Shooter’s Family Expresses Its Preference
The Associated Press switched its policy on the rendering of the name of the shooter at Virginia Tech late Friday, agreeing, in essence, that the Asian American Journalists Association was correct in insisting that he should be called Seung-Hui Cho, not Cho Seung-Hui.
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The AP, the world’s largest news organization, acted after Cho’s family issued a statement expressing its sorrow over the tragedy.
The AP dispatch, datelined Blacksburg, Va., read:
“When police and Virginia Tech officials released the name of the person responsible for the deadliest mass murder by a lone gunman in U.S. history, they identified him as Cho Seung-Hui.
“That’s how The Associated Press and many other news organizations referred to him when reporting on the shootings. Because Korean names are traditionally written with the surname first, on second reference he was identified as Cho.
“When Cho’s family gave a statement to the AP on Friday, however, they said his name was Seung-Hui Cho.
“Why the difference?
“The Asian American Journalists Association notes that many Korean-American families adopt traditional American name orders and use their surnames last. The Cho family immigrated to the U.S. in 1992, when he was 8 years old.
“The Associated Press will use the Cho family’s preference. The spelling is an English language transliteration of the Korean language characters.”
Other news organizations, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, followed.
Some Asian American journalists said the rendering of Cho’s name spoke to whether he was viewed as a foreigner or an American.
When National Public Radio announced Wednesday it would use “Seung-Hui Cho,” “Day to Day” producer Ki-Min Sung, a Korean-American, explained on that show:
“To call him Cho Seung Hui casts him as a foreigner. Asian or American? It’s a gray area a lot of Asian immigrants like me have had to navigate. Because Seung Hui Cho grew up here, he is, in fact, a Korean-American of the 1.5 generation.”
CBS switched on Wednesday night. Spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said that decision was made after checking with law enforcement officers and the Korean Embassy, and receiving feedback from many members of the Korean community, including a Korean-American staffer. “Added to the fact that he had been in this country for . . . years and that that is the way the individual himself signed his name, we reverted back . . . division-wide,” she told Journal-isms.
However, news organizations by and large had said they were following AP and police, which used Cho Seung-Hui.
Mike Silverman, AP’s managing editor, told Journal-isms earlier Friday: “We have been basing our usage on the police and university versions of his name. We would change if we learned through interviews, other documents, or some other evidence that he preferred a different version of his name.”
Asian American journalists had not been the only ones questioning the rendering of the name, In AP’s Washington bureau, Sonya Ross, a black journalist who is news editor – regionals, said she had been urging the news organization to check Cho’s driver’s license and his immigration records to be sure the organization had it right.
- Pamela Constable, Washington Post: Cho’s Name: Which Way Isn’t a Simple Decision
- Cleveland Plain Dealer: Is it Cho Seung Hui or Seung-Hui Cho?
- Michelle Tsai, Slate: Cho Seung-Hui or Seung-Hui Cho?: How the media chose a name for the Virginia Tech gunman.
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Asian Journalists’ Presence Felt on Va. Tech Story
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Asian Americans are only 3.27 percent of the total newspaper newsroom workforce, according to the latest survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, but they made their presence felt when the killer of 33 people at Virginia Tech on Monday turned out to be South Korea-born.
“We made an incredible difference,” said Jeanne Mariani-Belding, the editorial and opinion editor at the Honolulu Advertiser, who is national president of the Asian American Journalists Association.
AAJA members provided valuable contacts in the Korean community, they wrote columns about how they felt as Asian Americans, and they ran interference when they saw their news organizations going in the wrong direction.
“We just slowly say, can you think about this for a minute?” Mariani-Belding said. At her paper, she sent memos on the sensitivity of the issue to the editor and publisher and ran an editorial Wednesday that declared, “linking the event and Cho’s Asian ancestry is simply misguided and ignorant.”
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David Cho |
When AAJA issued its memos objecting to the initial characterizations of the suspect as “an Asian man,” or rendering his name in the wrong word order, members spoke up at their news organizations.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer announced in Friday’s paper that it was spelling the suspect’s name Seung-Hui Cho, rather than Cho Seung Hui, bucking other news organizations but following AAJA’s guidelines.
Janet Cho, AAJA’s vice president/print, is a Plain Dealer reporter. “Our style on Cho’s name was on the recommendation of Janet Cho. She was most helpful,” editor Douglas Clifton told Journal-isms. National Public Radio and CBS also credited Korean American staffers for their decisions to spell the shooter’s name the American, rather than the Korean way. Seung-Hui Cho had come to the United States as a child. Mariani-Belding said, “I’d venture he had more to do with suburban American kids than South Korea.” Advertiser Editor Mark Platte told Journal-isms he took Mariani-Belding’s advice on the word order.
