A Story of Hip-Hop and Revival

• N.Y. Post Chimp Cartoon Draws Outrage


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  TV Executive Accused of Beheading His Wife

  
  

  

  
  

   

  
  

  L. Londell McMillan tells the New York Post how Barack Obama has inspired him. The Source magazine publisher quoted Obama in the publication’s latest editorial.

  
  

  The Source Is Profanity-Free, Solvent, Profitable

  
  

  With no “n” words leaping off the page, and no photos of gangstas, pimps or weapons, the Source – the original hip-hop magazine – is under new ownership.

  
  

  And if you don’t believe it, the magazine now makes the declaration prominently on its cover. In the March issue, a full-page house ad proclaims “A New Era” and a logo, “Celebrating 20 years,” and an editorial quotes President Obama’s inaugural address:

  
  

  “What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm to the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”

  
  

  The editorial continues, “The Source readily accepts this duty and challenge as it echoes the principles of our new management team.”

  
  

  What’s going on? Folio magazine reported on Friday, “Northstar Source Group, a shareholder in pioneering hip-hop magazine the Source, has purchased a $3.75 million debt obligation and the remaining stock from a major investor in the magazine, making it the majority owner of the company.

  
  

  “Northstar is led by media and entertainment attorney L. Londell McMillan. . . . “

  
  

  “The logic here was simply to reduce the Source’s debt burden, increase retained earnings for the growth of the business, avoid sale of any important content and assets that are all integral parts of the new media vision and business plan of new management,” McMillan wrote in an e-mail to Folio.

  
  

  “This debt cancellation makes the Source the most financially attractive property in hip-hop and popular culture because it is now debt free and profitable.”

  
  

  As a lawyer, McMillan has counted Stevie Wonder, Prince, Lil’ Kim, Michael Jackson and Spike Lee as clients. But he also appears to be a businessman with a purpose.

  
  

  “As a law student at New York University, he considered becoming a civil rights attorney but decided that his humanitarian aims could be achieved by working for parity in the business world,” according to a 2001 profile by Crain’s New York Business, in which, at 34, he was featured as one of its under-40 up-and-comers.

  
  

  “One of the firms he started, NorthStar Business Enterprises, “aims to form alliances between black entrepreneurs and mainstream businesses, such as a new venture between FUBU Records and Universal,” the profile said. “He eventually plans to be in the business of buying and selling companies, following in the footsteps of Reginald Lewis and Ron Perelman, role models whom he ranks right up there with Malcolm X.” The references are to investors associated with the word “billion.”

  
  

  McMillan was also an enthusastic backer of Obama, and wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about why he put the then-Democratic nominee on the Source’s cover. He also testified to his admiration in a New York Post video.

  
  

  McMillan and co-publisher Jeffrey Scott, an investment banker, purchased the Source late last year through the North Star Group and Black Enterprise/Greenwich Street, respectively, as Nekesa Mumbi Moody reported last year for the Associated Press.

  
  

  The Source had run through a series of editors, had financial problems and suffered a decline under the ownership of its longtime leaders David Mays and Raymond “Benzino” Scott; the pair were fired in 2006 amid sexual harassment charges. When the magazine filed for bankruptcy, it was millions of dollars in debt, as Moody reported.

  
  

  Last month, the New York Times reported the magazine’s announcement that it would no longer take what McMillan called “booty ads,” for pornographic films, pornographic Web sites or escort services. They had been a mainstay for the Source – more than half the ads in the magazine at times, McMillan said.

  
  

  Boasting “20+ pages of NBA All-Stars,” “Fashion’s A-List,” an interview with the NBA’s Carmelo Anthony and a feature on the Consumer Electronics Show, the new Source looks as if it could be a hip-hop version of GQ, Esquire or any number of mainstream periodicals.

  
  

  “McMillan said during the past few years, the magazine had focused so much on rap, it had excluded other reader interests,” Moody’s story said.

  
  

  “It left off so much of what is the key ingredients of hip-hop and lifestyle now . . . which is lifestyle, fashion, online, new media, international aspects of how people embrace content,” McMillan told the AP writer.

  
  

  Still, the magazine hasn’t transformed itself completely – or to everyone’s satisfaction.

