Maynard Institute archives

Vindication After 17-Month Ordeal

by richard0604

AP’s Mike McQueen Sees Son’s Killer Found Guilty

After an 17-month ordeal in which his son was killed and then portrayed as a depressed former soldier who committed suicide, Associated Press bureau chief Mike McQueen found vindication Wednesday — but the experience altered his view of his profession, McQueen told Journal-isms.

 

A jury in the Washington suburb of Montgomery County, Md., found former Army Ranger Gary Smith, 25, guilty of second-degree murder in the slaying of fellow Ranger Michael McQueen II, 22, son of the AP bureau chief for Louisiana and Mississippi.

“It’s going to take me a while to be totally balanced and fair to defense attorneys,” McQueen said. “I have a very low opinion of the defense side of the case. That they would stoop to paint this African American man as a drunken, depressed, suicidal soldier with no money, no friends and no connection to family is nothing short of a public lynching,” he said, adding that he was well aware of the racial connotations of his statement.

“We’re never going to get over this,” he said. “My son is not only dead, but he was dragged through the mud. For what?”

The younger McQueen died in September 2006 of a gunshot wound in the Gaithersburg, Md., apartment he shared with Smith. Young McQueen was home on leave after three tours in Afghanistan and planned to attend the University of the District of Columbia.

 

“Smith did not visibly react when the verdict was announced in Circuit Court in Montgomery County. Second-degree murder is punishable by up to 30 years in prison,” Dan Morse wrote on the Washington Post Web site. Smith was found not guilty of first-degree murder.

“The defense said that McQueen committed suicide with Smith’s gun. Smith gave investigators conflicting accounts of his actions on the night of the shooting, and he eventually admitted that he had tossed the gun in a lake.”

Stephen Manning added for the Associated Press, “Prosecutors said Smith killed McQueen but didn’t suggest a motive, though they said Smith idolized McQueen and was upset when he said he planned to move out of the apartment.”

McQueen said that as a journalist, the experience “has made me more compassionate to victims of crime in the criminal justice system.” The defense team portrayed his son as depressed and suicidal as a result of an investigation in which he and his wife were never interviewed, McQueen said. “You didn’t conduct an investigation; you conducted an inquisition,” he said he told the defense lawyer. They said, “here’s a young black male, nobody’s going to know any better,” McQueen said. “To me this is the most amazing tar-and-feathering job I’ve ever been associated with. We never for one second believed that Michael killed himself.”

For a month, the prosecutors left open the suicide possibility, saying the cause of death was undetermined, McQueen said.

McQueen’s increasing sensitivity to crime victims surfaced in December, after Sean Taylor, star safety for the Washington Redskins, was slain during an attempted burglary and some journalists described him as a thug before the circumstances of his death were established.

“Did we, as news organizations, stop and ask ourselves: Are we applying a different standard in this young man’s case because he is a minority and many people are predisposed to think that minorities, particularly African-American men, are generally the victims of homicides because of something they are doing or have done in the past?” McQueen, a former managing editor at the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, asked then.

McQueen also said he was made more sensitive to the writing of such stories. For example, the lead on an AP story Wednesday said, “A Maryland jury will decide whether a former Army Ranger committed suicide after serving several tours in Afghanistan or if he was killed by his roommate, a fellow member of the elite fighting force.”

In fact, the jury was not going to decide whether young McQueen committed suicide, but whether Smith was guilty of murder. Moreover, “on what basis do you decide to put ‘suicide’ first? What are the mental processes? We don’t realize that victims of crime look at that and say, ‘he could have done it the other way'” and dismiss the story as biased. “Most people are not sophisticated in the media as I am,” said McQueen, who once chaired the journalism department at Florida International University.

McQueen said he sees the drawbacks of simply telling “both sides” of a story. “It doesn’t get you any closer to the truth,” he said. He praised Washington Post reporter Ernesto Londoño, who initially covered the case, for seeking his perspective early on. “If a family member is saying, ‘it ain’t that way,’ your obligation as a journalist is to dig in. . . . Two sides? Maybe there are three.”

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CBS Personnel Cuts to Affect Stations Coast to Coast

The sacking of Chicago television anchor Diann Burns, reporter Rafael Romo and 15 others at WBBM, the CBS-owned station in Chicago, Monday are part of a wider plan to lay off about 1 percent of the nearly 1,200 employees at CBS, as Bill Carter reported Wednesday in the New York Times.