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At the Seattle Times, “the very timely advisory that national AAJA issued on the shootings was passed on to editors here,” said Janet Tu, who is AAJA’s secretary. “That resulted in some quick changes to two of our Web site headlines, and editors thanked us for the reminder.” One headline “was something to the effect of: ‘Campus gunman was student from South Korea.’ It was changed to something that didn’t reference the shooter’s ethnicity or country of origin,” Tu told Journal-isms.
An Asian American reporter at the New York Daily News scanning the Internet perceived fear of a backlash Tuesday in the Korean American community, similar to what Arab-Americans felt after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said David Ng, executive editor at the paper. The reporter felt comfortable in coming to Ng, whose parents emigrated from Hong Kong, and Ng took it to national editors, who produced a story on those fears, “Edgy about anti-Korean backlash in U.S., abroad,” for the next day’s paper.
In San Francisco, where one-third of the city is Asian American, the San Francisco Chronicle’s entire newsroom staff was sensitized to Korean American concerns after the Chronicle created an uproar in the Korean community last fall with a four-part series, “Diary of a Sex Slave,” that Korean Americans found offensive.
Chronicle staffers learned how tight-knit Korean Americans were, and staffers thought the news “would resonate in that community,” Managing Editor Robert J. Rosenthal said. Technology reporter Ryan Kim blogged about his own feelings, and Vanessa Hua wrote two stories, the first reporting that “racially tinged speculation, based on the 23-year-old Cho’s heritage and immigrant status, flew around the Internet, even though he spent two-thirds of his life in the United States.”
At the Washington Post, David Cho, a financial news reporter and a second-generation Korean American, was less than impressed with “a lot of the stories that had the typical Korean reaction. They didn’t resonate with me or seem that spot-on,” he told Journal-isms. He was quickly detailed to the Virginia Tech coverage and completed a 50-inch piece on Friday after a series of interviews in the Washington-area Korean community.
Cho said his instincts told him to explore the cultural stigma in the Korean community of going to a mental health professional. “I described what a lot of Asian Americans went through,” including the gap between parents and children in the so-called 1.5 generation, the offspring of those who immigrated to the United States.
Cho, 33, brought his father along because the reporter spoke only “kitchen Korean,” though it turned out Dad wasn’t needed for the interviews.
In times like these, newspapers realize the value of diverse staffs, said Sandra Sugawara, the Post’s assistant managing editor for financial news. “Frankly, I wish we had more Asians, and particularly Asians who spoke Korean,” she said. “That’s why it’s so good to have a lot of people of color in the newsroom,” she said. “You have professional journalists telling you ‘this is the discussion in the community.’ It gives you a guidepost.”
AAJA’s vice president for broadcast, Jam Sardar, an Iranian American and correspondent for Comcast Network, went on Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor” on Friday night to press AAJA’s points, including his belief that Cho’s ethnicity belonged in the “10th or 15th paragraph” of the first-day stories.
Host Bill O’Reilly wasn’t much interested, doing most of the talking himself. He maintained that Cho’s ethnicity deserved top billing and denied that Arab Americans were victims of any significant backlash after Sept. 11.
Then time was up.
“Thanks for letting me listen,” Sardar told O’Reilly.
- Earl Ofari Hutchinson, syndicated: Should the Korean Community Apologize for Cho Seung-Hui’s Rampage in Virginia?
- Editorial, Asian Week: We Are All Americans
- Emil Guillermo, Asian Week: Pondering Cho Seung-Hui and Don Imus
- Dionne Walker, Associated Press: Asian-American activists concerned by focus on gunman’s ethnicity
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Jason Whitlock Interviews for Imus Radio Job
Jason Whitlock, the Kansas City Star sports columnist, has been excoriated for arguing that “pop culture — specifically violent and misogynistic rap music — is doing far more damage to the black community than anything” that was said by fired radio host Don Imus, in the words of the Star. Now he is interviewing for Imus’ job, the newspaper reported on its Web site Friday.
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Meanwhile, Bernard McGuirk, the longtime producer for Imus’ syndicated radio show, was let go late Thursday by New York’s WFAN-AM for his role in the fateful exchange in which Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s,” CBS Radio spokeswoman Karen Mateo said Friday. CBS Inc. is the parent company for WFAN.