  
  

  “While The Source at its pinnacle may have at times been immature and rebellious, so is the culture of Hip Hop and hence why its readers loved it so much,” a poster named Juan wrote on the site Highbrid Nation 2.0. “It was street and honest and at times vulgar but it encapsulated the essence of hip hop. The direction that Scott and McMillian hope to take the magazine is a reflection of what the older black generations hope or wished hip hop would always become and not what it needs to be in order to survive.”

  
  

  Writer Slav Kandyba told Journal-isms, “Objectively speaking, I feel the magazine has improved. However, I feel it is rather unfortunate it had to happen while writers like myself were left out. I know of at least three who are ready to sue – including me. I’m owed $2,500” for work done under previous regimes.

Media Catch Flak Over “Terrorist Training” Story

“Just hours before President Barack Obama took the oath of office, the FBI had word from overseas of a possible terrorist attack,” began a Jan. 28 story on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” “The threat was linked to a Somali hard-line jihadist group called al-Shabab, or The Youth.

“The threat came at a time when the FBI was focused on what looked like a massive recruitment effort of young men from Somali communities in the U.S. As many as two dozen of them have disappeared from Minneapolis alone in the past year.

“Federal agents are worried these young men are training in Somalia and could end up returning to the U.S. to launch a terrorist attack.”

That story ‚Äî and similar ones in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune  (“Recruited for jihad? What happened to Mustafa Ali?”) and Minnesota Public Radio (“The vanishing Somali boys“) ‚Äî prompted a community meeting last week in Minneapolis, painfully re-enacting complaints with the news media that have been voiced over the years across the country.

“There are few relationships on the planet these days worse than the one between the Somali community in the Twin Cities and news organizations which don’t know how to cover it,” Bob Collins reported for Minnesota Public Radio on Thursday. “There’s plenty of fallout following coverage in the last week of rumors/allegations that a Minneapolis mosque had something to do with the disappearance of young Somali men. On Thursday night, the Minnesota News Council sponsored a panel to try to repair the damage that the story, and other coverage of Somalis, has caused.”

“It’s a hole in our organization that we don’t have a lot of Somali people in the newsroom,” said Duchesne Drew of the Star Tribune, explaining his newspaper’s coverage of the story.

Hassan Mohamud of the William Mitchell College of Law said the media “paints the most important institutions ‚Äî which is the mosque ‚Äî in the worst light. Mosques are everything for the Muslim community. . . . They used military language about how we line up. Instead of talking about the positive statements that are made, they talked about my face. . . We cannot trust these people.”

“Without identifying him by name, Mohamud also made clear that Omar Jamal, often quoted by the Twin Cities media as a representative of the Somali community, does not represent the entire community,” the story continued.

“The audience, made up mostly of Somalis, laughed when the Star Tribune’s Drew said Jamal’s name. ‘Omar returns phone calls,’ he said, . . . I hope next time, you guys return phone calls. We’re not not going to run a story because you don’t want to talk. . . . We tried very hard to get as broad a mix of voices as we could.'”

Polk Awards Honor Reporters Who Risked Danger

“Correspondents who risked danger to disclose violence and corruption in Zimbabwe and reporters who unraveled the mysteries of the mortgage crisis and exposed toxic perils in everyday products were among the winners of 14 George Polk Awards for 2008 announced on Monday by Long Island University,” Robert D. McFadden of the New York Times reported on Monday.

Among the winners:

• “Paul F. Salopek of The Chicago Tribune for articles detailing America’s antiterrorist activities, including the rendition of terrorist suspects to secret prisons, in remote and lawless regions around the Horn of Africa, including Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea.


• “Jim Schaefer and M. L. Elrick of The Detroit Free Press won the local reporting Polk for articles revealing that Detroit’s mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, had lied under oath and used $8.4 million in city money to settle a whistle-blower case in exchange for destroying evidence of his affair with an aide. The mayor pleaded guilty to two felonies, resigned and was imprisoned for several months.


• “The Polk for justice reporting was won by Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin for ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ a five-part series in The East Valley Tribune that exposed a campaign by the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, against illegal immigrants in and around Phoenix, including racial profiling, slow responses to emergencies, lax criminal enforcement and other violations.