Among the others dropped are anchor/reporter Maria Arita and reporter Kaushal Patel at KTVT-TV in Dallas, as television writer Ed Bark reported on his blog; reporter Manny Ramos and weekend sports anchor Rick Quan at KPIX-TV in San Francisco; and, according to Veronica Villafañe‘s Media Moves site, reporter Jaime Garza at KCBC-TV in Los Angeles.

 

 

Separately, Sherylle Linton Jones, a writer-producer at WTXF-TV, a Fox station in Philadelphia, said she was laid off as Fox corporate eliminates newsroom positions at its owned-and-operated stations.

“Anchors and reporters are among the employees who have been laid off at such CBS stations as WCBS New York, KCBS Los Angeles, WBZ Boston, KYW Philadelphia, KPIX San Francisco, WBBM Chicago and KVOR Sacramento,” Georg Szalai and Kimberly Nordyke reported for Reuters.

“The cuts at the local stations owned by CBS were related to the financial performance of the station group in the first quarter of 2008, a CBS station executive said,” Carter reported. “The executive, who requested anonymity because the company was restricting comment on the moves, said that CBS had not issued a corporate order to cut jobs but that the stations ‘had to deal with their budget numbers.’

 

 

“The executive added, ‘It looks big and ugly, but it’s not something that was ordered from on high.'”

“When I walked in, they told me it was going to be a bad day in the newsroom,” Ramos said, according to Steve Rubenstein in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Then they told me it was going to be a bad day for me, too.”

“Ramos, who has worked at the station since 1980 and has won three Emmy awards for his news coverage, said he was told by station executives that it was ‘purely a business decision.'”

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2 Firms Create Big Spanish-Language News Bank

“ImpreMedia and McClatchy, the two leading Hispanic print and Internet news companies announced yesterday their agreement to share content, thus creating the largest Spanish-language news bank in the United States, reports La Opinión,” New America Media said on Tuesday.

“The agreement includes ImpreMedia’s publications La Opinión in Los Angeles, El Diario/La Prensa and Hoy in New York, La Raza in Chicago, El Mensajero in San Francisco and Rumbo in San Antonio. The McClatchy publications include El Nuevo Herald in Miami, Vida en el Valle in Fresno, Calif. and La Estrella in Dallas/Fort Worth.”

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NBC to Broadcast Live from Lorraine Motel Site

NBC News plans to broadcast live from the site of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was slain 40 years ago on Friday, as part of its commemoration of the event, NBC announced on Wednesday.

“Nightly News with Brian Williams” plans to originate live from the hotel site, now the National Civil Rights Museum. Friday’s “Today” will be a split edition with Ann Curry co-anchoring live from the museum and Meredith Vieira co-anchoring from New York. Also on “Today,” Al Roker will report from Memphis, and Tom Brokaw will report live from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the network said.

“MSNBC will have extensive coverage of the anniversary throughout the day and into primetime. Tom Brokaw will start off the day on ‘Morning Joe’ live from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Ron Allen will have live reports from Memphis throughout the day and Brian Williams will contribute reporting from Memphis in primetime.”

As announced last week, CNN is airing the two-hour “Black in America: Eyewitness to Murder — The King Assassination,” on Thursday. Soledad O’Brien “investigates how James Earl Ray, an armed robber and escaped convict, had already spent an uncommon year on the run that included plastic surgery just a month before his path collided with that of the civil rights leader in Memphis, Tenn. Through interviews with witnesses and investigators, O’Brien retraces the steps of King, Ray, the FBI and Memphis police and explores alternative scenarios of who was ultimately responsible for the murder that, for some, represented the end of the American Civil Rights era,” CNN said.

An online preview of the series is available here.

On ABC’s “World News with Charles Gibson,” correspondent Steve Osunsami will report from Memphis on Friday, and the “World News” Webcast will feature archival footage from April 4, 1968, ABC spokeswoman Natalie J. Raab said. On Friday’s “Good Morning America,” Claire Shipman, in Memphis, will examine the day, King’s legacy, and his impact on the civil rights movement and politics, she said. ABC News Radio correspondent Vic Ratner is also scheduled to report from the former Lorraine Motel.

