Maynard Institute archives

Articulating a “True Fact” About Race

by richard0542


credit: New York Times


Piece on “Well-Meaning” Term Strikes Chord


Lynette Clemetson, the writer, says, “I have received more mail than I ever have on any story — easily over 100” messages came to her from the Lynette Clemetsonpaper’s general e-mail address.


The editor, Katy Roberts, says, “I have to say I was proud to run that piece,” one unlike any she has ever placed in her section. “It makes journalism worthwhile. I felt very strongly about it.”


Clemetson, who works in the New York Times Washington Bureau, and Roberts, editor of the Times’ Sunday Week in Review section, were talking about “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well,” Clemetson’s Sunday essay that began:


“Senator Joseph R. Biden’s characterization of his fellow Democratic presidential contender Senator Barack Obama as ‘the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy’ was so painfully clumsy that it nearly warranted pity.








 


 


“There are not enough column inches on this page to parse interpretations of each of Mr. Biden’s chosen adjectives. But among his string of loaded words, one is so pervasive — and is generally used and viewed so differently by blacks and whites — that it calls out for a national chat, perhaps a national therapy session.


“It is amazing that this still requires clarification, but here it is. Black people get a little testy when white people call them ‘articulate.'”


Katy RobertsIn a piece that seemed to leap off the page, Clemetson went on to quote Michael Eric Dyson, radio host, author and professor of humanities at the University of Pennsylvania; Anna Perez, former communications counselor for Condoleezza Rice; Reginald Hudlin, president of entertainment for Black Entertainment Television; Tricia Rose, professor of Africana studies at Brown University; Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University; William E. Kennard, a managing director of the Carlyle Group and a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; and comedian and actor D. L. Hughley.








 


 


“Al Sharpton is incredibly articulate,” Rose said in the piece. “But because he speaks with a cadence and style that is firmly rooted in black rhetorical tradition you will rarely hear white people refer to him as articulate.” Kennard said he noticed during his days at a Washington law firm that prospective black hires were always called “articulate and poised,” adjectives never applied to whites. And so it went.


Clemetson contributed her own experience in the Times’ Washington bureau: “My colleague Rachel Swarns and I chuckle wearily about the number of times we have finished interviews or casual conversations with people — always white, more often male — only to have the person end the meeting with some version of the statement, ‘something about you reminds me of Condoleezza Rice.”


Of the responses from readers, maybe 20 percent were “yea, hooray, thank you for reporting that,” Clemetson told Journal-isms. Eighty percent, she said, “fell into a large category of agree, disagreeable or confused.” Many said, “how can you call me a racist — I’m a liberal; why can’t a compliment be a compliment?” Clemetson said. In responding, “I wanted to be clear — no one in the article called people racist. What makes it different is that it is not racism; it’s more subtle than that. It was likened to the vestiges of racism.”


Other readers called Clemetson a part of the “black elite” who ride around in limousines and have “no contact with real black people.”


“In their contact, there is a whole generation of black people who are inarticulate,” Clemetson said. “What do you do about this whole generation of kids who go out of their way to be inarticulate?” one asked.


“While I understand their point, they don’t base their expectations about Hillary Clinton on what they see on television about Anna Nicole Smith,” Clemetson said. And as for being in the black elite, “I drive a beat-up Honda Civic, and the last time I was in a limousine was at my grandmother’s funeral.”


The point was simply to think before using the word, Clemetson said.


Roberts said she responded with an “absolutely yes!” when Clemetson proposed the piece after Biden’s comment. “Let’s drive a stake through the heart of this thing,” was Roberts’ sentiment. Copy editors should be breaking open a bottle of champagne, Roberts said, because at the Times, editors have consistently had to remove the word from the copy of reporters who were ignorant of its implications when writing about African Americans.


The late editor of the New York Post, Jerry Nachman, used to talk about “true facts,” said Roberts, who has been an editor in various departments at the Times for 25 years, and editor of the Week in Review since 2003. “This fell into the category of true fact. There was no question here.” And “the piece was brilliantly done.”



