Maynard Institute archives

A Working Anchor’s Pregnancy

by richard0496

Critics Debate Implications of Vargas Move

The day after ABC News announced that Elizabeth Vargas would step down as co-anchor of “World News Tonight” and that Charles Gibson would become solo anchor, critics were debating the implications for on-air working women who become pregnant.

“Vargas said today she had chosen to step down to take maternity leave and later return to co-anchor ’20/20′ and ABC News specials,” Tuesday’s announcement said.

“Some critics say ABC mishandled the situation involving Vargas, who not only effectively became the first woman to be a solo network news anchor but was the first Hispanic to serve at that level,” Howard Kurtz wrote in the Washington Post. “No one asks to be taken off the anchor job of ‘World News Tonight,’ ” said Emily Rooney, a former ABC executive producer, in Kurtz’s story. “It’s wimpy, putting the onus on her. Elizabeth just didn’t have the strength to be anchor of ‘World News Tonight.’ She just didn’t have the charisma the job requires.”

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said she hoped that Vargas “is leaving of her own accord. I’m looking forward to the day where a woman who is eight or nine months pregnant is delivering the news,” Joe Garofoli reported.

On National Public Radio’s “News and Notes With Ed Gordon,” Gordon asked his roundtable panel, “Reverse the scenario – had Elizabeth been injured while covering the Iraq war and Bob Woodruff remained the sole anchor – do you believe that ABC would have said to a male in that seat, move over, we’re replacing you with another man?”

Andrew Tyndall, a consultant who studies evening news content, said in an e-mail quoted by many television writers today “that by effectively demoting Vargas when she returns from maternity leave, ABC sends the wrong message to young women. With Vargas, ‘World News Tonight’ has been devoting considerably more time to sex and family issues than its competitors, he said,” as David Bauder of the Associated Press reported.

“‘The demotion of Vargas and her replacement by a pre-Baby Boomer not only makes ABC News’ long-term strategy incoherent, it displays a woeful tin ear towards the very demographic ABC News was purportedly courting,’ he said. ‘What is the worst workplace nightmare the pregnant employee faces? It is the fear that her employer will find some way not to guarantee her job back on return from maternity leave.'”

ABC News President David Westin responded in a USA Today story: “I would challenge anyone to find another organization with our concentration of women in anchor roles,” asserting that “Nightline” anchor Cynthia McFadden, “Good Morning America’s” Kate Snow and Vargas’ staying on at “20/20” show ABC’s commitment to working moms, Peter Johnson wrote.

Retired ABC News reporter Judy Muller, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, said of Gibson’s appointment in the San Francisco Chronicle, “It’s about time. Charlie should have been named anchor the first time. I thought Elizabeth has done a credible job as an anchor. I think Charlie has, well, the word would be ‘gravitas.’ “

Vargas told reporters she was not forced out and that she decided to step down for the health of her baby.

“This has not been an easy pregnancy,” Johnson of USA Today quoted her as saying. “Even if Bob were here and doing the show, I would have had a really hard time flying into a war zone. You have to decide what is fair to your children, to your family and to yourself.

“Obviously, very little in the last 13 months went according to plan,” Vargas said, referring to the death of anchor Peter Jennings, her co-anchor Woodruff’s injury in Iraq and a pregnancy she says she didn’t anticipate.

Meanwhile, Kurtz reported, “ABC does not plan to replace Gibson on ‘Good Morning America’ in the near future, instead going with the all-female duo of Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts, who was elevated a year ago from newsreader to a third anchor spot, in part to prepare for this contingency.”

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Kristof Picks Winning Student for Africa Trip

“Nick Kristof has a new traveling companion – Casey Parks of Jackson, Mississippi. A graduate student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Casey will have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to accompany Nick Kristof, the Op-Ed and TimesSelect columnist, on a reporting trip to Africa this September,” the Times and Kristof announced on Tuesday.

“Some 3,800 applications poured in, accompanied by boxes of supplementary materials, ranging from senior theses to nude photos. After weeks of sifting through the applications, I finally have a winner,” Kristof, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his writing on the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, wrote.

