Maynard Institute archives

O, Canada!

by richard0551

Word Spreads About Photog Assaulted in Toronto

An e-mail campaign and petition drive are under way to defend a visiting African American photographer who says he was assaulted by Toronto police, and then was arrested on charges of assaulting the police.

 

 

The photographer is Tonye Allen, also known professionally as TRILOBITE, a photographer of hip-hop celebrities whose work has appeared in Essence, Vibe, Rolling Stone and the Source magazines and the Village Voice and LA Weekly newspapers. According to supporters, he was hailing a taxi with his fiancee, freelance writer Ann Brown, when police assaulted them.

“Mr. Allen, who did not resist, was beaten and pepper sprayed several times while handcuffed and in police custody. Ms. Brown was choked, shoved and threatened with arrest as well,” a news release says.

Photographs show a bruised Allen; the result, his supporters say, of an attack that required hospitalization. Allen has said he had no criminal record or history of drug use.

The e-mails circulating in the States bear headlines such as this one Tuesday on the popular black entertainment-news Web site EURWeb.com:

 

 

“BRUTALIZED BLACK JOURNALISTS, STILL STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE IN CANADA.”

But although the incident took place Oct. 16, the only Toronto newspaper coverage has been a 225-word article Dec. 2 in the tabloid Toronto Sun, “Cop-hit accused gets to go home; U.S. photographer facing cop assault charges.” It is about the charge against Allen, not Allen’s against the police.

In Toronto, “I can’t tell you that I’ve heard any sort of legitimate discussion of this issue,” Toronto Star reporter Ashante Infantry, who is active in efforts to revive the Canadian Association of Black Journalists, told Journal-isms Wednesday. “We have a tight network of black journalists” and black professionals, such as an organization of black lawyers, she said, but in that city, the incident has barely reached the radar screen.

The case is scheduled to be heard in the Ontario Court of Justice, College Park, on Feb. 16.

Staff Sgt. Tym Burski of the Toronto Police Department told Journal-isms Wednesday night that his understanding was that Allen was “yelling and screaming on the street,” causing a disturbance or a dispute, but said seeing the arrest report would require a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to an account by Shirley Hawkins in the Los Angeles publication Our Weekly, Brown and Allen were attempting to hail a cab after checking out of the hotel when they were approached by one of two policemen in front of the building.

“We were in Toronto filing travel stories about the city,” said Brown in the Our Weekly story. “We didn’t like the hotel we were in, so we were leaving to check into another hotel.”

“Brown said that a policeman approached the couple in his police car and got out. ‘He was really inquisitive,’ recalls Brown. ‘He just started asking us all of these questions,’ Brown said . . . She said that he asked, ‘Who are you? Where are you going? Why are you here?’

“‘I answered, “We just checked out of the Econo Lodge and we are trying to catch a cab,'” said Brown. ‘I asked him why he was asking us these questions.’

“Brown said that the policeman, who was from Precinct 51, quickly became agitated and responded, ‘I don’t like your attitude.'” Things escalated verbally. “She said that five policeman arrived and approached Tonye. ‘They didn’t even ask Tonye what was going on,’ said Brown. ‘They pulled him down and kicked him. Then they pepper sprayed him.’

“Brown said that one of the other officers began striking Allen’s head and torso with a night stick.

“‘Besides being pepper sprayed, I was beaten three times — on the street, in the hospital, and in the police station while being stripped searched,’ said Allen,” Hawkins wrote.

Allen’s lawyer, Jason Bogle, a black Canadian who has had his own problems with Toronto police, rejects the notion of his client’s guilt. “If Mr. Allen is not completely exonerated, we’re going to trial,” he told Journal-isms. “This is a horrific experience that Mr. Allen has endured: Imagine coming to the friendly city of Toronto and ending up in the hospital.”

Allen and Brown were on their way to South Africa when the incident occurred. But instead of heading overseas, they have remained in Toronto, at the Econo Lodge Hotel where the fracas occurred.

Brown told Journal-isms the pair did not want to leave Canada while the case was pending. “I want to be sure that we won’t go away and have some disaster happen.” Bogle is the third lawyer the couple retained — the first two did not show up in court — and Bogle has not been paid, she said. She said she has helped publicize the case by contacting press agents for celebrities she has written about. Brown’s work has appeared in Essence, Black Enterprise, Upscale magazine and the Source, and she is the daughter of ’70s folk-soul singer Bill Withers (“Lean on Me”).