The Associated Press noted that McGuirk, who joined the “Imus in the Morning” show as producer in 1987, was “one of Imus’ frequent on-air foils,” and provided much of the program’s dicier content, a great deal of it while doing over-the-top impressions of the late Cardinal John O’Connor and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.”
“You told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car coming home, that Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes,” Mike Wallace told Imus in a 1998 interview on “60 Minutes.” Imus at first denied that, then confirmed it.
In the Kansas City Star, Jeffrey Flanagan reported, “Word spread along the East Coast on Friday that Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock interviewed with radio station WFAN’s operations director, Mark Chernoff, about — you guessed it — replacing the fired Don Imus. But Whitlock said he was cool to the idea.
“‘It’s never been my belief that I have to live on either coast to have my voice heard across the nation,’ Whitlock said. ‘I’ve been doing pretty well from right here in Kansas City.'”
In an April 11 column, Whitlock thanked Imus. “You’ve given Vivian Stringer,” the women’s basketball coach, “and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor,” he wrote.
“Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred,” he wrote.
On the AOL Sports Web site, Keith T. Clinkscales, general manager of ESPN The Magazine and a member of the founding team of Vibe magazine, rebuked Whitlock on Tuesday, writing, “The mainstream media also thanks you, Jason, because by attacking [the Rev. Al] Sharpton and [the Rev. Jesse] Jackson you are doing the dirty work that no white person can credibly do.”
On Friday, Brian C. Browley, a student journalist at Tennessee State University, writing on Black College Wire, called Whitlock “a black columnist who feeds his family by trashing black athletes.”
Newsday sports columnist Neil Best, who is white, suggested on April 13 that Whitlock would be good in Imus’ slot, saying, “Whitlock has an outrageous streak that would yield attention and ratings. But he also has built-in credibility as a black journalist to help him ward off future parades of hypocritical blowhards like the one that scared advertisers and broadcasting executives away from Imus.”
- Robin Finn, New York Times: Chaotic Duo Indignantly Fills Post-Imus Void
- Trotter Group commentary on Imus
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Ernest Wilson Named Dean at USC Annenberg
Ernest James Wilson III, ranking senior member of the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and “a pioneering author and researcher on the Internet and digital communication in developing countries,” has been named dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, effective July 1, the school announced on Friday.
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Wilson, 58, is the first African American to hold the position and one of the first to lead a journalism school at a majority white institution. Lorraine Branham is director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, and William T. Slater is professor and dean of the College of Communication of the Schieffer School of Journalism at Texas Christian University.
Wilson holds a joint appointment at the University of Maryland, College Park, as a professor in the Department of Government and Politics and in the Department of African-American Studies.
“This is an exciting time for journalism and communication: national borders continue to erode with digital communication and our societies are experiencing accelerated diversification,” Wilson said in a news release. “There is now an important opportunity for scholarship and teaching in journalism and communication to help understand the convergence of technology, human initiatives and institutional relations.”
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N.C. Anchor Goes to Jail in Drunken-Driving Death
“Circled by attorneys and family, choking back tears as he spoke, television news anchor Tolly Carr apologized Friday for his role last month in the drunken-driving death of a budding chef,” Eric J.S. Townsend reported Saturday in the Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record.
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“Moments later, Carr turned himself in on charges of felony death by vehicle in the March wreck that killed Casey Ryan Bokhoven .
“Carr, on unpaid leave from his job with WXII (Channel 12), opted not to post a $100,000 bond and intends to spend the time until trial in the Forsyth County jail.
“Prosecutors could have charged Carr with involuntary manslaughter, which can carry a lighter sentence. Carr also faces a charge of felony injury by vehicle for wounds his passenger sustained.
“A guilty verdict on both counts could result in anything from probation to a maximum of six years in prison, one prosecutor said, depending on how much weight a judge gives several factors.”
“‘I had a very irresponsible night. And it took the life of another human being,’ Carr told a throng of reporters outside the jail. ‘And that’s something you can apologize for, but there’s nothing you can do to bring back Casey.'” [Item added April 21]
- Allen Johnson, Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record: Why the Carr saga should be a sobering lesson
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Ken Burns Won’t Reedit ‘War,’ PBS Says
“A PBS official said yesterday that filmmaker Ken Burns will not re-cut his documentary on World War II— a statement that disappointed and angered minority-group activists who on Tuesday said they believed Burns and PBS had committed to reediting the film to address their concerns about its content,” Paul Farhi reported Thursday in the Washington Post.
