Rivera Broadens Attack after “Editors’ Note”
Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera, having secured what he called a “grudging” editors’ note from the New York Times acknowledging that Rivera did not “nudge” anyone, as the Times reported, said today the paper is “insulting a lot more than just me,” and is “out of synch with the hundreds of thousands of Latinos in New York and environs.”
“I am held in pretty high regard” by Latinos; “they just don’t get it,” Rivera told Journal-isms. The Times’ treatment of him is further evidence that the paper has “no sensitivity to the Hispanic community.”
The controversy involves a Sept. 5 TV Watch column by Alessandra Stanley about the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. “Some reporters helped stranded victims because no police officers or rescue workers were around. (Fox’s Geraldo Rivera did his rivals one better: yesterday, he nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety),” the story said.
“Mr. Rivera denied that he had ‘nudged’ anyone and demanded that The Times publish a correction. Mr. Rivera and Fox said a videotape of the segment that Ms. Stanley had watched on Sept. 4 shows no nudge,” Times Public Editor Byron Calame wrote on Sunday.
“The tape shows no such thing, and the New York Times owes Mr. Rivera an apology,” President Veronica Villafañe of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists added in a letter to Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. dated Friday.
Tuesday’s editors’ note said: “The editors understood the ‘nudge’ comment as the television critic’s figurative reference to Mr. Rivera’s flamboyant intervention. Mr. Rivera complained, but after reviewing a tape of his broadcast, The Times declined to publish a correction.
“Numerous readers, however — now including Byron Calame, the newspaper’s public editor, who also scrutinized the tape — read the comment as a factual assertion. The Times acknowledges that no nudge was visible on the broadcast.”
Rivera said the paper uses its own “cultural criteria” in deciding who receives respect; those on the “Ivy League, country club circuit” benefit.
Asked whether a reporter should not maintain distance from an event he is covering rather than try to become part of the story, Rivera said that Stanley piece was “laudatory” of CNN reporter Anderson Cooper, whom he admires, for the emotion he showed in covering the hurricane. But “the difference between Anderson Cooper and me is he travels in their social circles,” Rivera said.
“Anyone who knows me knows I am Geraldo 24/7,” he added, “and Geraldo is someone who gets involved.” The incident in question was “an all-hands-on-deck situation.”
Fox issued this statement: “We’re pleased that the ‘paper of record’ finally recognized its mistake, albeit three weeks after the fact. It’s unfortunate that it took an outcry from the nation’s top journalists, not to mention a reprimand from its Public Editor, for them to admit Alessandra’s egregious gaffe.”
The Times said it would have no further comment.
An “editors’ note” is distinct from a correction, the newspaper explained a year ago.
“Substantive errors – those that have materially affected the reader’s understanding of a news development – will be addressed under the traditional heading, ‘Corrections.’ . . . Editors’ notes, which address lapses of fairness, balance or perspective, will continue to appear under their separate heading, ordinarily beneath the corrections.”
- Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune: Times’ `grudging’ budge on nudge riles Rivera
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Readers Relate to Man Who Thought He Was White
Sometimes one person’s life can be used to great effect to illustrate a larger story, and investigative reporter Jeff Kunerth of the Orlando Sentinel found such an example to demonstrate how tragic the story of race in America can be.
“Every family has its secrets. There are things parents never tell children. There are lies that become family legend. There are stories that were never meant to be told,” began his Sept. 18 story, “A Big White Lie,” also distributed to subscribers to the Knight Ridder Tribune wire.
“Judith Hartmann‘s secret, when she married Bill Myers in 1959, was that she was pregnant by a black man.
“When the baby born to two white parents came out black, the secret became a lie.
“Throughout his childhood, David Myers was told that his skin color was a disease called melanism. He was lucky, his mother said, because the skin discoloration was all over his body, instead of just splotches of brown like most people had.
“So despite his dark skin, Myers grew up in white, middle-class neighborhoods in Ohio and New York believing he was white.
“‘For many years I thought I was white. I thought like a white kid. There was a feeling in me that I didn’t want to be associated with blacks. I wanted the story to be true,’ says Myers, a 45-year-old Orlando tennis teacher.