Bogle, whom the pair located through the city’s African Canadian Legal Clinic, said their defense fund needs $10,000 and has raised only one-fifth that amount. Information about sending contributions is on the pair’s blog.

“If this goes unreported, it’s a cry in the dark that nobody hears,” Bogle told Journal-isms. “You can’t have people victimized in our community and nobody hears about it. These stories have to be told.”

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Confrontation Leaves Grambling Paper on Hiatus

“Editors and newspaper staff members at Grambling State University have decided to cease publication of The Gramblinite for fear of adviser termination after administrators claimed they had the right to suspend the newspaper under the 2005 Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Hosty v. Carter,” Jared Taylor wrote Wednesday for the Student Press Law Center.

 

 

 

“Provost Robert Dixon sent a Jan. 17 memorandum to Gramblinite faculty Publication Director Wanda Peters that stated the newspaper was suspended for the rest of January or until administrators are content with greater ‘quality assurance’ of the paper, according to The News-Star, a newspaper in nearby Monroe, La. Gramblinite editors defied the order and published on Jan. 18.”

“In specific, Dixon also said that an instance of plagiarism by a staff writer was not met with strong enough sanctions by the newspaper,” the News-Star reported.

“The plagiarism involved a Gramblinite sports writer whose stories included information and language taken from copyrighted material in The News-Star.”

The Student Press Law Center story continued, “Gramblinite Editor in Chief Darryl Smith said he was told during a meeting with Dixon on Tuesday that recent stories have cast the university in a negative light, which Dixon was unhappy with and prompted the suspension.

“‘They’re saying that we have nothing but negative stories in the paper,’ Smith said. ‘To suspend the paper — to stop the one thing the students look for after a long week of classes — that’s absurd.'”

Mark Goodman, director of the center, told colleagues and supporters, “A university that believes in the First Amendment wouldn’t think of shutting down a newspaper. If they want to create more and better training opportunities for the student editors, then do it. But you don’t behave like a repressive dictatorship to respond to quality concerns. . . . I would urge everyone who can to call or write the university provost or other officials there and complain.”

Dixon and the chair of the mass communications department, Anita Fleming-Rife, have not spoken with the news media and have not returned telephone calls from Journal-isms.

However, Sharon Armstrong, president of the Grambling University National Alumni Association, told Journal-isms she would raise the issue along with others this weekend at a meeting of the board of the University of Louisiana System.

Her organization “takes the position that this is only one incident in a series of events that are moving Grambling toward dismemberment,” she said, citing a list of complaints about the operation of the school. “Louisiana has a tendency to feel they have too many four-year universities. If you get rid of your universities, you get rid of your African American universities first.”

Smith told Journal-isms Wedneday night he did not know how long the paper would be on hiatus. “We’re not sure what’s going to happen. We’re hoping they’ll say, ‘you know what, we were wrong.’ Maybe I’m hoping for too much.”

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Fact-Checking on Bush Speech Shows Discrepancies

A fact-checking by National Public Radio of President Bush’s “State of the Union” speech Tuesday night shows some discrepancies over the effectiveness of the “No Child Left Behind” law Bush has touted.

“Five years ago we rose above partisan differences to pass the No Child Left Behind Act — preserving local control, raising standards in public schools, and holding those schools accountable for results,” the president said, according to the analysis on “Morning Edition” by Steven Drummond.

“Then he touted the law’s successes: ‘And because we acted, students are performing better in reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap.’

“Well, sort of. There’s no question the law has had a significant impact on the nation’s 14,000 school districts. But the results from the tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress are more mixed than the president suggested. The administration can point to some modest gains in math and reading among fourth graders, and math among 8th graders. But in 8th grade reading, test scores fell from 2002 to 2005. And the achievement gap between black and white students in that period actually widened a little.”

Is Journalism Ready for a Black President?

“‘Is America Ready for a Black President?’ It’s a question that many media outlets have posed recently ahead of a possible presidential run by Senator Barack Obama. But instead of asking if the country is prepared, the press would do well to ask itself, ‘Is Journalism Ready?'” Tony Dokoupil wrote Monday on Columbia Journalism Review’s CJR Daily.

“Three main batches of research . . . focus on mayoral races in New York and Seattle in 1989, and national congressional contests in 1992, 1994, and 2004.

