Articles Feature

ABC ‘Benches’ T.J. Holmes, Amy Robach

by richard02586

Will ‘Think and Work Through’ Co-Anchors’ Affair

Telling Uplifting Stories — Grim Ones, Too:

Slave-Like Conditions Harvesting Sugar
Why Are People Still Dying in the Desert?
Mining for Gold, Even Though It’s Killing Them
A Grateful Community Thought He Had Died
After 40 Years, Love Triumphs Over Bigotry

Homepage photo credit: ABC News

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“‘These decisions are not easy, they are not knee jerk, but they are necessary for the brand and for our priority which, you guys know, are all of is — the people here at ABC,” ABC News President Kim Godwin said of T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach. (Credit: ABC/Heidi Gutman)

Will ‘Think and Work Through’ Co-Anchors’ Affair

“ABC News has temporarily benched GMA3 co-anchors T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach while the network and president Kim Godwin figure out what the next steps should be in the wake of a tabloid report revealing a personal relationship between the anchors,” Alex Weprin reported Monday for The Hollywood Reporter.

“Godwin announced the move on ABC’s Monday morning editorial call.

“ ‘I want to say that while the relationship is not a violation of company policy, I really have taken the last few days to think about and work through what I think is best for the ABC News organization,’ Godwin (pictured) said, per a source who was on the call. ‘These decisions are not easy, they are not knee jerk, but they are necessary for the brand and for our priority which, you guys know, are all of is — the people here at ABC.’ ”

Peter Sblendorio added in the Daily News in New York, “Robach, 49, and Holmes, 45, didn’t break any network rules, but the public attention surrounding them caused ‘an internal and external disruption,‘ the Daily News confirmed.”

In The New York Times, John Koblin and Michael M. Grynbaum wrote, “ ‘I’m asking that we stop whispering about it in the hallways,’ Ms. Godwin said of the furor surrounding the hosts’ relationship, according to two people who listened to the call.”

[Jeremy Barr completed the quote in The Washington Post, “You know, we can’t operate with gossip, and speculation and rumors,” she said. “We need to stay focused on the work.”]

Weprin continued, “Godwin added that Gio Benitez and Stephanie Ramos will be anchoring the third hour of Good Morning America for now. She also added that she won’t address the matter on the call again until there is more to be said.

“Holmes has been with ABC News since 2014, and has co-anchored GMA3 since 2020 Robach joined ABC News in 2012, and also joined GMA3 in 2020.

“The co-anchors were revealed to be in a relationship by The Daily Mail earlier this month, surprising many inside ABC News. Both Holmes and Robach are married, though they have each separated from their partners.

“The relationship has become the hot topic of the tabloids, from Page Six to People, with the original Daily Mail paparazzi photos making the rounds across the internet.

The New York Post and its Page Six column were among the tabloids leaping on the story.

“Holmes and Robach anchored GMA3 after the story came out (without addressing it), but Godwin’s decision suggests that ABC is thinking about a more formal course of action in response to the unexpected disclosure. . . . “

The case is another illustrating the dynamics when Blacks are in executive positions and feel they must take action against high-profile Black employees. Holmes is Black, Robach is white.

In December 2020, at MSNBC, Rashida Jones (pictured) was named the first Black journalist to head a mainstream network or a news division, followed in April with Godwin named the first Black executive to run a broadcast-network news operation.

In February, Godwin suspended co-host Whoopi Goldberg from “The View” for two weeks after she said repeatedly during an episode of the show that aired on Monday that the Holocaust was not about race, comments that come at a time of rising antisemitism globally. She later apologized,” as Jenny Gross and Neil Vigdor reported at the time for The New York Times.

“In the episode, Ms. Goldberg said the Holocaust was about ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ and ‘not about race.’ When one of her co-hosts challenged that assertion, saying the Holocaust was driven by white supremacy, Ms. Goldberg said, ‘But these are two white groups of people.’ ”

Last month, MSNBC announced it was not renewing the contract of Tiffany Cross, the MSNBC weekend host who pledged to be “an authentic Black voice” on her Saturday commentary program. She was told to leave immediately.

The MSNBC decision came just two weeks after Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that Cross was inciting a “race war” against white people in the United States.

Karen Attiah wrote Friday in the Washington Post, “The situation is all the more disheartening considering that MSNBC’s current president is a Black woman, Rashida Jones. We are made to hope and believe that representation at the upper ranks will understand and support our voices. Sadly, this is not always the case.”

Telling Uplifting Stories — Grim Ones, Too

Workers in the Dominican Republic preparing Central Romana’s fields for the upcoming sugar crop. (Credit: Pedro Farias-Nardi)

Slave-Like Conditions Harvesting Sugar

“In 1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked that when his fellow New Englanders spooned sugar into their tea or savored their cake, ‘no one tasted blood’ in the treats,” Andrew Delbanco recalled in June for the New York Review of Books.