No African American students were apparent among the finalists, who were asked to submit essays on why they should be chosen. However, Dalton Walker, who grew up on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota and covered the shootings on the reservation last year, was.

“I so desperately want to leave this country and know more,” Parks, who grew up poor, wrote. On the Public Radio International show “The World” today, Parks was asked how she, as a Caucasian, would feel in Africa, where people were “a totally different color.” “My mother has the ability to respond better to people who aren’t white,” she said. “It’s important for people to know you have to find that common ground” in order to be a good journalist. She said she had long admired Kristof for his ability to help set the agenda on Darfur.

It was difficult to determine how many students of color did apply. “We did not ask people to identify themselves by race/gender/ethnic background/religion or sexual orientation when they applied for ‘Win a Trip with Nick,'” Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told Journal-isms. “We have not done an analysis of the schools applicants attended.”

Two experiences at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University, a historically black school, might be illuminating, however.

“I had Kristof’s sign up for a month” during the courses “Introduction to Media Writing,” “Mass Media in a Multicultural Society” and “Advanced Reporting and Writing, ” faculty member Wayne Dawkins said by e-mail. “Even drew the continent with a green marker to add ART. Yet I did not get any takers, and I took the sign down immediately after the deadline. I’m confident that in the 2006-07 school year, my students won’t overlook opportunities like that.”

Jack E. White, who taught a class for seniors, said, “Few of my students knew anything about the contest or the appalling situation in Darfur before they were assigned to apply for the contest. Even though none of them made the list of finalists, applying opened their eyes to a world few of them had paid much attention to. I hope that awareness sticks.”

Kristof wrote, “The point of this contest wasn’t to give one lucky student the chance to get malaria and hookworms. It’s to try to stir up a broader interest in the developing world among young people.”

He said, “We’ll most likely start in Equatorial Guinea, bounce over to Cameroon and travel through a jungle with Pygmy villages to end up in the Central African Republic â?? one of the most neglected countries in the world.”

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Media Called Unforgiving of Barry Bonds

The New York Post ran a cover story on Barry Bonds‘ Babe Ruth-tying 714th home run on Sunday, illustrating the “714” with syringes,” Steve Bloom observed today on mediabistro.com.

“Like Bonds’ assault on Mark McGwire’s short-lived home run record – which he shattered in 2001 – Bonds’ chase of Ruth’s 714 home run mark (the second-highest all-time behind Hank Aaron’s 755) prompted a firestorm of media coverage. Except this time around, the media has largely been unforgiving.

“A Web search of stories about Bonds produces a litany of nasty remarks you’d expect from screaming fans, not seasoned journalists,” wrote Bloom, former editor of High Times and currently the magazine’s editor-at-large.

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Dunham Gets Front Page Two Days Running

When Katherine Dunham, the choreographer, social activist and world-renowned dancer, died Sunday in her New York apartment at age 96, it was duly noted in obituaries written by arts critics if the papers had them. In a few cases, it was mentioned on the front page with a reference to the story inside. The stories or appreciations ran mostly on Tuesday.

But not in newspapers serving East St. Louis, Ill., where the legendary dancer created the Katherine Dunham Centers for the Arts and Humanities, opened the Katherine Dunham Museum and started the annual Dunham Technique seminar, attended by students from around the world.

Dunham’s death was featured on the front page, under the nameplate, both Monday and Tuesday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Editor Arnie Robbins told Journal-isms, “She’s an icon in the St. Louis area, for African Americans and whites, and has a long-storied history. She is somebody who is universally beloved.”

In the smaller Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, whose coverage area also includes East St. Louis, Dunham’s death was that paper’s lead story on Monday as well. “It was a no-brainer for us. We just pulled out all the stops,” Executive Editor Jeffry Couch told Journal-isms today. The paper had “an extensive layout,” including her history as a social activist and dancer, a pullout section with a timeline of her life, and “old photos of her back in the day.” The next day, Dunham’s death led the local section, with a reference on the front page.

“She was a very beloved and very important figure here,” Couch said, and the coverage was also aimed at “those who didn’t know.”