“. . . Three interesting results emerge from these content analyses of national and local newspaper coverage. First, journalists disproportionately underscore the race of black candidates, while virtually never identifying white politicians by their color, no matter the circumstances. Second, journalists covering a black candidate are more likely to emphasize party affiliation and voter demographics, while providing relatively less coverage of substantive issues; fewer policy questions are discussed in white-black elections than in any other scenario. Finally, journalists tend to muzzle racial messages from candidates, or campaigns, while nevertheless accenting race themselves.”

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Student Paper Calls for Chief Illiniwek to Go

The student newspaper of the University of Illinois, the Daily Illini, called Wednesday for the school to retire its controversial Indian mascot, Chief Illiniwek, after 80 years.

 

 

“Much like the Chief is a symbol for the University, the controversy surrounding his image has come to represent the administration’s inability to act unless their hand is forced by a third party. Now that it has been forced, the time has come for closure,” the editorial board wrote.

“The Oglala Sioux tribe’s recent request that the University return the regalia undermines the validity of the pro-Chief argument. If the University were to refuse the request, pro-Chief advocates could no longer claim that the Chief honors the American Indian tradition. If the University were to acquiesce, then the Chief would truly become a white man made up like an Indian.”

“. . . The next meeting of the University Board of Trustees will be held on March 13 at 9 a.m. in Urbana. The time for a respectable solution has long since passed, and the only way the University can move forward is to put Chief Illiniwek out of his misery.”

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Jonathan Capehart Joins D.C. Post Editorial Board

Jonathan Capehart, who has been a national affairs columnist for Bloomberg News, a policy adviser to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign, helped win a controversial Pulitzer Prize for the New York Daily News and wrote in the News about being a gay black man, is joining the Washington Post’s editorial board, Post editors announced Tuesday.

Capehart, most recently a senior vice president and senior counselor for public affairs at Hill & Knowlton, will be the only person of color on the board. In that role, he succeeds Colbert I. King, who retired as deputy editorial page editor at the end of the year but is continuing to write his weekly column.

In 1999, The News editorial board won the Pulitzer for “its effective campaign to rescue Harlem’s Apollo Theatre from the financial mismanagement that threatened the landmark’s survival,” the Pulitzer Board said.

At the time, Michael Goodwin, editorial page editor, credited Capehart and editorial writer Michael Aronson in particular for “pulling the plow” on the Apollo editorials.

But in December of that year, the New York Amsterdam News ran an 2,699-word editorial by publisher Wilbert A. Tatum headlined, “The Daily News must return the Pulitzer Prize.”

It began, “Diminutive in stature and venomous in tongue and pen, ‘Capeman Capehart’ has used the influence and financial resources of a hopelessly racist newspaper, the New York Daily News, to further his attempts to destroy Harlem’s leadership, in particular, Cong. Charles B. Rangel, ranking member of the House Committee on Ways and Means.

“Needless to say, Rangel, Sutton and the Apollo board have been completely exonerated by the attorney general of New York State, Spitzer, although he really did not want to do it,” references to Percy Sutton, former Manhattan borough president, and now-Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

In 2004, when New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey announced he was resigning, saying, “my truth is that I am a gay American,” Capehart returned to the paper to write, “I’m one of the lucky ones who came to terms with his homosexuality in college and never looked back. But for every Jonathan Capehart, there are 10 more McGreeveys. . . . It was an explosive moment in gay history. A ‘where were you when?’ moment.”

The New York Social Diary said of Capehart, “Dapper, dashing, friendly but with an agreeable air of authority, he is perhaps one of the most important young men, as well as political characters in the city, and possibly the country today.”

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Black-Press Veterans Honor Simeon Booker

Veterans of the black press and others who have made their mark in the African American struggle assembled at the National Press Club to honor Simeon Booker, who is retiring, at 88, as Washington bureau chief of Johnson Publishing Co., publishers of Ebony and Jet magazines.

 

 

“I haven’t seen this many photographers since I was on the road,” said Booker, looking at the phalanx of Johnson photographers on duty among the crowd of about 225. He noted that he had introduced Martin Luther King Jr. at the press club in 1962 and that King had become its first black speaker, causing a committee chairman to quit. Booker also said people had asked what he would do next. “I’m 88. Why do I have to do anything? What is it about the word retired that they don’t get?”

