Maynard Institute archives

Police Hint at Conspiracy to Kill Bailey

by richard0490

Teen Gunman Believed to Have Had Accomplices

A 19-year-old handyman who has confessed to killing Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey with a shotgun is not believed to have worked alone, police said on Monday, raising the possibility that a splinter Black Muslim group conducted the first assassination in memory of a American-born black journalist on American soil.

 

 

“Devaughndre Broussard, 19, admitted pulling the trigger in Thursday’s ambush killing in downtown Oakland, but ‘we don’t believe he worked on his own,’ said Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan, who declined to elaborate,” Henry K. Lee reported Monday on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site.

Broussard worked at Your Black Muslim Bakery, which is affiliated with a black Muslim splinter group.

“Jordan said Monday that Bailey, a former Oakland Tribune reporter, was working on a story about financial troubles the bakery was having and that the story upset Broussard,” Paul T. Rosynsky of Media News reported on Monday on the Oakland Tribune Web site.

“‘The motive, we believe, is that Chauncey Bailey was working on a story about some of the financial shortfalls,’ Jordan said. ‘He is an innocent person just doing his job.”’ Bailey was editor of the Post Newspaper Group, black-oriented weeklies in the San Francisco Bay area.

If the police are correct, the killing of Bailey could be the first assassination of a black journalist by a black community group. That did not happen even in the turmoil of the 1960s, when some militants subjected journalists to menacing rhetoric.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the last journalist to be killed on U.S. soil was Dona St. Plite of WKAT in Miami on Oct. 24, 1993.

“St. Plite, a Haitian-born reporter and commentator for radio station WKAT in Miami, was murdered at a benefit for the family of Fritz Dor, a colleague killed two years earlier. His name had appeared on a hit list of supporters of ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He was the third Haitian-born journalist killed in Miami in three years,” CPJ said.

 

 

 

“Obviously, his name will be added to the Journalists Memorial this year,” Margaret Engel, managing editor of the Newseum, said of Bailey on Monday. The Newseumâ??s Journalists Memorial bears the names of more than 1,600 journalists who died while reporting the news.

Oakland Mayor Ronald Dellums, along with media figures and family members, will speak at Bailey’s funeral Wednesday at 11 a.m. at St. Benedict’s Catholic Church in Oakland, a cousin, Donna Duhe, told Journal-isms. The church holds 500.

“The outpouring of support from the community locally, nationally and internationally has just been enormous,” she said. “Every minute we’re realizing the difference that he made and the magnitude of the work that he did.”

Duhe gave Bailey’s date of birth as Oct. 20, 1949. Some news organizations had given his age as 57; others as 58.

 

 

Journal-isms asked Eric Newton, vice president/journalism program of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and a managing editor of the Tribune under owners Bob and Nancy Maynard, why Bailey’s death is news.

“It’s news whenever a part of civil society is under attack — and that’s what journalists are, part of civil society,” he said. “If someone kills a judge or an elected official or a journalist because they were doing their jobs, that murderer is doing more than taking a single life. He is trying to take civic life from the whole community.”

Asked whether he was satisfied with the coverage, Newton said, “Chauncey’s story got more coverage than any journalist’s slaying in the United States since Don Bolles was killed in the 1970s. Both reporters were, when they were murdered, writing about people accused of wrongdoing. Both had long careers in mainstream journalism and were known by hundreds of colleagues.”

But, Newton said, “I’m concerned whenever editors don’t think the murder of a journalist is important. CPJ, for example, lists a dozen other journalists killed in the United States in the line of duty in the 30 years between when Don was murdered and when Chauncey was murdered. But the murders of those journalists were not well-covered. They were immigrants, and not seen as mainstream journalism stories. The only place the others are remembered now is the Freedom Forum Journalists Memorial.”

Newton continued, “It’s unfortunate, but too many editors in the United States still do not consider the murder of journalists to be a significant problem.

“The Inter American Press Association has for a decade been doing a good job of reporting on the murders of journalists throughout the Americas. IAPA has helped get laws changed to improve investigations, prosecutions and convictions for the crime of murdering a journalist.

“Publishers throughout the Americas, but very few in the United States, have donated millions of dollars in ad space to fight the impunity with which journalists have been murdered. Though journalists continue to be killed throughout the world, some progress is being made. Ten years ago, virtually no one was behind bars for murdering a journalist in the Americas. Now, according to Ricardo Trotti of the IAPA, 77 people are in jail, right now, for that crime.”

The group behind Your Black Muslim Bakery filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October, and a bankruptcy judge on Friday filed an order converting the bakery’s case to a Chapter 7 liquidation. The judge said the bakery’s last day of business would be Thursday, Lee wrote in the Chronicle.