“The secret shrouded in a lie lasted 26 years. Keeping it hidden all those years would turn Judy Myers into a hard, angry, unhappy woman, her family says. It made Dave Myers a defiant, rebellious, hostile child who would grow estranged from his parents, sisters and brother.
“Learning the truth would send Myers on a search for identity. And it would convince him that his story is the story of America — a white America that has been lied to, a black America oppressed and discriminated against, and a society unable or unwilling to discuss race.”
There was more: Kunerth found the black man that Judith Myers said had raped her, Fermon Beckette. “‘That’s an old fashioned, Southern lie,’ says Beckette, now a 77-year-old retired steelmill worker,” Kunerth wrote. “‘Knowing the situation, I can see how she would deny it. After all, she had to hide it to save her marriage.'”
Kunerth told Journal-isms today he came across the story when Dave Myers tried to publicize a “Discuss Race” seminar he conducts. “Then he starts telling me his story, and showed me the pictures. It was such an unbelievable story that I called his mother,” and Kunerth’s investigation began.
“He called kids ‘nigger’ because he thought he was white. There were other blacks around, but he never associated with them.”
The reporter said he’s had a dozen phone calls and about 50 e-mails since the story was published. Dave Myers has never had a full-time job, and now “wants to make his story his career.”
“Most people’s reaction has been, this is a sad story,” Kunerth continued. “A few say I’ve got a similar story,” but it turns out those are about white people with black family members they did not know about.
Either way, Myers’ story touched readers. “People could relate to him,” Kunerth said.
- Sidebar: Even in more tolerant times, lies continue (Jeff Kunerth, Orlando Sentinel)
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Nonwhites in Poll Trust Media More Than Whites
“Half of Americans say they trust the mass media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly, according to Gallup’s annual Governance survey,” the organization announced yesterday, but 23 percent of nonwhites say they trust the media “a great deal” as opposed to only 10 percent of whites.
Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, ascribed the differences to partisanship, noting to Journal-isms that Republicans trusted the media less than Democrats.
“Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to express confidence in the media, but are much more likely to perceive bias in the news media, with most Republicans saying they are too liberal,” Joseph Carroll wrote on the Gallup Web site.
“The poll, conducted Sep. 12-15, finds that half of Americans say they have a great deal (13%) or fair amount (37%) of trust and confidence in the mass media, while the other half say they do not have very much trust (37%) or none at all (12%). The current results show an increase in the public’s trust and confidence in the media since last year, but the results are still slightly lower that what Gallup has recorded in recent years.”
The poll surveyed 919 people, 723 white and 190 nonwhite, Newport said. On the question of how much they trusted the media, 37 percent of whites and 35 percent of nonwhites said “a fair amount,” 40 percent of whites and 30 percent of whites said “not very much,” and 12 percent of whites and 11 percent of nonwhites said “not at all.”
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Most Reports of Evacuee “Atrocities” Unsupported
“As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know,” Brian Thevenot and Gordon Russell wrote Monday on the Web site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Their report was quickly followed by similar ones from the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and other news outlets.
“I think 99 percent of it is bulls—,” said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome,” in the Times-Picayune story. “Don’t get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. . . . Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved,” Lachney said.
“Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor,” Susannah Rosenblatt and James Rainey wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
“If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people,” said Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss in the L.A. Times story, “it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”
Rosenblatt and Rainey mentioned stories by Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Ottawa Sun and the London Evening Standard.
- Center for Public Integrity: Profiting from Katrina (list)
- Council of National Journalism Organizations: Aid for Journalists Affected by Hurricane Katrina
- Eric Deggans, St. Petersburg Times: Media outlets exaggerated some of New Orleans’ woes
- Tracy Stokes, BET.com: Prisoners Left Locked Up as Katrina’s Floodwaters Rose?
- Anthony Violanti, Buffalo News: After the storm comes the emotional trauma for CNN’s Rick Sanchez.