Other coverage:

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Nigeria’s “Most Influential Journalist” Lives Abroad

The most influential journalist in Nigeria is one who won a Pulitzer Prize for the work he did for Newsday in the United States and who now lives in South Africa, according to the London-based Financial Times.

The newspaper asked its foreign correspondents to pick the most influential journalists in several countries, and for Nigeria, the winner was Dele Olojede, former foreign editor of Newsday in Long Island, N.Y.

“Some of Nigeria’s most pointed political commentary comes from two of the country’s literary giants, novelist Chinua Achebe and playwright Wole Soyinka,” Dino Mahtani wrote from Lagos on Friday for the Financial Times. “And it says something else about the state of the country’s media that its most influential journalist is neither a columnist nor a commentator, but an investigative reporter best known for the work he has done for a US newspaper, Newsday.

“Dele Olojede won a Pulitzer prize for international reporting last year for his coverage of the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. It is a situation scarcely imaginable anywhere, as if most Jewish survivors were compelled to remain in Germany immediately after the Holocaust, living cheek-by-jowl with their erstwhile neighbours,” Mahtani wrote.

“His biggest story in his home country was a 1986 report in the Nigerian news magazine Newswatch, which resulted in the freeing of the internationally known musician, Fela Kuti, and the dismissal of the judge who sentenced him.

“Based in Johannesburg, Olojede now wants to make an impact on post-military Nigeria’s press, which he says lacks quality and critical muscle. ‘There is a real disconnect between the media and public,’ he says.”

Americans on the list included, for the United States, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer; and for India, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Countries covered were Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.

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Emery King Says Speaking Out Helped Get Him Fired

Emery King, the former Detroit anchor who “has said virtually nothing publicly since he was bounced by WDIV-TV in March 2005,” suggested at a journalism scholarship benefit that speaking out on racial issues helped get him fired, Neal Rudin reported today in the Detroit News.

Citing people who were present, Rubin reported that at the benefit, King told the tale of a young, white reporter in a helicopter.

“WDIV sent the reporter airborne as part of a story about renovations to a safe house on the Underground Railroad. Dutifully, she called back to the newsroom.

“‘We found the house, and we found some railroad tracks,’ she said, ‘but I can’t find the place where the tracks went underground.’

“According to several listeners at the Atheneum Hotel, that was the first of multiple examples of what King called lack of understanding or subconscious bias in the newsroom.

“With his typical eloquence, they said, King also suggested that speaking out on racial issues helped get him fired.

“The $125-per-ticket event was a benefit for Central Michigan University’s Lem Tucker Journalism Scholarship, named for the late alumnus who was one of the first black reporters on network television.”

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Wendi Thomas Drawing Letters to the Editor Again

Columnist Wendi C. Thomas, who returned to the Memphis Commercial Appeal after accepting a columnist’s job at the Baltimore Sun, then changed her mind, is prompting letters to the editor again in Memphis.

“Two-and-a-half-year-old Trudy Buchanan has two mommies, mommies who wanted her to take swimming lessons this summer at the Nuber-East Memphis YMCA,” she wrote on May 16.

“But last week the lesbian couple and their daughter were denied a family membership at the center on Quince. Trudy will have to learn to swim elsewhere. . . .The gay community and their supporters have the . . . right – and even stronger obligation – to support organizations that broaden the definition of family to include gay men and women and their children, and to avoid organizations that don’t,” she wrote.

Letters published on Friday from gays were on both sides of the issue.

Thomas wrote her first column after her return to Memphis on May 7, in which she said, “I’d like to think this humbling experience will make me a kinder, gentler columnist, and it might.

“But the chances are good that I’ll continue to rail against politicians who squander the public trust, rappers who defile women with every rhyme, people of faith who behave as anything but, and everyone else who makes mistakes, as I did, but passes up opportunities to undo them, as I was fortunate enough to be able to do.”

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N.C. Columnist Says He Loves Ishmael Reed but . . .

Author and poet Ishmael Reed wrote two columns criticizing black journalists this month and last, and columnist Barry Saunders, writing Saturday in the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., has become the latest to respond.

