An Electrifying Speech, but It Wasn’t on Networks
“Jazz Night at Slade’s” was the title of the “Convention Diary” posted on washington post.com today by the Washington Post’s Robert G. Kaiser.
“Well, I am probably flattering the idea I had tonight, to go to a Boston bar popular with African Americans to watch the hot new African American star Barack Obama give the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention. I thought it would be fun to see how Obama, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, was received by people who would be inclined to view him sympathetically, at least initially,” Kaiser wrote.
As it turned out, Kaiser was disappointed, like many others who wanted to see the man about to become only the third African American to be elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction.
“Then The Wrinkle,” he continued. “Slade’s has a limited cable TV service that did NOT include any of the channels that were broadcasting the convention Tuesday night. So Obama and his speech were unavailable to be commented on at Slade’s. Thanks to America’s oh-so-statesmanlike television broadcast networks, which decided to show nothing of tonight’s convention activities, the patrons at Slade’s — not to mention millions of other non-cable families — missed the chance to see the fellow who may well be the first black male Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate.”
Obama’s speech was widely praised. In fact, it “exceeded expectations,” as one pundit said on National Public Radio.
It seemed that Obama got his due primarily in print, and particularly in his home state.
A glance at the Newseum’s newspaper front pages for today shows that Obama’s photo made the front of such diverse newspapers as USA Today, the Washington Post, the Tampa Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, the Miami Herald, the Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger, the Indianapolis Star and the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa. “Obama Shares His ‘American Story,'” was the headline in the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago. “OBAMA DELIVERS” screamed the Chicago Sun-Times.
The Chicago Tribune ran five pieces on Obama: “Kennedy, Obama stoke the faithful”, by Jeff Zeleny; “Multipurpose star born for Democrats’ effort,” by Michael Tackett; “Black leadership in flux as new stars take stage; Obama among the new faces as party enters a new transition”, by Dahleen Glanton and Charles M. Madigan; “Obama finding himself flush with media attention” by David Mendell; and an editorial, “The Phenom”.
Viewers of the commercial broadcast networks also missed a chance to learn a little about the African connection of Teresa Heinz Kerry, the would-be first lady who strode to the stage to a recording of Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best.”
As Alessandra Stanley wrote in the New York Times:
“‘I grew up in East Africa, in Mozambique, in a land that was then under a dictatorship,’ she said. ‘As a young woman, I attended Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa, which was then not segregated. But I witnessed the weight of apartheid everywhere around me. And so with my fellow students we marched against its extension into higher education.’
“She added, ‘I have a very personal feeling about how special America is, and I know how precious freedom is.’
“Mrs. Heinz Kerry has often described herself as African-born, but few Americans know much about African history or that her Portuguese father, a doctor, was a liberal opponent of the colonial regime. In interviews, she has a habit of alluding proudly, but airily, to experiences that few Americans know she had. She told Ms. [Katie] Couric yesterday that in her youth she put her ‘life on the line’ for freedom, an allusion to her anti-apartheid activities that many viewers could not have guessed.”
Journal-isms asked the networks how they covered Obama, in light of their decisions not to show any of Tuesday’s convention live.
The responses:
- ABC: Spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said that 200,000 people on America Online watched its coverage via ABC News Now, launched last year on the ABC News Web site and with Comcast digital networks. Some ABC affiliates are offering the coverage on their digital channels, available to those with specially equipped TVs, as Howard Kurtz said in the Washington Post today. “We also had profiles on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and a piece last weekend on our weekend news broadcast; Ted Koppel interviewed him and ran a clip last night [on] Nightline and we have repeated that interview at various times since last night’s speech. We have also booked him for tonight on our convention coverage on the digital channel — probably about 8 p.m.,” added Paul S. Mason, senior vice president for news.
- CBS: “We did a piece about him in last night’s CBS Evening News with Dan Rather,” said spokeswoman Andie Silvers.
- NBC: “It was covered on NBC News on cable, MSNBC,” said spokeswoman Barbara Levin.
Michael Moore, in Boston, Turns Sights on the Press
You had to look in the right places to find “Fahrenheit 9/11” producer Michael Moore‘s appearances in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., where he blasted the press yesterday. “Moore said he had not planned to attend the convention, and showed up only to accept an award from the Congressional Black Caucus,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!” added, “More than 2,000 people lined up in Cambridge to hear Michael Moore speak at a forum with Howard Dean. Only 500 or so were able to get in,” and replayed the speech.
As Ciro Scotti reported in Business Week:
“Moore’s barbs aren’t aimed just at the President. Yesterday, he seemed just as interested in going after the press. ‘The unstated villain in the film is our national media,’ he said. ‘The film outs them as shills for the Bush Administration . . . and cheerleaders for the war.’
“As the crowd hooted its approval, Moore addressed the press: ‘We need you to do your job. You do us no service . . . by looking the other way’ or failing to ask a hard question for fear of being called un-American.