Those seeking portrayals of Latinos in the documentary included the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which announced on April 11 that the groups had achieved victory.
Farhi wrote, “Programming chief John Wilson, seeking to clarify PBS’s earlier statements, said yesterday that Burns’s 14 1/2 -hour documentary, ‘The War,’ is complete. That statement, however, leaves unresolved the complaints from some Latino and American Indian organizations, which have been pressing Burns and PBS for months to incorporate into the film material about Latino and American Indian service members.
“Burns has resisted any suggestion that he is changing ‘The War,’ despite his agreement to film additional material to try to address advocates’ concerns. A spokesman for Burns insisted yesterday that the filmmaker isn’t ‘reediting’ his work, as The Washington Post reported yesterday.
“Some of the disagreement over Burns’s — and PBS’s — intentions turns on small but critical semantic distinctions, particularly whether the unproduced new material will be a ‘part’ of ‘The War,’ or instead air as a supplement.”
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Secret Service Pulling White House Credentials
When the White House Correspondents Association meets for its annual dinner on Saturday night, don’t expect to see Askia Muhammad, who says his White House press credential “was not renewed last month, after 30 years, and being renewed 14 times, by the last five White House press offices, including three times by ‘Bush 43.'”
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Muhammad, who reports for broadcast outlets as well as the Final Call and Washington Informer newspapers, is one of the latest victims of Secret Service efforts to trim the number of White House reporters who hold permanent press credentials. The efforts began during the Clinton years, but accelerated after Sept. 11, 2001, reporters say.
“The Secret Service has indicated over the last several years that they want to see a reduction in the hard passes,” which gain reporters quicker entry at the White House gates, Steve Scully of C-Span, president of the White House Correspondents Association, told Journal-isms.
Martha Kumar author of the upcoming book, “Managing the President’s Message,” says the number of accredited journalists at the White House has been “sharply reduced.”
The Secret Service is counting the number of times the pass is used and failing to renew the passes of those who use it “infrequently,” Scully said, adding that “infrequently” has not been defined. “We prefer to use the system as it is,” but “we have to live with the process of the White House.” All his group can do is warn its members.
Sonya Ross, news editor – regionals in the Associated Press Washington bureau, said she got tired of going to the White House simply to keep her credentials up. She no longer covers the building, and said that in any case the pass was no longer good for taking visitors to the annual Easter egg roll, or guiding people on tours. And journalistically, “The White House is definitely a news-free zone,” she said.
Muhammad, who said he went to the White House “not more than once or twice a month” because it lacks sufficient work space “for use of those who are not in the coterie,” is not a member of the White House Correspondents Association. That organization also relegates non-daily reporters like him to second-tier status, he said.
“I wrote the White House Press Office in JANUARY, concerning credential renewal. It did not expire until March 30. They never said a mumbling word at that time, concerning roll being taken in order to be accredited again. That’s the outrage,” Muhammad said by e-mail. April Ryan, who covers the White House for American Urban Radio networks, said of the executive mansion, “It’s a very strange place to work. Things are not necessarily told. You can find things out just by hearing things in the wind.”
Muhammad sees a racial element at work. “Although I have been kicked out of fancier parties than this one, I resent the decision,” he continued. “I think it is insensitive because there are so few Blacks accredited to begin with, and . . . April Ryan with American Urban Radio, is the only other person accredited to a Black news outlet,” he said.
He won’t miss not being at the annual correspondents dinners. He hadn’t been going anyway.
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Ida B. Wells Award Nominations Due May 1
“News executives, managers, journalists or any individual who has made a significant difference in the hiring, promotion and news coverage of underrepresented minorities,” are eligible for the Ida B Wells Award, given jointly by the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Conference of Editorial Writers.
The deadline for applications is May 1.
The award, named after the crusading anti-lynching editor of the late 19th century, is intended “to give tangible and highly visible recognition to an individual or group of individuals and their company. Winners should have provided distinguished leadership in opening doors of employment opportunity and in coverage of minorities in American journalism.”
Recent winners include Virgil L. Smith, president and publisher of the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times (2006); Reginald Stuart, corporate recruiter, Knight Ridder (2005); Don Browne, chief operating officer, Telemundo (2004); David Yarnold, senior vice president and editor, San Jose Mercury News (2003); Sam Adams, retiring curator of the award (2002); and Reid MacCluggage, retired editor and publisher of The Day, New London, Conn. (2001).