• “Richard Behar, an investigative journalist, won the award for magazine reporting for ‘China Storms Africa,’ which appeared in the business publication Fast Company. The article detailed China’s drive to invest in sub-Saharan Africa to acquire raw materials for manufacturing.


• “The foreign reporting award went to the husband-and-wife team of Barry Bearak and Celia W. Dugger, the bureau chiefs for The New York Times in Johannesburg, who reported on violence in Zimbabwe surrounding the disputed re-election of the authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe. Mr. Bearak was jailed for four nights for ‘committing journalism,’ but he and Ms. Dugger continued to file reports on a nation torn by repression, corruption, disease and hunger.”

TV Executive Accused of Beheading His Wife

Police say they are “very confident” they have enough evidence to move forward with second degree muder charges against a Buffalo-area man who started a television network to portray Muslims in a better light, and now stands accused of beheading his wife, according to Buffalo station WKBW-TV.

Muzzammil Hassan, 44, is accused of killing 37-year old Aasiya Hassan, who was found slain in the offices of Bridges TV on Friday in suburban Orchard Park shortly after her husband reported her death.

He was arrested hours later.

“The television channel, which Hassan had founded after leaving a job at M&T Bank, had been under financial strain, said Khalid J. Qazi, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Western New York,” Fred O. Williams and Gene Warner reported in the Buffalo News.

Aasiya Hassan had filed for divorce and obtained an order of protection on Feb. 6, barring her husband from their home, police said, according to the News.

It would be a mistake to link an act of domestic violence to the couple’s religion, Khalid J. Qazi, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Western New York, told the News.

Asked if the slaying is being investigated as an honor killing, Orchard Park Police Chief Andrew Benz replied, “It’s safe to say we’re investigating all the angles we can, all the possibilities in conjunction with the district attorney’s office. We’re looking at whatever we might come across,” Fox News Channel reported.

Muzzammil Hassan arrived in the United States from Pakistan in 1979, news reports said.

Black Press Backed on “Window Dressing” Complaint

The Washington Times on Sunday backed members of the black press who complained that they were “window dressing” at President Obama’s news conference last week, as they were seated prominently but were not called upon.

“What purpose does it serve to put black journalists from black-owned media organizations in the front row where they can be seen, if they are not on the list Mr. Obama used when calling upon questioners?” an editorial said. “Mr. Obama’s list ‚Äî that’s what no one has mentioned. President George W. Bush was skewered for having ‘scripted’ press conferences but Mr. Obama got a pass, as usual.

“Mr. Obama should either shelve the Potemkin village approach or, if he wants to maintain civility, let everyone run to a microphone who wants to ask a question and take the questions in order. Apparently that is the only way reporters from black media organizations have any shot at asking the president questions on camera.”

• Eric Easter, ebonyjet.com: Can a Brother Get Some Stimulus?: What the Obama Plan Means for Joe Average


• Jeff Johnson, Huffington Post: Iraq’s Struggle for Civil Rights


• Errol Louis, New York Daily News: The much-maligned Jimmy Carter must be heard on the Mideast


• Myriam Marquez, Miami Herald: American way of life hangs on stimulus plan


• Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com: Blacks in White House Press Corps Needed for More than Color


• Tonya Pendleton, BlackAmericaWeb.com: Swagger Like Barack: How President Obama Has Reset the Rules


• Albor Ruiz, New York Daily News: Passage to Cuba may open with new legislation


• St. Louis American: How will the Stimulus Package Affect African Americans?


• Chuck Todd, NBC’s “First Read”: The White House Bubble


• Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Republicans playing same old politics


• Lynne K. Varner, Seattle Times: For education, here comes the (much-needed) rain of a stimulus bill

Presidents, Black History Observances Get Complicated

As the 44th president, Barack Obama “has necessarily fallen in with a checkered crowd,” William Jelani Cobb wrote in a Presidents Day piece for theRoot.com:

“Washington, who laid out precise numbers of slaves to keep a perfect gender ratio of the Negroes he owned; Jefferson, who crossed out the lines in the Declaration of Independence that condemned the slave trade, copy editing black freedom out of existence. Jackson, who strangled abolitionist efforts and bought a black girl at an auction for his own entertainment; Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed civil rights laws but never relinquished his profane noun of choice for black people. Even Barack’s boy, Abraham Lincoln, was arm-twisted into glory and penned the Emancipation Proclamation as he struggled to exile freed blacks outside America’s borders. It’s this kind of thing that will make your head grow weary of pondering.

