C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb Has Issues With AAJA
“When C-SPAN’s chairman and CEO Brian Lamb spoke after accepting the prestigious Freedom of Speech Award from the Media Institute on Oct. 22, he promptly launched an award program of his own: the Lenscap award, given to those individuals and organizations who most persistently keep cameras away from their proceedings,” Tony Mauro reports in Legal Times.
“Lamb’s first Lenscap Award went to the camera-allergic Supreme Court, with a ‘special mention’ for Justice Antonin Scalia — an old friend of Lamb’s — who routinely bars cameras from recording his speeches,” Mauro continues.
“Other winners of Lamb’s dubious award include the Senate Appropriations Committee, which bars cameras from markups, and the Democratic and Republican Senate Campaign Committees, for being camera-shy at their fund-raising events.
“Perhaps most surprisingly, Lamb also said members of the news media deserve the award: the Asian American Journalists Association and the Gridiron Club have barred the door to broadcast coverage, he said, as have countless book authors and their agents and hosts. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many journalists’ are averse to being taped and broadcast, said Lamb.”
This is news to AAJA, says executive director Rene Astudillo.
“It comes as a big surprise to me that Brian Lamb would single out AAJA as among the organizations that ‘most persistently’ keep cameras away from their proceedings,” he told Journal-isms. “As far as I know, C-SPAN has been covering our conventions every year and have, in fact, broadcast many of our convention plenary sessions and workshops.
“I know that at our convention this year in San Diego, we honored the wishes of our keynote speaker not to have broadcast cameras cover his speech. This is in no way a reflection of AAJA’s policy, and I don’t think this one instance qualifies as ‘persistent.’
“We’d love C-SPAN to cover our conventions or other public events from beginning to end!”
The appearance of retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, former Army chief of staff, at the Aug. 15 banquet was to be one of Shinseki’s first major public appearances since his June 11 retirement.
Sounds like Lamb took it hard when C-SPAN cameras couldn’t be there.
Hampton U. Provost Has Different Take on Her Words
The acting president of Hampton University has apparently come up with a different interpretation of what she meant by her clarifying phrase describing the scope of the task force she agreed to form to decide the future relationship of the student newspaper to the administration.
Dr. JoAnn Haysbert was said to have agreed to abide by the recommendations of the task force that could advise independence from the administration, but Monday told the students that “as Acting President, it is not within my purview to change the institutional model on which this outstanding paper was founded,” putting the task force at a standstill, as reported Wednesday.
The Daily Press in Newport News, Va., today reports that Haysbert “told endowed journalism professor Earl Caldwell, the students’ mediator and chairman of the task force, that her wording simply meant that the paper could not change its policy that includes student staff members from all majors, not just journalism.”
Haysbert has not been returning reporters’ telephone calls.
Meanwhile, columnist Joe Davidson, writing for bet.com, reported that “Judy Clabes, president and CEO of the Scripps Howard Foundation, said its $10 million, 10-year grant to Hampton is not in jeopardy. That grant built and equipped the university’s fine journalism school. Yet, Clabes was full of praise for Hampton’s student journalists and critical of the acting president, whose action Clabes said was a ‘reflection of her [Haysbert’s] inexperience.'”
The administration confiscated the student newspaper last week after Haysbert demanded that a letter from her be placed on the front page and the students instead placed it on page 3, alerting readers to it on page 1.
The paper was republished in time for Saturday’s homecoming game, with both the letter from Haysbert and a large disclaimer from the students on the front page.
The students wrote of the agreement, “In exchange, university officials promised to abide by the recommendations of a task force that will be established to determine the role of the student newspaper at the school.”
Black Caucus’ Debate Called Not “Black” Enough
The Democratic candidates debate Sunday in Detroit, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and carried by Fox News Channel, didn’t address enough questions of concern to African Americans, Caucus Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., told BlackPressUSA, the news Web site of black newspaper publishers.
?’I would have preferred that we had gotten into some of the questions that go to the essence [of] what African-American people are most concerned about,’ says CBC Chairman Elijah Cummings. He said he would like to have heard questions about criteria for Supreme Court judges, urban policies and housing,” Hazel Edney’s story reported.
?’We don?t control the journalists. We give them our briefing papers. We give them our concerns. We give them our agenda. We give them our objectives. We also provide that same information to the candidates,’ he says. ‘The fact is that all we could do was suggest and kind of, you know, say that it would be nice if they did this or if they did that. I wish they had gotten a little deeper into the issues.’?
“Cummings says that one of the Black Detroit Congresspersons, Carolyn Kilpatrick, selected the three panelists; Carl Cameron, FOX News chief political correspondent; [Huel] Perkins, an on-air personality for WJBR-TV, Detroit?s FOX affiliate; and Gwen Ifill, moderator of PBS?s ‘Washington Week’ and senior correspondent for ‘The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,’ ” the story continued.