Previously:



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A Super Event for Indianapolis and Its Daily Paper


The Super Bowl figures are in, and for the Indianapolis Star, there are more reasons to celebrate. On Sunday, the day of the Indianapolis Colts victory over the Chicago Bears, the newspaper’s Web site garnered 3.3 million page views. The figure is normally 1.2 million to 1.4 million, Dennis Ryerson, the paper’s editor, told Journal-isms.


The newspaper posted a video of fans celebrating in the streets, and that posting had garnered 17,500 page views on Tuesday. The Star celebrated by hanging a five-story replica of its Super Bowl front page from the front of the Star building. The paper had published six Super Bowl special sections over the last few weeks.


“There is a tight sense of community,” Ryerson told Journal-isms. “We’re not as big as Chicago. We’re not as big as New York, or even St. Louis,” he said of the Indianapolis metro area and its 1.7 million people. But residents are saying, “our team can play with the best of them,” he said.


The Star sent 16 people to Miami for the game, but lack of diversity, Ryerson acknowledged, is the “huge deficit on our sports staff.” He could count one African American reporter, referring to NBA writer Mike Wells, and thus the Star had no black perspective on Tony Dungy’s historic achievement as the first African American coach to win a Super Bowl.


“We’ve not had hires” in that section. “It’s just been disappointing,” Ryerson said, adding that there are still no openings there.


However, the editor said, the paper was conscious of diversity in its selection of photographs, rejecting a photo for the front page that showed Colts quarterback Peyton Manning holding up his Most Valuable Player trophy because Dungy’s back was to the camera, for example. Another photo was used showing both men in order to give Dungy’s milestone its due.








 


 


Meanwhile, Johnson Publishing Co. held up sending the Feb. 19 edition of Jet to the printer so it could feature a cover photograph of Dungy and Bears coach Lovie Smith, who, like Dungy, is African American. “Since it was such a historic event, we had four journalists at the game (a reporter and photographer from Ebony, and a similar team from Jet),” editorial director Bryan Monroe told Journal-isms. The issue hits newsstands Monday. In a first, Monroe said, the Ebony/Jet Web site also covered the Super Bowl events.


The Indianapolis Recorder, which calls itself “Indiana’s Greatest Weekly Newspaper” and the nation’s third oldest black news publication, published a four-page section on the Super Bowl last Friday, and partnered with a T-shirt company to produce a shirt featuring a mock front page of the Recorder trumpeting the “Super Colts.” However, editor Shannon Williams said, publishing an edition after the game “wasn’t an option that we explored,” nor has it updated its Web site. Still the paper, which claims a circulation of more than 20,000, plans to report on the victory in the edition to be published on Friday, Williams said.


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Will Black Reporters Get More Play for ’08 Race?


“‘There’s kind of a stable of people who do punditry that get called on regularly,’ said Michael Fletcher, a White House correspondent for The Washington Post who said he seldom gets calls to talk about presidential politics on the major network shows,” Jackie Jones wrote Wednesday on BlackAmericaWeb.com.


Her story was headlined, “Will More Black Reporters, Pundits Get Play in ’08 Campaign Coverage? Gwen Ifill Hopes So.”


“Even The Politico, a new print and online publication launched last month dedicated to covering congressional and presidential politics and the business of Washington lobbying, announced with great fanfare that it hired away two high-profile white political reporters from The Post to be editor and executive editor, but mentioned no major steals of black or other reporters of color.


“‘That kind of tells you where we are in this thing,” Fletcher told BlackAmericaWeb.com. . . . “


“Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent on PBS’ ‘News Hour with Jim Lehrer‘ and moderator and managing editor of ‘Washington Week,’ said when it comes to analysis and opinion, “‘there is a lack of people of color on both sides of the line.’ . . .


“‘Why aren’t we there? I don’t know. It’s the same treadmill we’ve always been on,’ Ifill said. ‘Bosses promote and hire people who remind them of themselves, and there aren’t enough of us who are bosses.'”