CBS plans pieces on the “CBS Evening News” and “significant coverage” on the “Early Show,” spokeswoman Sandra M. Genelius said. [“Correspondent Dean Reynolds will examine the politics of race partially through the results of a new CBS News poll on how race has played into the 2008 Presidential election,” the network said Thursday in a news release. “Correspondent Bill Whitaker will visit the Memphis, Tenn., Sanitation Department, the same group King was organizing when he was killed in that city. Whitaker will look at how that department and the city of Memphis have changed over the past four decades, as well as local events commemorating the anniversary. Mark Strassmann will speak with Raphael Warnock, a dynamic 38-year-old who is the current pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., where King was a pastor, and examine the similarities and differences between the two men.”

[On Sunday, the “CBS Evening News With Russ Mitchell” plans a “cover story” on the speech Robert F. Kennedy made in Indianapolis on the day the King died, in which he told the crowd that King had been assassinated, and talked of his own family’s being similarly attacked. “The speech is widely credited with preventing riots in Indianapolis at a time when so many other cities were racked by riots in response to the King shooting,” she said.

[“CBS Sunday Morning” plans a piece by correspondent Chip Reid on what’s changed and what hasn’t for blacks and whites in America, Genelius said.]

National Public Radio announced a series of special reports and interviews to air from April 3 to April 11.

“This coverage marks the launch of ‘Echoes of 1968,’ a year-long NPR News series recalling the events of 1968 and their influence on American politics, culture and society in the four decades since,” the network said.

“Highlights of NPR’s coverage include an interview with the Reverend Billy Kyles, who invited Dr. King to Memphis in 1968, about Dr. King’s defining ‘Mountaintop’ speech, during ‘Morning Edition’ on April 3; a profile of the civil rights leader’s political influence, on ‘Day to Day’ on April 4; and a look back at how Dr. King spent his final day, on ‘All Things Considered’ on April 4. Also on April 4: ‘News & Notes’ hears from notable African Americans about how they learned of the tragedy and how it changed their lives, and ‘Tell Me More’ will feature a discussion about Dr. King’s charismatic preaching style.”

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported Monday that live broadcasts were also planned by public broadcasting talk show host Tavis Smiley, as was a live cut-in on CNN’s “Larry King Live” on April 4. “Nationally syndicated radio hosts Tom Joyner . . . and Michael Baisden . . . will join the mix along with international news teams from two worldwide Spanish language networks, BBC World News and news teams from Belgium, Italy, France and The Netherlands.”

In Baltimore, public radio station WYPR began on Monday a five-part documentary series, “’68: The Fire Last Time,” on the political, racial and social turmoil that engulfed Baltimore and 150 other cities and towns. Sunni Khalid, WYPR managing news editor, narrates.

Black Entertainment Television spokeswoman Jeanine Liburd said Thursday, “We are planning to broadcast special briefs live from Memphis throughout the day, including a special package that will lead in a special airing of ‘Boycott,'” the 2001 HBO movie about the Montgomery bus boycott.

TV One, the other major cable network geared toward African Americans, has not announced commemoration coverage.

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Kilpatrick Supporters Plan to “Push Back” at Media

“Members of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick‘s city hall staff, including a cousin, have launched an e-mail campaign to encourage Detroiters to ‘push back’ against what they contend is unfair media coverage of the mayor,” Ben Schmitt, Kathleen Gray and M.L. Elrick reported Tuesday in the Detroit Free Press.

“City officials said the e-mail requests, dubbed Media Watch, were sent from personal accounts during private time. They defended the use of city hall phones and fax machines for residents to respond to the campaign.

“‘We weren’t privy to this e-mail,’ Kilpatrick spokeswoman Denise Tolliver said. ‘This was sent from a personal e-mail account. It’s our job to monitor the press. People call us all the time. I don’t think that’s a misuse of city funds. It’s part of our job.'”

“On Tuesday, Kilpatrick and his former Chief of Staff Christine Beatty were arraigned on multiple perjury, conspiracy, misconduct and obstruction of justice charges. They face a June 9 preliminary examination in Detroit’s 36th District Court,” as a story credited to BlackAmericaWeb.com and the Associated Press explained.