According to police, on Thursday morning Broussard had apparently tried to track Bailey down, going by the paper’s downtown offices to confront him, according to the Oakland Tribune. “When he found Bailey had not yet arrived at work, Broussard began driving around in a van looking for him and spotted him in the 200 block of 14th Street. He stopped and approached Bailey on the street, shooting him several times with the shotgun.”

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2 Sports Milestones Meant Dilemma in New York

A week ago, we reported that the San Francisco Chronicle planned to “make a big deal” if hometown hero Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants tied or surpassed Hank Aaron’s home run record, but the hope was that he wouldn’t do it too late in the game for the paper to give it the appropriate display.

Bonds came through with No. 755 early enough in the game for the Chronicle — and lots of other California papers, especially — to prepare a well-designed. splashy Sunday front page in commemoration.

 

 

There was another issue in New York, though. The same night, Alex Rodriguez became the youngest member of the 500-home-run club, playing against the Kansas City Royals. Which milestone takes precedence?

“Obviously, in New York, the big story was A-Rod,” Leon Carter, sports editor of the Daily News, told Journal-isms, “but Barry Bonds was also a big story. We’ve been following him [with a reporter] since he was three homers away, and it’s even bigger when you consider the steroid cloud above his head. That will play out if a grand jury has enough information to indict him.”

At the Daily News, a tabloid, the solution was to give Rodriguez the front page and Bonds the back cover. The New York Post and Newsday also went with A-Rod. The New York Times gave Bonds priority.

In San Francisco, where playing up Bonds’ milestone was a no-brainer, the Chronicle assigned two photographers and three writers to the Giants’ away game against the San Diego Padres, Deputy Sports Editor Larry Yant told Journal-isms.

The front page had already prepared by the art department, and although the tie with the record set by Hank Aaron came early in the game, the sports staff worked past midnight on the story, he said.

But there’s the matter of beating Aaron’s record. On Monday night, the Chronicle deployed five writers and eight photographers to the Giants’ home game against the Washington Nationals.

Will breaking Aaron’s record be a bigger story? “Absolutely,” said Yant. “He’ll be the only guy” to have hit 756 home runs. Carter said, “Baseball is all about statistics, all about records.”

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Coaching Legend Remembered for Open-Door Hiring

Bill Walsh, who died July 30 after a long battle with leukemia, was celebrated as the best NFL coach of the last quarter-century.

And some did not forget the role that Walsh, who was 75, played in the history of African Americans in pro football.

“As he built his coaching tree, Walsh embraced an open-door hiring policy that gave opportunity to black coaches at a time when the rest of the NFL was in the Stone Age concerning minority hiring,” Bryan Burwell wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“From groundbreakers such as Dennis Green to neophytes such as Mike Tomlin, nearly every black head coach in NFL history has a direct or indirect historic link to Bill Walsh.”

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NFL Stands by Requirement for Ads on Vests

“The National Football League is apparently standing firm in its plan to require sideline photographers to wear vests with ad logos this season, according to the National Press Photographers Association, which has led the opposition to the plan, claiming it represents a conflict for photogs,” Joe Strupp reported Monday in Editor & Publisher.

“NPPA also dismissed the idea of an organized boycott of games, according to NPPA Vice President Jack Zibluk, who said in an e-mail to E&P that ‘Our problem with a boycott is that it could play into the hands of the NFL in the long run. Boycotting wouldn’t cause a coverage blackout. The only photographers left would be the ones favored by the NFL.'”

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Scarborough, Esiason Seen as Imus Replacements

“Don Imus’ former radio and television empire is being broken up, with MSNBC very likely hiring Joe Scarborough for its morning telecast while radio looks elsewhere, according to people close to the negotiations,” David Bauder reported Saturday for the Associated Press.

“WFAN, the New York radio station that was Imus’ flagship, is said to be close to naming former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason to the morning time slot. Esiason works now as a football analyst for CBS Sports.”

Speculation mounted in July that Imus would return to the airwaves after his ouster in April for racist and sexist remarks. The National Association of Black Journalists, the first organization to call for his removal, opposed a return, but the Rev. Al Sharpton said, “We never called for him to be permanently barred from being on the air.” A spokeswoman for CBS Radio had refused to confirm or deny a report in the New York Post that Imus might return to WFAN.

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10 Years of a (Not Very Diverse) Blogosphere

July marked the 10th anniversary of blogging, David Eaves and Taylor Owen reminded readers of the Toronto Star last week, but after a decade of the phenomenon, the organizer of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers, made this observation:

“It’s mostly white. More male than female. It’s not very diverse,” said Gina Cooper, according to Jose Antonio Vargas, writing from Chicago Monday in the Washington Post.