“He was especially harsh on NBC. He called General Electric (GE ), parent of NBC, a ‘war profiteer’ that has $600 million worth of contracts in Iraq. So, he suggested, it’s hardly surprising that GE’s ‘news entity’ didn’t tell the truth about the war. ‘You haven’t just been embedded,” he said again to the press, ‘you’ve been in bed with the wrong people.'”
“But the press’s failings go beyond swallowing the Administration line on Iraq, Moore said. He ridiculed the media mindset that the U.S. is a 50-50 country, almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. He said the press just keeps looking at ‘likely voters,’ but September 11 has changed everything, and Nov. 2 will see a sea change because the 50% of America that doesn’t vote is now talking politics.”
Bill Cosby to Team Up With NAACP on Education
Bill Cosby, whose remarks about the failure of parenting among lower-income African Americans have become perhaps the year’s most commented-upon cultural issue, is teaming up with the NAACP to do something about the problem, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond disclosed today on public radio’s “The Diane Rehm Show” on WAMU-FM in Washington.
Bond said he had a conversation on Monday with Cosby “on his perspective and our perspective to see if we can’t attack the problems that affect so many in the lower economic” group.
He said he talked to Cosby about participating in the NAACP’s “Back to School/Stay in School” program, and said that in a major American city — which he said he was not ready to name — he and Cosby would use the program to “see if we can’t meld some of these programs together with some of his ideas.”
According to its Web site, “BTS/SIS is a program committed to promoting the retention and graduation of all youth. The program aims to enhance student success in the following ways: reducing the absenteeism and dropout rate, providing a higher level of academic and cultural enrichment, increasing parental involvement and improving overall perceptions about public schools.”
Bond repeated today that he thought Cosby’s original remarks were too harsh and too broad.
The development should have special relevance for journalists.
Two years ago, this column noted that “Project Excellence, a scholarship program founded by Carl T. Rowan to help local black students attend college, is ceasing operations after 15 years because the economic downturn has made it harder to raise funds, the late columnist’s son said, the Washington Post reports.
“Since its 1987 inception, the program has awarded about $109.5 million in scholarships, including as much as $700,000 a year in cash grants, to more than 4,200 District of Columbia and suburban high school seniors. The organization will fulfill its financial obligations through 2005, but it will not award new scholarships after the current school year.
“Rowan wrote in May 1987 that ‘children caught up in anger and frustration are embracing a new kind of racism that says a black youngster who excels at speaking and writing is “using Whitey’s language,”‘ and proposed that black journalists chip in to fund scholarships for the best high school achievers in writing and speaking. The program eventually was funded by foundations and others.”
NABJ Hits “Amazing” Record: 4,695 Members
The National Association of Black Journalists announced today that “a year of unprecedented growth has driven its membership roster up by 43 percent, to a record 4,695.
“Going into next week?s UNITY 2004 convention in Washington, NABJ, the oldest and largest organization of journalists of color, had 2,656, or nearly 40 percent, of the 6,930 delegates already registered for what will be the biggest gathering of journalists in U.S. history,” a news release says.
“NABJ went into last year?s convention in Dallas with 2,200 delegates pre-registered and closed with a total of 2,669 having attended. As for the July 2004 membership numbers, they compare remarkably with 2,673 and 2684 in July 2002 and July 2003, respectively.
“This is amazing news. I?m still finding it hard to believe,’ NABJ President Herbert Lowe, a courts reporter at Newsday, said of the record growth. ‘Certainly, the excitement about UNITY 2004 played a role. But we also believe black journalists are responding to our efforts and priorities -? first and foremost, that NABJ is a year-round organization fighting for them every single day.’?
On Friday, the Asian American Journalists Association announced that, “Our total paid registration under AAJA has reached 1,056, exceeding our UNITY ’99 AAJA registration. This number is also the highest ever paid registration figure in the entire AAJA convention history.”
6 File for NAJA Board; Election Next Week
Six candidates have filed to run for four seats on the Native American Journalists Association board of directors, the organization’s summer 2004 newsletter reports. The election takes place Thursday, Aug. 5, at the Unity convention.
The candidates are: Tim Giago, Lakota Nation Journal; Frank King III, publisher, Native Voice, Rapid City, S.D.; Mike Kellogg, publisher, Stillwater News Press, Stillwater, Okla.; Ronn Washines, managing editor, Yakama Nation Review, published on a reservation within Washington state; Tirsea McNeal, a junior at Weber State University in Utah, and Cristina Azocar, director of the Center for the Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University.
“When I founded the Native American Journalist[s] Association in 1984 the association was intended to strengthen and support Indian newspapers, tribally owned and otherwise,” Giago said in the newsletter.
“NAJA has moved away from that goal and I think it is time that we went back and focused on the reasons we were formed.”
Until April, Giago was running as an independent for the U.S. Senate seat held by Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader from South Dakota.
Laura Chang named N.Y. Times Science Editor
Laura Chang, deputy science editor at the New York Times, was named science editor today, according to a memo from Executive Editor Bill Keller, a Times spokeswoman confirms.
“With this appointment, Laura formally assumes a title that covers the responsibilities she’s accepted and handled so well for months on end in the past during unsettled times. Laura will be supervising a department — always a gem with its all-star cast of reporters and editors — that has become increasingly crucial to the paper’s operation, daily as well as weekly,” Keller’s memo said.