The story said Kilpatrick was picking up financial support from high-profile national business and political leaders to help mount a defense. They included commentator Michael Eric Dyson, who teaches at Georgetown University, and Danny Bakewell, CEO of the Los Angeles Sentinel.

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Some Not Calling Obama on “100 Years” Reference

“Ever since John McCain said at a town hall meeting in January that he could see U.S. troops staying in Iraq for a hundred years, the Democrats have been trying to use the quote to paint the Arizona senator as a dangerous warmonger. And lately, Barack Obama in particular has stepped up his attacks on McCain’s ‘100 years’ notion,” Zachary Roth wrote Tuesday for the Columbia Journalism Review.

“But in doing so, Obama is seriously misleading voters — if not outright lying to them — about exactly what McCain said. And some in the press are failing to call him on it.

“Here’s McCain’s full quote, in context, from back in January:

“Questioner: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years . . .

“McCain: Maybe a hundred. Make it one hundred. We’ve been in South Korea, we’ve been in Japan for sixty years. We’ve been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it’s fine with me. I would hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.

“It’s clear from this that McCain isn’t saying he’d support continuing the war for one hundred years, only that it might be necessary to keep troops there that long. That’s a very different thing. As he says, we’ve had troops in South Korea for over fifty years, but few people think that means we’re still fighting the Korean War.”

The dispute over McCain’s remark was the subject of a piece Wednesday by Brian C. Mooney in the Boston Globe. He wrote, “The presumptive Republican nominee says that his Democratic rivals are distorting his views. He explains that he never favored such a long war, but rather envisioned an open-ended military presence of peacekeepers, similar to US military commitments in Korea and Bosnia and even Japan and Germany.”

Meanwhile, Mark Jurkowitz reported for the Project for Excellence in Journalism that, “For once, the fractious fraternity of talk show hosts was united about something last week — Barack Obama’s ability to put words together.

“According to PEJ’s Talk Show Index for March 17-23, the presidential campaign accounted for an astounding 83% of all the airtime on the cable and talk radio shows examined. (That more than doubled the 39% of the general newshole filled by the campaign.) And last week, the focus on the campaign trail was on the Obama/Wright relationship and the Illinois Senator’s effort to try and explain it,” referring to Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “(A new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found the public has paid more attention to the Wright sermons and the Obama speech than to any other campaign-related events.)”

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“Awesome” Piece on Chicago’s Trinity Church

 

“Our man Kelefa Sanneh, New York Times pop music critic turned intrepid New Yorker reporter, just unveiled his first article for the magazine,” Neal Ungerleider wrote for MediaBistro’s FishBowl NY Web site.

“In a word, it’s awesome. Sanneh just delivered a piece on Barack Obama‘s controversial Trinity United Church of Christ. Here’s a sampling:

“‘I have never seen so many white people here in my life!’ It was Good Friday on the South Side of Chicago, at Trinity United Church of Christ, which has been Senator Barack Obama’s church for about twenty years and the most notorious congregation in America for about three and a half weeks. The preacher was in the pulpit, recalling a scene outside the church earlier in the week. He gestured at the reporters who had come to take notes. ‘I hope you’re tithing,’ he said.”

“We’re glad to see Sanneh’s found a home at the New Yorker. The fella’s a killer reporter.”

Meanwhile, WMAQ-TV in Chicago announced it will examine the role of the black church in Chicago with a special program, “Chicago’s Black Churches: The Mission, Message and Music,” airing at 6-6:30 p.m., on Saturday, according to TV Newsday.

“Among the topics covered are the controversy surrounding Barack Obama and his pastor; the new missions that churches are funding abroad; churches with separate businesses that round out their portfolio; the music that keeps Chicago’s black churches on beat; plus profiles of two young ministers running two of the biggest churches in Chicago.

“WMAQ’s Warner Saunders and Marion Brooks will anchor with reports from Renee Ferguson, Art Norman and LeeAnn Trotter.”

Rob Stafford of WMAQ reported that members of Trinity, where Wright once served as a pastor, held a special prayer service Monday night to show support for the retired minister.

“Many church members said they were angry at reporters saying that Wright has been misunderstood,” he reported.