“There goes the open secret of the netroots, or those who make up the community of the Internet grass-roots movement,” Vargas continued.

“A recent census of ‘the blogosphere’ counted more than 70 million blogs covering an unimaginable array of topics,” Eaves and Owen said in their Toronto Star story.

“Moreover, every day an astounding 120,000 new blogs are created and 1.5 million new posts are published (about 17 posts per second). Never before have so many contributed so much to our media landscape.”

The Toronto Star writers also drew a distinction, as does this column, between blogging and journalism (Journal-isms lines up with the journalists.)

“Blogging is not a substitute for journalism,” they wrote. “If anything, this past decade shows that blogging and journalism are symbiotic —to the benefit of everyone.

“To its many ardent advocates, blogging is displacing traditional journalism. But journalism — unlike blogging — is a practice with a particular set of norms and structures that guide the creation of content. Blogging, despite its unique properties (virtually anyone can reach a potentially enormous audience at little cost), has few, if any norms.”

At the Chicago convention, Vargas wrote, “For all the talk about the increasing influence of this growing group — ‘We are a community . . . a movement . . . an institution,’ Cooper said in a speech Saturday night — what gets scant attention is its demography. While the Huffington Post and Fire Dog Lake, both founded by women, are two of the most widely read blogs, the rock stars are mostly men, and many women bloggers complain of sexism and harassment in the blogosphere.

“Walking around McCormick Place during the weekend, it became clear that only a handful of the 1,500 conventioneers — bloggers, policy experts, party activists — are African American, Latino or Asian. Of about 100 scheduled panels and workshops, less than a half-dozen dealt directly with women or minority issues.”

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Short Takes

  • Caribbean-American journalists on Monday announced their own organization, the National Association of Caribbean-American Journalists. Ann-Marie Adams, former Hartford Courant reporter and a Ph.D. student at Howard University, was elected president on July 28, according to a news release. The group can be reached at nacaj07@yahoo.com.
  • Roland S. Martin, the nationally syndicated columnist,

 

 
  • Chicago-based radio host and former editor of the Chicago Defender who recently joined CNN, is adding Essence magazine to his portfolio. Martin’s agent, Marc Watts of Signature Media Group, announced on Tuesday that Martin will blog on essence.com twice daily and will contribute to Essence magazine bimonthly, beginning with the December issue.
  • The Santa Barbara (Calif.) Daily Sound reluctantly turned over 144 unpublished photographs taken during a gang fight that resulted in the stabbing death of a teenager, the Associated Press reported on Monday. Editor and publisher Jeramy Gordon called it “a sad day for journalism and for our rights as Americans,” explaining that the newspaper couldn’t afford to fight the court order.
  • Robin Roberts of ABC’s “Good Morning America” thanked viewers on Monday for their support during Friday’s breast cancer surgery. “I cannot even begin to adequately say thank you. I have truly been touched by your e-mails and messages of support. My family read many of your e-mails while I was in surgery. It brought them such comfort. My big sis, Sally-Ann, marked all the survivor stories with a big S,” she wrote on the ABC News Web site.
  • “The News & Observer had a good idea for a back-to-school feature: Invite high school students in to model their fall fashion favorites,” reader representative Ted Vaden wrote on Sunday about the Raleigh, N.C., newspaper. “But there was an uh-oh moment when seven teens turned up for the photo shoot: All were white girls. At that point, it was too late in the production schedule to find more models or change the story, editors said. . . . The reaction from readers was swift.”
  • Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper “will receive assistance in processing its archives through a nearly half a million dollar grant to Johns Hopkins University,” the newspaper reported on July 26. The purpose of the grant is to develop a new archival training practicum and internship program at Johns Hopkins. . . . Since it was founded in 1892, the company has stored thousands of photos, articles, business documents, journals, letters etc. dating back to the late 1800s. Many writings, artwork and photographs are contained from individuals including Langston Hughes, Romare Bearden, Sam Lacy and others. It has been referred to as the largest single source of 20th century African-American history in the world.”
  • “Americans say the media is to blame for the saturation of celebrity coverage on TV, a new survey finds,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote on Friday. “The Pew Research Center for People & the Press said Thursday that 87% of respondents said celebrity scandals get way too much ink and airtime. Only 8% think the media gets the balance between celebrity and serious news right, while 2% told the surveyors that there wasn’t enough celebrity scandal coverage.”
  • A stagesetter by Allison J. Waldman in TV Week on the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Las Vegas, which begins Wednesday, is starting to draw scornful comments from posters. “Is there a National Association of ‘white’ anything?,” asked Red Blanchard. “Whoopee, congratulations NABJ. You were the first to call for the lynching of Don Imus. [Fascism] at its finest,” wrote someone identified as Festus.

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