The Washington Post Sunday used the occasion to run a profile of Ifill by reporter Kathy Blumenstock.
George Curry: I Know About Those Kind of Cartoons
George E. Curry, editor of BlackPressUSA.com, doesn’t think much of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who criticized a cartoon last week that showed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with a fright wig, a persona called “Janice Brown” after black conservative Janice Rogers Brown. Brown is a nominee for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
“As the editor who put Clarence Thomas on the cover of ?Emerge: Black America?s Newsmagazine? with an Aunt Jemima-style knot on his head, I am not about to criticize the cartoonist or Glen Ford, the editor who had the courage to publish the cartoon,” Curry writes on BlackPressUSA.com. “Political cartoons are not supposed to be even-handed renderings of an issue or person. They are, by definition, withering and often humorous attacks.
“I didn?t hear [Sen. Orrin] Hatch complain about the cartoons that made fun of Bill Clinton, everything from his public policies to his private life. I don?t think a cartoon made the rounds on the Internet any faster than the one of a rhyming baby girl with Jesse Jackson?s facial features. If presidents and civil rights leaders are not exempt, Janice Rogers Brown shouldn?t get preferential treatment.”
Toni Morrison: Call Me a Black Writer
Journalists of color who struggle over how much to be identified by their ethnicity might be interested in author Toni Morrison’s take on her own resolution of that question. She was interviewed yesterday on “The Tavis Smiley Show” on National Public Radio:
“SMILEY: I mentioned this in my introduction of you and you have mentioned it by my count two or three times now in this conversation, and that is this notion of your writing unapologetically about black life, about the African-American experience. Why so, and where did that come from?
“MORRISON: Well, my introduction to African American literature was late because they didn’t teach it in the schools that I attended. And I’ve always noticed that the great African American writers, when they were spoken about by critics, there was a kind of an apology, some notion that they were slumming. No matter how grand or great the themes or how well the work was done, it was, A, viewed as sociology and not literature and not art, and also I’ve found that writers themselves, knowing full well they had the filter of, you know, the white publisher and the white reader to get through, were frequently addressing themselves to that readership.
“So when I began to write, I always insisted upon being called a black woman writer or an African American writer because some people would say, you know, ‘You write very well. Why do you limit yourself? You don’t have to call yourself “black writer” or “black woman writer.” You are a — and then I would fill in the blank. A white male writer? So that I just deliberately and unapologetically concentrated on, A, what I knew, and what I was interested in, and also to make certain that people understood this was not a narrow, shallow or limited area.”
Morrison also discussed her famous 1998 assertion in the New Yorker magazine that Bill Clinton was “our first black president.” She wrote, “African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: this is our first black president. Blacker than any black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food loving boy from Arkansas.”
When Smiley asked, “you still feel the same way about that?” Morrison replied that “Yeah, I do. I mean, culturally speaking, he certainly is.” But she added, “I have to say, Tavis, that was not original with me.
“SMILEY: Yeah.
“MORRISON: I repeated what Chris Rock said.
“SMILEY: Yeah.
“MORRISON: Chris Rock said it, some friends — male friends of mine used to say, you know, ‘They treat that man like he’s black.’
Concluded Smiley: “Who knew? Toni Morrison quoting Chris Rock and not the other way around. Now that’s funny to me. That’s really funny.”
Katie Couric Reportedly Wants Jayson Blair
“I hear that Katie Couric met on Monday with New York Times nemesis Jayson Blair, who’ll participate in an hour-long prime-time NBC special timed to the March 9 publication of his memoir, ‘Burning Down My Master’s House,'” writes gossip columnist Lloyd Grove in the New York Daily News.
“The focus of both the special and a subsequent ‘Today’ show appearance will be the breakdown in journalistic safeguards at the Gray Lady and the reasons Blair plagiarized and fabricated stories that ended not only his Times career but the careers of executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd. Still unclear is whether Raines or Boyd talk to Couric.
“‘Hopefully, it will be a full account,’ Couric told me. ‘I’m especially interested in this because I came of age during the whole Janet Cooke controversy, and this seemed to have echoes of that.'”
Del Walters Leaves as Leon Harris Starts in D.C.
“WJLA anchor and reporter Del Walters has left the ABC station after 18 years,” reports Lisa deMoraes in the Washington Post.
“Though his official last day was Monday, Walters was last seen on the air Sept. 3, the day before Allbritton-owned WJLA announced that former CNN anchor Leon Harris would co-anchor its 5, 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts.”
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