Saunders said “the highlight of my academic career at Morehouse College was when I was chosen to escort Ishmael Reed around campus during one of his visits.”

But, Saunders added, “As much as I love Reed, I’d like to ask him if it’s possible to criticize other blacks out of love or a genuine feeling that some of us deserve to be taken to the woodshed, that some of our injuries are indeed self-inflicted. When black writers criticize poor parenting among blacks or the glorification of pimps, thugs and drug dealers, are we all, as he contended, merely trying to ‘maintain credibility with (our) employers’?

“Naw, homes.

“All journalists have a right, even an obligation, to confront issues in all communities, to focus attention on them and to demand or offer solutions.

“There is, as Reed would agree, a tendency by some black commentators to exhibit seemingly extra harshness in attacking the pathologies that affect many in the nation’s black communities. I’ve re-read some of my columns and concluded that I may at times have lowered the boom a bit too heavily myself.”

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Short Takes

  • “Looking to take advantage of the continued growth in black publishing and his acquisition of Black Issues Book Review last March, Ken Smikle, president of the black consumer research firm Target Market News, announced plans to launch Blacks & Books, a monthly book review and news supplement that will be distributed in black newspapers in six of the top metropolitan markets – New York, D.C., Chicago, L.A., Philadelphia and Atlanta,” Calvin Reid reported Sunday in Publishers Weekly. Clara Villarossa, a former Harlem bookseller, is to join BiBR as director of business development.
  • Alison Bethel, one of the few African American newspaper bureau chiefs in Washington, is leaving the Detroit News to become executive editor of the Washington-based weekly Legal Times, the No. 2 job, she told colleagues today.
  • On Monday, one of the two teenage girls anchoring the daily televised news show at an Alexandria, Va., middle school, Sierra Leonian immigrant Damba Koroma, showed her fellow students a video of herself that explained why she doesn’t have a left hand, Tara Bahrampour wrote today in the Washington Post. Rebels in her homeland set homes on fire and attacked villagers. Damba “has drafted a letter to Oprah Winfrey that she plans to send along with the video,” hoping for wider distribution of her video.
  • Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, was interviewed by the Express in Tanzania during an NABJ delegation’s visit to that country. It was among several pieces the African media wrote about the trip.
  • Regina Robertson has become West Coast editor of Essence magazine, writing a monthly column in which she will “report on the scoop from Hollywood to Harlem,” among other duties, an Essence spokeswoman said today. Robertson had freelanced for Essence; O, The Oprah Magazine; the Associated Press and America Online.
  • Reporters Without Borders, the international press freedom organization, Monday joined other journalist groups in expressing concern about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales‘ statement Sunday that journalists who reveal information considered classified could be liable for prosecution.
  • “CNN’s Sanjay Gupta will keynote the Asian American Journalists Association’s 2006 National Convention, taking place June 21-24 at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel in Honolulu. Gupta will deliver his address during the June 23 gala scholarship and awards banquet,” AAJA announced Monday.
  • Former Time magazine journalist Jack E. White responded to a letter from Dean Tony Brown of Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications over White’s departure from the faculty. White’s letter ran today in the Daily Press of Newport News, Va.; Brown’s ran in the same paper on Saturday.
  • “During San Francisco’s 2003 Mayor’s race, the San Francisco Chronicle enlisted columnists, reporters and editorial page writers in a one-sided effort to elect Gavin Newsom over Matt Gonzalez. Now the Chronicle is harnessing its power toward bashing progressive icon Ron Dellums and electing Ignacio De La Fuente as Oakland’s Mayor,” Randy Shaw wrote Monday on the blog BeyondChron.org
  • After the announcement Tuesday of the sale of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, the Newspaper Guild said it remained committed to pursuing “a possible ‘worker friendly’ purchase of former Knight Ridder newspapers that have yet to be sold as well as any additional newspaper properties around the United States that may be coming to the marketplace,” Editor & Publisher reported. In the American Journalism Review, Rem Rieder wrote today that the new Philadelphia owners are “sounding all the right notes. . . . The test will come when the papers, as they inevitably will, begin to gore some of the new owners’ favorite oxen.”

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