Elusive On Sudan Slavery p.11

By: Editorial Staff THE LAST TIME the Rev. Louis Farrakhan spoke to reporters, he challenged them to put up or shut up about reports of slavery in the Sudan.
"If slavery exists, why don't you go as a member of the press and look inside Sudan, and if you find it, then you come back and tell the American people what you found," Farrakhan, who denies slavery exists in Africa, told the National Press Club in Washington.
Two Baltimore Sun reporters, Gilbert A. Lewthwaite and Gregory Kane, did just that ? and reported in a recent series that they actually bought two Sudan boys and returned them to their father.
When he talked to the National Association of Black Journalists meeting in Nashville last week, however, Farrakhan brushed off the topic.
"The Sudan. How many of you are ready to go there and look at it and report accurately ? even if you have to go against what is said about there?" Farrakhan said, without elaborating.
As part of the NABJ program, after his remarks, Farrakhan was questioned on stage by Warner Saunders, the veteran anchor with WMAQ-TV in Chicago. Saunders said that in conversation with Farrakhan before the program, the Nation of Islam leader "just fluffed off" his direct question about the Baltimore Sun series.
If Farrakhan missed seeing slaves on his visit to the Sudan, he apparently found some of them at the NABJ convention, where he repeatedly referred to African-American journalists as "you slave writers, you slave media people."