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Short Takes

 
  • “Maurice Jones, the vice president and general manager of The Virginian-Pilot, has been named publisher of the newspaper, effective April 14,” the Norfolk, Va.-based newspaper announced Wednesday. “Unlike many newspaper executives, Jones came to the industry in mid-career after serving as a lawyer for the firm of Hunton & Williams and commissioner of Virginia’s Social Services Department under former Gov. Mark Warner. Jones was the valedictorian of his graduating class at Hampden-Sydney College. He was named a Rhodes Scholar and later received a law degree from the University of Virginia.” The newspaper noted that, “In January, Landmark officials announced they would explore selling all of the company’s properties, including The Pilot and The Weather Channel, based in Atlanta.”
  • Boston Globe Metro columnist Adrian Walker, who was arrested last month and accused of operating under the influence while speeding and driving a company vehicle, has had his speeding and two minor charges dismissed, with the Dorchester, Mass., District Court continuing the “under the influence” charge for a year, meaning it will be dropped if Walker has no further arrests. The columnist told Journal-isms he would not comment on the March 24 disposition of the case, “other than to say I have no immediate plans to write about it.”
  • “The former editor of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ official newspaper is suing the tribe for forcing him out of his job after he wrote articles critical of Principal Chief Michell Hicks,” Jon Ostendorff wrote Monday in the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times. “Joseph Martin was editor of the Cherokee One Feather, a newspaper owned by the tribal government, for 11 years before he was transferred in November to operations manager of the tribe’s child day care operation. He refused to take the transfer and the tribe fired him.”
  • “Edward Schumacher-Matos, The Miami Herald’s ombudsman, has been named Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor for Latin American Studies at the Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies,” Editor & Publisher reported on Tuesday. “Schumacher-Matos was the founding editor and associate publisher of The Wall Street Journal Americas. Four years ago he founded the Rumbo chain of Spanish-language newspapers in four Texas markets.”
  • After launching a campaign against human rights violations in China that portrayed the Olympic rings transformed into handcuffs, Reporters Without Borders has produced a 62-second animated film produced for TV, Internet and cinema, the organization announced. It “will be offered to news programmes and to websites that make videos available online. Based on a Reporters Without Borders script and made by Polish production company Platige Image, this animated film uses caricature to condemn the climate in which these Olympic Games are being prepared in China and the violence of the repression being carried out by the Chinese government.”
  • “‘Taxi to the Dark Side,’ a horrifying documentary about an Afghani cabbie who died in U.S. military custody, added a Peabody to its list of awards, which already included an Oscar. ‘Taxi’ raised disturbing questions about interrogation techniques and U.S. wartime policies,” the University of Georgia`s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication announced on Tuesday.
  • “TXA21’s ‘Positively Texas,’ hosted by Iola Johnson, is being dropped as part of a wave of layoffs and budget cuts,” Dallas-based television writer Ed Bark wrote Monday in his blog. In the 1970s, Johnson made history at WFAA-TV as the Dallas-Fort Worth market’s first black woman anchor. “Positively Texas” aired at 6:30 a.m. Sundays.
  • The unbylined stories in the New York Times on the Zimbabwe election were written by Barry Bearak, the Times disclosed. ‘”We withheld Barry Bearak’s name at his request as a security precaution,” Diane McNulty, Times executive director of community affairs and media relations, told Editor & Publisher in an e-mail, according to E&P. “But as more Western journalists used their bylines and as the story grew more prominent, Barry felt it was time to use his byline, which appeared in the latest editions of the newspaper.” [April 3 update: Bearak has been arrested, according to Agence France-Presse.]
  • “Despite his resignation Monday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson still hasn’t alienated the affections of Sen. David Vitter and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin,” Lolis Eric Elie wrote Wednesday in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “Two Democratic U.S. senators, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Patty Murray of Washington, had called for Jackson’s resignation in light of the secretary’s refusal to answer questions put to him by a Senate committee regarding allegations of corruption at HUD. Vitter has offered fairly tepid support for investigations into Jackson’s dealings. Nagin has made no public call for a thorough look at allegations that Jackson tried to steer contracts to his cronies.” In the Philadelphia Daily News, Elmer Smith wrote about Jackson’s Philadelphia connection.
  • “The Senate Commerce Committee postponed an April 2 hearing at which it had planned to consider a resolution to block the Federal Communications Commission’s decision in December to loosen the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban,” John Eggerton reported for Broadcasting & Cable. The hearing was rescheduled for April 24 at 10 a.m.

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