On Saturday, the investigative reporting program Reveal announced it had revisited its investigation with Mother Jones “that follows a supply chain of millions of pounds of sugar from the cane fields of the Dominican Republic to our kitchens. We look at the toll it is taking on the people, mostly Haitian migrants, who harvest some of that sugar and the powerful corporation, Central Romana, that owns the vast sugar plantations.

“And since our investigation was first released in September 2021, there has been a breakthrough in the story.”

The program, from the Center for Investigative Reporting, told listeners, “Sugar is a big part of Americans’ daily diet, but we rarely ask where that sweet cane comes from.” In the 21st century, it was reporting on a system that borders on slavery.  

“In November, the United States announced that it will block all imports of raw sugar from one of those sources: the cane fields owned by the Central Romana Corp. in the Dominican Republic. U.S. Customs and Border Protection cited labor abuses in its decision. Sugar from Central Romana feeds into the supply chains of major U.S. brands, including Domino and Hershey. 

“The federal government’s action follows a two-year investigation by Reveal and Mother Jones. Reporters Sandy Tolan and Euclides Cordero Nuel visited Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic who do the backbreaking work of cutting sugarcane for little pay. Central Romana is the Dominican Republic’s largest private employer and has strong links to two powerful Florida businessmen, Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul.

“The reporters speak to workers who have no access to government pensions, so they’re forced to work in the fields into their 80s for as little as $3 a day. In the 1990s, Tolan reported on human trafficking and child labor in the Dominican sugar industry. Conditions improved following pressure on the government from local activists, human rights groups and the U.S. Labor Department. But major problems have persisted.  

“After Reveal’s story first aired in fall 2021, Congress took action. Fifteen members of the House Ways and Means Committee called on federal agencies to formulate a plan to address what they called the ‘slave-like conditions’ in the Dominican cane fields. Central Romana also took action: It bulldozed one of the worker camps our reporters visited, claiming it was part of an improvement program. Residents say that with very little warning, they were told to pack up their lives. Central Romana denies the U.S. government’s recent findings that its cane cutters are working under forced labor conditions.”

Why Are People Still Dying in the Desert?

“I used to say I was ‘obsessed’ with the horror of people, migrants and refugees, dying in the desert,” writes Maria Hinojosa, creator of public radio’s “Latino USA.” “But when I spoke with Francisco Cantú, who worked as a Border Patrol agent for four years, he offered another perspective.

“ ‘I think we should be haunted by these people. It should make us emotional. It should be hard to talk about it, even if you’re not somebody who has seen the body or known the name of somebody lost out there,’ he said.

“Haunted. Not obsessed.

“And, dear reader, I need you to be haunted, too.

“In 2021, Futuro Unidad Hinojosa launched its investigative unit, ‘Futuro Investigates.’ For our inaugural project, we decided to investigate the increasing number of migrant and refugee deaths taking place along the U.S.-Mexico border and the policies that have created the conditions for them. What we uncovered turned out to be more horrible than we had imagined.

“It’s not just the prevention-through-deterrence policies, which both Republicans and Democrats have supported, that have pushed people to cross through the most dangerous parts of the desert that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border.

“It’s that the Border Patrol has embraced an enforcement strategy that intentionally leads to more deaths. And the agents who enact these strategies do so while claiming that they are helping to ‘save’ lives.”

“In this year-long investigation from Futuro Investigates, we dig into how the U.S. government and Border Patrol’s decades-long ‘prevention through deterrence’ policies have knowingly created a deadly funnel, pushing migrants attempting to cross from Mexico to the U.S. into the deadliest terrain in the country, including the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona,” Hinojosa, Julieta Martinelli and Roxanne Scott reported Friday for “Latino USA.”

(Credit: Global Press Journal/YouTube)

Mining for Gold, Even Though It’s Killing Them

“The young men brace for the first shock of cold water as they enter the river, easing their way into another day of illegal gold mining,” the Global Press Journal reported from Mutare, Zimbabwe, on Nov. 7. The Washington-based Global Press says it builds “independent news bureaus, staffed by local, women reporters, in some of the world’s least-covered places.”

Its report continues, “David Mauta and Wisdom Nyakurima, both 18, stand knee-deep in the Odzi River near the eastern Zimbabwe mining city of Mutare and shovel gravel onto a woven mat. They hinge their hopes on finding flakes of shiny gold. But it’s another metal whose dangers they don’t recognize that may have a more lasting impact.

“Every day, they touch and breathe mercury, a silverly chemical element that carries deadly implications. The toxic liquid metal is key to their gold-mining efforts, as is the government, which purchases their gold even as officials vow to eliminate mercury’s use.

“The young men are unregistered artisanal miners, freelance workers who don’t have a license to operate. They sift through rocks in the river and dump beads of mercury over the sediment, which clings to gold. Then they light a match, using the flame to separate the mercury from the gold, a process that shoots toxic vapors into the air.

“Inhaling these fumes or regular contact with mercury can each have devastating effects on the nervous system and prove fatal, according to the World Health Organization. The chemical quietly invades the body and leads to brain damage, developmental disorders in infants and young children, and irreparable kidney damage. Elemental mercury, the liquid form, can travel through the air and settle on land or in water, making it a pernicious threat to people and animals.