“She arrived in New York in 1990 by way of the University of Washington (where she studied journalism and psychology) and The Seattle Times, where Jim Roberts spotted her and set in motion her career here, where she glittered quietly and advanced steadily. She climbed from National Desk copy editor to assignment editor. For a while, she served as special projects editor, handling reports on welfare reform, the erosion of privacy and the spread of E. coli contamination. Her oddest assignment: she’s the editor who stayed up through the night excerpting the Unabomber manifesto.”
Chang is a member of the Asian American Journalists Association and is a graduate of AAJA’s Executive Leadership Program (class of 1996, New York), AAJA Executive Director Rene Astudillo told Journal-isms.
Web Editor Fired After Online Insult to Reporter
“A WLWT-TV online editor acknowledged Tuesday he was fired after a paragraph belittling reporter Raegan Butler was inserted into a story on the station’s Web site,” Justin Fenton writes in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“The comments were placed into the last paragraph of a July 19 news report concerning a body identified in Portsmouth. Station officials said the story was discovered about 10 minutes after posting, but took days to remove from Google and Yahoo caches.
“The former online editor, Dave Thomas, 33, said he did not write the comment but did accidentally place it in the story. He said he has attempted to contact Butler to apologize. ‘I take responsibility for what happened, and I’m disappointed,” he said. “I had an excellent track record there, but I understand why I was terminated as well.'”
A cached copy of the original story shows the last, offending paragraph to be:
“Investigators are not sure if Powell died where her body was found or if she was killed elsewhere, WLWT Eyewitness News 5’s most-overrated, obnoxious, annoying, stick-like, ho-bag, sperm-receptacle staff member Raegan Butler reported.”
“Rumbo” Daily Launches in San Antonio
“This may not seem like the most auspicious time to roll out a Spanish-language newspaper, given the circulation scandal embroiling Tribune’s Hoy. But today a San Antonio startup headed by veteran journalist Edward Schumacher challenged the big media conglomerates by launching Rumbo, the first in what Schumacher hopes will soon be a string of dailies designed to fill a gap in the Spanish-language market,” Ainsley O’Connell writes in Forbes magazine.
“. . . Will Hispanics embrace Rumbo? Schumacher, who has designed the paper for flexible expansion, sounds confident. ‘The beauty of our model is that once you get it up and running, things happen pretty fast,’ he said, pointing to Rumbo’s 60-to-40 ratio of core content and local content. ‘We can open a new city with 20 to 25 people.”
“As long as no one else with a daily gets there first: Even for the ambitious Rumbo, some cities are out of the question — especially Los Angeles, where Hoy is taking on La Opinion. Tribune stumbled recently when Hoy’s New York edition acknowledged that it had inflated its claimed circulation by 19%. La Opinion’s [publisher Monica] Lozano says the brouhaha ‘called into question’ Hoy’s ability to compete in Los Angeles, which has become a battleground between Tribune and Impremedia.”
Grand jury eyes Newsday numbers (New York Post)
‘Hoy’ to Readers: We’ll Get to Bottom of Scandal (Editor & Publisher)
Ads from Kerry a Boon for Black Newspapers
“As Sen. John Kerry prepares to formally accept the Democratic presidential nomination this week, readers of black-interest newspapers across the country are seeing an unprecedented blitz of early advertising for his campaign,” Mark Fitzgerald reports in Editor & Publisher.
“The ads were a pleasant surprise for The Weekly Challenger, a 20,000-paid circulation paper in St. Petersburg, Fla. The first ad showed up last week and was followed by one for this week’s issue. Advertising Manager Shirley Morgan said she’s not sure how long they will continue. ‘They haven’t said, but we’re just glad to get (the ads) week to week,’ she said.”
Lack of Blacks in British Newsrooms Decried
“Walk into any big city newsroom and the lack of black and ethnic minority journalists is all too apparent. Those who do make it — like this correspondent — invariably face endless shifts with no prospect of permanent employment and a journalistic diet of menial or stereotypical assignments: ‘Could you follow up on this black-on-black shooting in Tottenham?,'” Paul Macey writes in the London Independent.
“Earlier this month, the Commission for Racial Equality relaunched its Race in the Media awards to try to encourage good reporting on Britain’s ethnic minorities. But, for black reporters, the prospects of writing for national papers have hardly improved since the awards began, in 1992.
“There are just a handful of established black reporters on the national scene, notably Baz Bamigboye at the Mail and Gary Younge at The Guardian, but black writers have not progressed in the same way as their television counterparts — think Rageh Omaar, Sir Trevor McDonald and Moira Stuart. Asian print journalists — led by Mazher Mahmood, Mihir Bose, Rav Singh and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — have fared only a little better.”
ABC News Hires Jim Avila for Newsmagazines
“Jim Avila, who signed off in January after eight years as Chicago-based national correspondent for NBC News, has been hired by ABC News. As expected, he’ll be featured mainly on ABC’s newsmagazine shows,” reports Robert Feder in the Chicago Sun-Times.
