation day at Carleton, Capehart was both the youngest-ever member of The New York Daily News editorial board and a Pulizer winner -- he acknowledges that, in both newsroom assignments and reader critiques, some only see him as a Black gay man and assume he has a hyper-liberal viewpoint. While Capehart says he brings his whole self to his profession, a two-dimensional view of him misses the bigger picture, and an important caveat.
“My personal and professional identities have conflicted many, many, many times during my career,” he says. “But I always viewed truth as my foundation.”
That’s because Capehart considers himself a staunch moderate on issues of race as well as sexual identity -- not a leftist culture warrior, wielding a flaming sword for identities others assume he represents.
“There are a lot of people who think that because I’m gay or because I’m black I have a responsibility to those respective communities depending on the issue. I feel that my responsibility as a journalist is to tell the truth,” Capehart said in a 2010 interview with Metro Weekly magazine. “And sometimes telling the truth to either the gay community or the black community is really tough for those two communities to take: ‘How dare you air our dirty laundry?’ or ‘How dare you say this? Why aren’t you supportive?’”
“My personal and professional identities have conflicted many, many, many times during my career. But I always viewed truth as my foundation.”
When working for the Daily News in the late 1990s, for example, Capehart called on then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to close gay movie houses and sex clubs to curb unsafe sex. The gay community was livid, Capehart says, but he stood his ground.
And in 2015, a year after Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson, Mo., police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager -- an incident that triggered national protests and jump-started the #BlackLivesMatter movement -- Capehart suggested Wilson might have been justified in shooting Brown.
Citing a highly detailed Justice Department investigation, he wrote that the forensic evidence, including DNA collected at the scene along with wounds on both Brown’s and Wilson’s bodies, strongly suggests that Brown, not Wilson, was the aggressor, and that both men wrestled for control of Wilson’s gun.
While it is a “mistake” for the Black community to declare Brown a blameless martyr, “it does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death,” Capehart wrote, including a long pattern of police killing unarmed Black men. “But we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative,” and “when we discover that we have, we must acknowledge it, admit our error and keep on marching.”
Civil rights activists saw the column as heresy; others called Capehart a sellout, among other things. But Capehart says he stands by his convictions, regardless of what people think.
“If someone Black or LGBTQ fell on the wrong side of truth in a story, I felt duty bound to hold them accountable,” Capehart says. “We have worked too hard to get to these positions to then not hold ourselves (as a group) to the standards we hold others.”
Throughout his career, “I have been called a ‘neocon, self-loathing, sex-negative’ gay man. I’m still called by some an ‘Uncle Tom who doesn’t know he’s Black’ or ‘not of the community,’” he says. “And that’s fine. Folks are entitled to their opinions. I know exactly who I am -- even if they don’t.”
Jonathan Capehart attends Politics & Inclusion Dinner for the White House Correspondents’ Weekend (Deonté Lee/BFA.com)
Representation of Black Men Matters
It’s a sense of identity that came to Capehart at an early age. Raised by his mother in northern New Jersey during the late 1960s and ‘70s, he says ideas about his sexual orientation and career path both came to him at age 10.
That year, spending the summer with relatives in Virginia, he came across a Bible tract condemning homosexuality (“I remember reading this one part about man lying with man and blah blah blah. And I thought, ”Hmmm, well. What’s wrong with that?”). Watching co-anchors Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley on NBC’s TODAY show spurred thoughts about becoming a journalist.
Capehart’s journalism ambitions developed, however, during the 1980s, when Bryant Gumbel replaced Brokaw on TODAY (“I saw someone who looked like me doing the job”). After interning at the news program in college, it hired him full-time as a researcher in 1992.
“My roots in newspapers took hold when I left TODAY in 1993 to join the editorial board of the New York Daily News,” Capehart says. Aside from a three-year detour in public relations in the mid-2000s (“I knew it was a mistake on my first day. I tried to make it work, but I just wasn’t cut out for it”) print journalism is his primary career.
“What I thought would just be a two-year stint before going back to television became a 30-year affair this year,” he says.
Although he’s a self-described centrist, Capehart does lean to the left in his columns and TV appearances. He has slammed conservatives’ ongoing rollbacks of gay and civil rights (as well as Democrats’ inaction), and resigned from The Post’s editorial board in protest after it published an editorial that minimized Republican-implemented voting restrictions in Georgia.
“It wasn’t until I saw Bryant Gumbel in the job I knew I wanted to pursue that I felt like it was truly possible. Our imaginations expand that much farther when we see what is possible.”
Capehart is also clear: When it comes to diversity, the journalism establishment shouldn’t look at his success and pat itself on the back.
“Black and Brown faces in newsrooms guarantee that that organization will have a clearer view of what’s happening in the world around them,” Capehart says. “But the voices that come with those faces have to be listened to for that guarantee to even work.”
Moreover, “My career is the living example of what happens when managers open the door to diversity,” he says. “It wasn’t until I saw Bryant Gumbel in the job I knew I wanted to pursue that I felt like it was truly possible. Our imaginations expand that much farther when we see what is possible.”
And although Black gay representation in the media has a long way to go, “there are more of us” than one might imagine, Capehart says. “I’m specifically thinking of Eugene Scott at Axios. Eugene Daniels at Politico. Both of them are breaking barriers because they are damned good at their jobs AND because they are comfortable in their own skins and supported for it.
He continues: “Just think about how those two men challenge the notions of who should be on television. Eugene Scott is literally tall, dark and handsome. We don’t see many dark-skinned people (period) on television -- and he’s an out gay Black man. Eugene Daniels, just by being himself with his fabulous curly afro, colorful nails, gender non-conforming style, effortlessly widens our expectation of what a Black man is ‘supposed to’ look like.”
“Because of them,” he says, “there will be more of us.”
Joseph Williams is The Reckoning’s Race & Health Editor. A seasoned journalist, political analyst and essayist, Williams has been published in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and US News & World Report.
A California native, Williams is a graduate of the University Of Richmond and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives and works in metro Washington, D.C.