Lerone Bennett, retired Ebony editor, noted that in the early 1960s, “the big names at the Kennedy White House would leave their offices at the end of the day and congregate at the Johnson Publishing Co. office” run by Booker. He said that Jet and Ebony had the largest contingent of writers and photographers at the 1963 March on Washington and that Booker and his then-assistant, E. Fannie Granton, assisted them.

In a event during which slides continuously flashed scenes of Booker with historic figures and at memorable scenes from the civil rights movement, Bryan Monroe, editorial director of Ebony and Jet, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, and a former Knight Ridder executive, praised the black press. “I spent 19 years telling their story; now we get to tell our story,” he said of his own recent move to the black press.

Dorothy Height, 94, retired longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women, told the group, “This is a party that I just couldn’t miss.”

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Short Takes

  • Stephen A. Smith, Philadelphia Inquirer sports writer, will appear on ABC-TV’s “General Hospital” as a news reporter covering the hostage situation at the Metro Court during February sweeps,” Jennifer Snyder wrote Tuesday for SoapOperaNetwork.com. Smith also serves as an NBA analyst for ESPN.
  • The new Politico newspaper and Web site debuted Tuesday, prominently featuring two stories about African Americans: “Clinton Woos Black Vote, Targets Obama,” by Ben Smith, and “Black Caucus: Whites Not Allowed,” by Josephine Hearn.
  • “The Boston Globe said yesterday it is closing its three foreign bureaus as part of efforts to trim costs, ending more than three decades of reporting from staff members based overseas,” Robert Gavin reported Wednesday in the Globe. The four reporters in those bureaus who are to be offered other jobs are Thanassis Cambanis and Anne Barnard in Jerusalem; Colin Nickerson in Berlin; and Indira Lakshmanan in Bogota, the story said.
  • Commenting on a New York Times story that said that by a margin of 1 percent, more women are unmarried than married in America, Gal Beckerman wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review’s CJR Daily, “As much as we would like to persist in thinking that we are a classless and race-blind society, the Times, of all papers — having run groundbreaking series on both race and class — should realize that a phenomenon that might bode well for middle-class white women might be absolutely disastrous for poor black women.” She criticized the piece for not examining the consequences for the black community, because most of the article was “completely about those middle class white women who insist they have chosen to be without ball and chain.”
  • Julie Shaw, a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is joining the Philadelphia Daily News on Jan. 30 as a general assignment reporter, the paper told staffers on Wednesday.
  • KDLT-TV in Aberdeen, S.D., is offering a Spanish newscast, according to a news release, the Aberdeen American News reported on Tuesday. “Monday’s 10 p.m. newscast was to be rebroadcast at 2:10 this morning, according to the press release. Early morning rebroadcasts will continue daily at 2:10, it states. Mariah Quezada and Sandra Meza, natives of Mexico who are Sioux Falls residents, will interpret the English newscasts. Broadcasts will feature news, weather, sports and Spanish commercials.”
  • Henry Chu, news director at KGBT-TV in Harlingen, Texas, has left the CBS affiliate after almost six years, station employees confirmed Wednesday.
  • “The last of Zimbabwe’s independent media voices would disappear if the publisher of the country’s two remaining private newspapers loses his Zimbabwean citizenship, warn civil society activists and journalists,” Moyiga Nduru reported Monday for Inter Press Service in Johannesburg. “Trevor Ncube, who owns a majority share in both the Zimbabwe Independent and the Standard weeklies, was prevented from renewing his passport in late December 2006.”
  • The Committee to Protect Journalists has asked for a thorough probe into the death of Godwin Agbroko, editorial board chairman of Nigeria’s private daily ThisDay, who was shot in his car while driving home from work on Dec. 22, killed by a single bullet to the neck with his valuables untouched, according to local journalists and news reports.
  • The minister of information of Guinea, Boubacar Yacine Diallo, on Jan. 15 ordered all private and community radio stations not to broadcast any material on the ongoing general strike by the country’s workers protesting against the high cost of living and other national concerns, the Media Foundation for West Africa reported on Wednesday.
  • In China, “More people have been arrested over the death of a reporter in Shanxi amid repeated denials from his newspaper that the journalist was trying to extort money from an unlicensed coal mine,” Kristine Kwok reported Tuesday in the South China Morning Post. “Mine operator Hou Zhenrun, who turned himself in on Friday, is suspected of hiring eight thugs to beat up two reporters and a driver.

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