“Miners from Indonesia to Peru have turned to mercury for decades to extract prized gold. So much so that the United Nations Environment Programme says artisanal and small-scale gold miners make up the biggest source of mercury pollution in the world. It’s one of the few chemicals considered so detrimental that more than 100 countries have agreed to end its use. . . .”

Linda Mujuru (pictured, above), an investigative journalist with Global Press Journal, discussed the issue Nov. 25 on the “PBS NewsHour.”

Correspondent Nick Shifrin asked Mujuru about the miners. “What do they tell you when you tell them that it’s dangerous?“

Mujuru replied, “Some of them were grateful for this information. But they indicated that, since now they knew of the dangers . . . posed by mercury in the mining processes, they were not going to stop mining. The reason why is that they have no alternatives in terms of survival.”

A Grateful Community Thought He Had Died

“I was sitting at my desk at my office in Downtown Oakland,” Tammerlin Drummond (pictured, below), then with the Bay Area News Group, explains. “My editor walks over and says, ‘Do you know somebody named Willie?’ I said, ‘Willie?’ She said, ‘Yeah, this guy named Willie. He used to be a salesman up at Lake Merritt.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I don’t know him.’

“She said, ‘Well, he apparently died, there’s this big memorial that people have erected to him up at the lake. Can you go with the photographer and check it out?’ So, I jumped in my car and went up to the lake and I saw all of these pictures of Willie who was this African American man. I figured maybe he was, I don’t know, 60-ish, Kind of scraggly beard. And I realized this is the guy that I used to see when I was walking the lake but I had never actually spoken to him, but I remembered him. . . .”

Thus began a Thanksgiving weekend story on public radio’s “Snap Judgment.” “This week on ‘Snap,’ when a pillar of the community goes missing, the people rally to show their love. But maybe our hero… is still alive?,” the announcer says.

It’s a story Drummond told in the East Bay Times in 2016. The headlines outline the tale. First, “Death of Lake Merritt mystery man prompts unusual outpouring,” from Sept. 2, and then “Oakland mystery: Lake Merritt’s Willie not dead but recovering from brutal assault” from Sept.6, updated both times.

A highlight: “I [kind] of sidle up to the bed and pull up a chair and sit down. I said, ‘Hi, Willie. I’m Tammerlin Drummond. I’m a reporter with the East Bay Times. I am so surprised to find you here. Everybody thinks you’re dead.’ And I pulled out my phone because I had taken some pictures from the memorial and I started showing him the pictures of the poems and the flowers and all these things, and he just burst into tears. . . .”

The headline, “An interracial couple was pressured to break up. Four decades later, they rekindled their romance and got married.”

After 40 Years, Love Triumphs Over Bigotry

“For most of her adult life, 69-year-old Jeanne Gustavson has suffered from chronic regret for breaking up with her college sweetheart,“ Steve Hartman reported on his “On the Road” segment Friday on the “CBS Evening News.”

” ‘I can’t turn back the clock. I wish I could,’ Gustavson told CBS News. ‘I would have married him.’

“Gustavson met her college sweetheart, Steve Watts, in German club at Loyola University in Chicago. She said he would have made the perfect husband — if only he’d been White.

” ‘My mother was absolutely livid,’ she said. ‘What didn’t she say? How could I disgrace the family? It was not pretty.’

“Partly because of those pressures, Gustavson broke up with her boyfriend and they never saw each other again — until 2021, when she tracked him down at a Chicago nursing home.

” ‘What I found was sort of a broken man,’ she said.

“Like Gustavson, Watts was divorced with no kids. But life for him had been much harder. He had been homeless, suffered two strokes and was almost unrecognizable the day Gustavson walked back into his life.

” ‘But he’s still the wonderful, gorgeous man that I knew,’ Gustavson said. . . .”

Stefano Esposito told the story as he covered the wedding Oct. 16 for the Chicago Sun-Times.

“Tina Mattern, Gustavson’s close friend and neighbor, was still trying to wrap her mind around the ‘miracle’ love story,” Esposito wrote.

“ ‘Miracle is a word that people throw around, but this was a miracle,’ said Mattern, recalling how Gustavson found Watts living without hope in a nursing home. ‘Every day, you lie there thinking, “God, just take me home.” And then one day, the love of your life, that you haven’t seen in [42] years, walks in and she says, ‘Would you come home with me?’” . . .

“What would Gustavson’s mother have made of the wedding celebration? It’s a question Gustavson has been asked many times.

“She has forgiven her mom. Gustavson, a devout Catholic, even asked her mother, “Please, please can you hold off on the bad weather in Oregon?”

“It was sunny and in the mid-80s Saturday.

” ‘With her being in heaven or wherever she is on the other side, I think she understands now,’ Gustavson said.

“Before she could say any more, Watts interrupted, ‘If she doesn’t understand — ‘

“Watts made a loud raspberry sound. Then, the newlyweds both burst into laughter.”

 

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