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ABC to Help Rebuild Robin Roberts’ Hometown
“Good Morning America” has partnered with the Salvation Army and the Corporation for National and Community Service to help Robin Roberts’ hometown of Pass Christian, Miss., which was damaged in Hurricane Katrina, ABC-TV announced Tuesday.
“It’s a charming, charming town of about 6,000 in Pass Christian,” Roberts, who is an anchor on “Good Morning America,” said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” “Eight percent of that town, Larry, gone. The high school where I went to no longer exists so, yes, we’re going to have a year initiative with ‘Good Morning America’ to help the Pass because that’s what we affectionately call it here in the area, the Pass, get back on its feet. We had some supplies that were delivered today. You should have seen those eyes light up to see the school supplies. Our goal is — our immediate goal is in the next two weeks to get the school up and running and get the kids back in school.”
Meanwhile, competitor “NBC has turned New York’s Rockefeller Plaza home of the ‘Today’ show into ‘Humanity Plaza,’ a staging ground to build homes with Habitat for Humanity that will be trucked south for those who lost theirs in flooding,” David Bauder reported today for the Associated Press.
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Short Takes
- Congressional leaders are all atwitter over Venezuelan President Hugo Chᶥz’ new satellite television station, Telesur, which has begun broadcasting four hours a day, financed by its host country and also Argentina, Uruguay and Cuba, guest columnist Floyd J. McKay wrote today in the Seattle Times.
- A “lame attempt at alliteration” by the Washingtonian magazine’s Harry Jaffe helped prompt comments and counter-comments among Washington Post writers and editors and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg. Goldberg was up for a full-time job at the Post in 1986, he said in an interview with Jaffe, when an editor took him aside and said, “We would like to hire you, but we have to hire a Hispanic for that slot.” His career was “doomed by diversity,” Jaffe wrote. Some at the Post responded caustically and challenged the premise of the “doomed” statement. The back-and-forth was reported Tuesday by Jack Shafer in Slate.
- “In deference to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and now hurricane Rita, which have significantly affected many communities in Texas, AAJA has decided to postpone the 25th Anniversary Endowment gala and fundraising event originally scheduled for November 18, 2005 in Dallas. The event will instead be held in March next year,” the Asian American Journalists Association announced.
- A new Society of Metro Editors “was formed in September by a group of editors who attended an American Press Institute seminar for city and metro editors in early 2005. Seminar members found they learned a lot from each other while at API. They continued their discussions by e-mail through an API-sponsored listserv that is set up following each seminar so that participants can continue to network and receive support from each other long after the seminar ends. Members of the City and Metro Editors seminar decided to take that listserv a step further and invite city and metro editors from across the country to join the conversation,” Lisa Rabasca reported today on the API Web site.
- Leon Dash, University of Illinois journalism professor, has donated his papers to the university’s archives, which plans to open them officially at an Oct. 27 reception on the Urbana-Champaign campus. The papers include correspondence, notes, interviews, photographs and research materials. Dash won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his Washington Post series, “Rosa Lee: Poverty and Survival in Washington” and is working on a book probing the survival mechanisms of African Americans in Mattoon, Ill.
- Ron Nixon, one of the few African American experts in computer-assisted reporting, left the Minneapolis Star Tribune in July to become projects editor for computer assisted reporting at the New York Times. “It was too good . . . an offer to pass up even though Minneapolis is my home,” he told Journal-isms. Nixon is a former training director for Investigative Reporters and Editors.
- Overlooked story? “President Vladimir Putin apologised on Tuesday for racist attacks that have been on the rise in Russia in recent years and promised that law enforcement services would redouble their efforts to stop them,” South Africa’s News24.com reported yesterday. “Earlier this month, foreign students protested in the northern city of Saint Petersburg after a Congolese student died as a result of wounds he sustained after being attacked in the street. Authorities said on Monday they had arrested four people in connection with the attack.”
- “Google unveiled its first significant partnership with a television network Monday, a deal that allows it to show the entire first episode of UPN’s sitcom ‘Everybody Hates Chris’ on its Web site,” Michael Bazeley reported Monday in California’s San Jose Mercury News.
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