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News Director Anzio Williams Moves Up 34 Markets








 


 


“Anzio Williams, the top newsroom executive at WDSU-TV in New Orleans, was named news director on Monday at KCRA (Ch. 3) — one week after Dan Weiser resigned from the position,” Sam McManis reported Tuesday in the Sacramento Bee.


The move catapults Williams from the 54th largest television market to the 20th.


“Williams, who will turn 35 this month, is considered something of a news prodigy. While in college at North Carolina A&T, he was the producer of the morning news show at a station in Greensboro, N.C., and two years after graduating, was producing the 6 o’clock news,” McManis wrote.


“Since then, he’s had producing and/or news directing stints in Cincinnati, Miami and Orlando before his current stop in New Orleans.


“There, he guided the station through its Hurricane Katrina coverage, for which the station won a regional Emmy Award. And he started a popular 30-minute, late-night news and public affairs program, ‘6 on Your Side Live,’ which the Columbia Journalism Review praised for being ‘pugnacious’ in holding public officials accountable.”


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Bush Proposes Steep Cut in CPB Funding


“President Bush is reopening the fight over government support of public television, unveiling a 2007 government fiscal year budget that would cut federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by nearly 25 percent,” Ira Teinowitz reported Monday in Broadcasting & Cable.


“There was some confusion on how to tally the exact cut, but public TV and congressional sources said at least $114 million of the $460 million CPB budget for the fiscal year that starts in October would be cut. The Association of Public Television Stations said the total impact could be $145 million when cuts in related programs are added, including a program to upgrade radio station satellite facilities.


“‘It’s more of the same,’ said John Lawson, president and CEO of the Association of Public Television Stations, noting previous requests to cut funding for public TV, most of which were overturned by Congress.”


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Rumbo Experience Called Cautionary Tale


The Spanish-language publication Rumbo should “serve as a cautionary tale for the newspaper business on many levels,” Mark Fitzgerald wrote in Editor & Publisher. “It’s a story not only of the glittering potential of the Latino market for print, but also the real difficulties and limitations of that market. It also reveals the continuing caution and sometimes ignorance of national advertisers, who many suppose wrongly will leap at any opportunity to tap into the Hispanic market.”


“. . . Rumbo launched with a bang in 2004, rapidly rolling out in four Texas markets a strikingly good-looking tabloid designed by the acclaimed Roger Black, helmed by the Colombian-born Schumacher Matos who was founding editor of The Wall Street Journal Americas, and marketed by a sophisticated and creative cast of newspaper veterans, experts on Latino audiences, and guerrilla marketers.


“But a couple of weeks ago, Meximerica Media simultaneously announced that Schumacher Matos was stepping down as chairman and CEO, and that the Rumbo papers — which had previously gone free, then abandoned the Austin market and cut its frequency to thrice-weekly from five times a week and knocked the Rio Grande Valley paper to a weekly — would now publish as weeklies in Houston and San Antonio, as well.”


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2 Cable Outlets Offer Missing Perspectives


“Have you been watching Al Jazeera English? What about France 24?” asked Brian Montopoli Wednesday on his CBS Public Eye blog.


“Yeah, didn’t think so.


“The cable news networks, after all, are hard to track down here in the U.S.: The former is available to most of us only online, and the latter runs in only a few U.S. markets.


“That’s a shame, according to Newslab’s Deborah Potter, who argues that the networks offer stories and perspectives one can’t find in American media.


“‘Newscasts on Al Jazeera English are dominated by coverage of the Middle East and Muslims. AJE covers stories that others ignore, and gives the stories everyone else covers much more time,’ she writes. Potter cites packages on Muslim refugees in Bangladesh and women opposing the enforcement of Sharia law in Indonesia as examples.


“As for France 24, which seeks to ‘convey the values of France throughout the world,’ Potter notes that it offers ‘more stories from Africa and lots of serious talk about issues like whether Turkey should be allowed to join the European Union.’ That’s not stuff you see much on the U.S. news networks.”


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“Journalist” Smiley’s Symposium Airing on C-SPAN


Although Tavis Smiley, the talk-show host, activist and author, has said on more than one occasion that he does not consider himself a journalist, the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., introduced an interview with Smiley Wednesday by saying, “the 42-year-old has been called ‘arguably the nation’s most influential black journalist.'”