“On the day after the election, one of my students announced to me that the question was no longer ‘What to the slave is the 4th of July’ but ‘What to the African American is the 4th of November.’ I didn’t have an answer for her then ‚Äî and I still don’t. But when I figure that one out, I can holler back about the meaning of Presidents Day.”

• Joshua Boak, Chicago Tribune: Linda Johnson Rice: Heir to an African-American publishing legacy looks forward


• George E. Curry, National Newspaper Publishers Association: Preserving Black History Month ‚Äî Part 2


• Wayne Dawkins, politicsincolor.com: Throw the books at ’em: Black history is still relevant; look at what’s new


• Eric Deggans blog, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: Celebrating Black History Month with the Daily Show’s senior black correspondent, Larry Wilmore


• Latina magazine: Black is Beautiful: A Celebration of Afro-Latinas


• Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Why we still need Black History month

  

Some Metaphors You Can Just Put a Cap On

An editorial cartoon by David Cohen, a regular freelancer for the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times, never made it into the newspaper, but it’s caused him grief all the same.

“Most of my cartoons deal with word play,” Cohen explained to Journal-isms on Monday, describing why he chose the images for his Feb. 9 drawing. He posted his work on the Web site of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, of which he is a member, and on that site, cartoons go through no editor.

The cartoon, headlined, “Post-Racial America,” shows a black man holding a gun to a white man in its first panel, saying, “I’m puttin’ a cap in your a–!” In the second panel, President Obama is pointing a finger at the same white man, presumably a corporate executive, saying, “I’m putting a cap on your salary!”

Cohen, 54, was drawn to the word play possibilities of the phrase “put a cap on.”

“I liked the phrase and I’ve heard it used myself, in rap music, and Chris Rock used it on cable TV. When I first heard the words ‘putting a cap on’ something, my main concern was not spelling out the word ‘ass’.”

His point? “The ‘post-racial’ angle is that he is in charge,” Cohen explained, speaking of Obama. “I voted for him. I’m behind him 100 percent.”

The cartoon ended up on the local Web site Ashvegas as well as on other cartoonists’ blogs.

“David is a good guy, doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” said Jim Buchanan, Citizen-Times editorial page editor. He asked Cohen to remove any identification with the newspaper, however, wherever that particular cartoon appeared.

The problem, Cohen said he realized, was that he wasn’t clear enough in the message he was trying to convey.

“Giving him the benefit of the doubt here,” black comic artist Darrin Bell wrote on one cartoonists’ blog, “the moral of the story is simple: If when you’re trying to justify your work you’re more likely to cite Chris Rock, slang and rap than you are Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, and W.E.B. DuBois, you might want to be extra scrupulous with your racial metaphors.”

Payne Says He Was Wrong About Sports Journalism

“I come forth humbly now, as Alex Rodriguez did last week, to declare that where once I was blind ‚Äî I now see the light,” longtime editor and columnist Les Payne, formerly of Newsday, wrote Saturday on his blog.

“In my case, it was about sports reporting. Years ago, as an aggressive newspaper editor, I diverted several young sportswriters into political reporting on the advice that they should put away childish things.

“. . . I felt a lot of pressure back then to increase the ranks of what, deep down, was construed as ‘serious’ journalism. Like A-Rod, I was young. I was stupid. I wanted to enhance socio-political coverage exclusively; and for this narrow-mindedness, I am deeply regretful.

“. . . as much as any sports writer, the work of Bill Rhoden continues to leaven my view of journalism. . . . the Times’ columnist is sustaining a current hot streak in unraveling the complexities of the steroids matter that plagues the major leagues. Along the way, he brings into sharp relief the broader societal issues of truth, fairness and the possibility of reconciliation. ‘Our dual national pastimes ‚Äî Wall Street and Major League Baseball,’ Bill argues, ‘have been slammed into the rocks by ambition and unchecked greed.'”

Rhoden wrote Thursday of the A-Rod steroids scandal, “The only way to close this chapter is for Major League Baseball to go through a deep and intensive soul-searching. It needs to hold its own scaled-down version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings after apartheid was abolished in the early 1990s.”

• William C. Rhoden, New York Times: Focus on Bonds Misses the Big Picture 
  


• Ana Veciana-Suarez, Miami Herald: We can take a lesson from mighty A-Rod’s fall

Short Takes 

• Larry Gross, longtime sports editor for the Chicago Defender, died Wednesday from complications of lung cancer, the Defender reported. He was 59. Gross started at the Defender in 1987 and “covered every possible kind of sporting event for the newspaper, almost all of it” when it was a daily. “He was especially proud of his coverage of prep sports, particularly Chicago Public Schools. He also was a champion for the newspaper’s coverage of Little League baseball.”


• “When I moved to Missoula,” Jodi Rave wrote Sunday in the Missoulian in Montana, “I knew I would be working in the belly of the beast, ground zero for prejudice in one of three states where Native people are the majority minority. The other two states include North Dakota, my home state, and South Dakota, the land of my Lakota relatives at the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. I know these ‘Indian’ states well,” she wrote, posting a vitriolic anti-Indian letter. Rove said she was “not expecting the outpouring of comments from Natives and non-Natives. They all offered thought-provoking, insightful and sometimes funny remarks. Most of all, I thank all those who have offered me words of support and journalistic praise.” 


• Since arriving at WFAA-TV in Dallas in January 2008, Cynthia Izaguirre has been pronouncing her surname “with an R roll that many of us just can’t pull off. That includes a majority of her colleagues at WFAA8,” Dallas-Fort Worth television writer Ed Bark said. ” But “Because of continued viewer resistance, Izaguirre says she’s decided to pronounce her surname in what essentially is the Anglo way. But you can see and feel her frustration when she says it. In 2009 ‚Äî and in a D-FW viewing area with a heavy Hispanic population ‚Äî Cynthia Izaguirre shouldn’t have to Americanize her surname to placate anybody. That includes viewers sending her emails or ruinous ‘focus groups’ that already have taken too many media companies down self-destructive paths.”


• Of the six talk radio outlets in Los Angeles, “not one has an Asian, Native American, Latino, or African American holding court on the dial during the week,” Kevin Ross wrote Sunday on his blog. “There are 48 individuals being given incredible opportunities to make hordes of cash and hold sway over public opinions on the issues facing the nation. Of the cast of characters, 38 are white men, mostly over 40, and frequently accused of demagoguery. White women make up the rest, equally split in terms of their political ideology and two not sharing top billing with their male co-host.”


• Carlos Slim Hel??, Mexico’s richest man and now a major shareholder in and lender to The New York Times, has a complex relationship with the news media, Marc Lacey wrote Sunday in the Times. “He invests money in an array of television and newspaper companies and says he sees a bright future for those media companies that adapt. But when the news media focus their spotlight on him, he sometimes gives the impression that he wants to be left alone to make more money in peace.”


• “One year ago, Con Chapman wrote a satirical blog post on the community section of FoxNews.com about an NBA ‘tattoo cap’ that would allow no more than 61% of the upper arms and necks of players to be inked,” MediaBistro’s FishBowl LA reported. “Last week, the Phoenix New Times went to press with a 4,500 word cover story about tattoos in the NBA ‚Äî and reported the aforementioned satirical post as fact. The author of the story, Niki D’Andrea, even went so far as to include a quote from the joke post supposedly from NBA Commissioner David Stern: ‘We feel it is important that our players not scare the bejesus out of affluent demographic groups with gangsta-style tattoos.'”


• Reporters Without Borders Sunday proposed that, “with the agreement of the Israeli authorities, press equipment should be sent to the Gaza Strip. This equipment is today sadly lacking: film cameras, tapes, cameras, editing equipment, generators were all damaged or destroyed. Since Israel controls all goods that get into the Gaza Strip, Reporters Without Borders calls on the state of Israel to show discretion in its control of equipment entering the Gaza Strip. Equipment that is essential to the press should benefit from the same conditions as humanitarian supplies.”