The newspaper interviewed Smiley in connection with his upcoming “State of the Black Union” symposium at nearby Hampton University, selected because of its proximity to Jamestown, Va., which is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the arrival there of English settlers.


C-SPAN announced it will cover the event live starting at 8 a.m. ET on Saturday. This year’s program is entitled “Jamestown America’s 400th Anniversary: The African American Imprint on America.”


Panelists at the opening session, “The Covenant in Action,” include Bruce Gordon, president of the NAACP; historian and author Lerone Bennett, Jr.; the Rev. Al Sharpton; former astronaut Mae Jemison; the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.; Judge Glenda Hatchett; actors and activists Tim Reid and Daphne Maxwell Reid; Richmond Mayor Doug Wilder; author Sonia Sanchez; Black Planet founder Omar Wasow; law professor Charles Ogletree; Cathy Hughes, founder of Radio One; and U.S. Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, D-Minn.


From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m, C-SPAN breaks away for coverage of the formal announcement by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., that he is running for president.


The afternoon session, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., features Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund; Julia Hare of Black Think Tank; Jemison; U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., radio personality Tom Joyner and academician Cornel West.



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Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Commemorated


Wednesday was National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, “At all stages of HIV/AIDS — from infection with HIV to death with AIDS — African Americans are disproportionately affected compared with members of other races and ethnicities.”


Some columnists and media outlet took note:



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Short Takes



  • “The total number of TV households will grow 167 percent for Hispanics through 2050, with an estimated increase of 136 percent in the number of Latinos in TV households,” Nancy Ayala reported Wednesday in Marketing y Medios. “That’s compared to a 66 percent growth among African-American total TV households (an increase of 59 percent of African-Americans in TV households) and 166 percent for Asians (an increase of 155 percent). This was the first time Asian TV households have been estimated in the report” from Nielsen Media Research, she wrote.

  • Andria Hall, a former CNN, Fox News and WCVB-TV Boston news anchor, said she didn’t realize how much negativity there was in her line of work the higher she climbed the corporate ladder, according to Whitney Ross, writing Tuesday in the Marion (Ind.) Chronicle Tribune. “Every level you go, there is a new devil,” Hall said.

  • The “Geraldo At Large” newsmagazine went out with a bang, according to John Clarke Jr., writing Tuesday in Variety. For its final airings the week ending Jan 28, the Geraldo Rivera program earned a 1.7 rating, equaling its highest Nielsen number ever. Since the announcement of its cancellation in early January, ratings rose 21 percent, from 1.4 to 1.7, Clarke wrote.

  • Cecilia Alvear, former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, will be honored by Los Angeles Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky on Feb. 13 for her 30 years of service to broadcast journalism and to the city of Los Angeles. Alvear, who recently retired, was the first Latina producer for NBC News, NAHJ reported on Tuesday.

  • “CNN’s Rick Sanchez — of Miami WSVN fame — got a proposal of a lifetime Sunday from Oscar-winning Hollywood hottie Charlize Theron,” Frances Robles wrote Tuesday in the Miami Herald. “During an interview to discuss her new documentary about Cuban rappers, ‘East of Havana,’ the South African actor looked right at the camera and said: `I want to make out with you right now.’ But her shocking proclamation was not so much a come-on as a ploy to turn the corner on an interview that was going downhill fast. When the Cuban American Sanchez asked about the lack of freedom on the island, Theron slammed what she said was the lack of freedom in the United States.”

A survey conducted across 17 sub-Saharan countries shows a massive proliferation of media during the last five years, especially in radio and print. But despite this growth, the report says that the sector still faces professional, technical and ethical challenges and low management standards. “The survey, born out of the 2005 Commission of Africa and published by the BBC World Service Trust in Nairobi, Kenya, also cites the insufficiency of media training institutions, media practitioners’ low salaries, inadequate funding and governments’ muzzling of the media as key barriers to press development, according to Issa Sikiti da Silva, writing on South Africa’s bizcommunity.com.

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