As ABC Turned Screws, Simpson Turned to Johnnie Cochran
Black Alumni at Columbia J-School Raise $100G for Scholarships
Texas Monthly, Innocence Project Team to Free Inmate
Toledo Jews Divided Over Rick Sanchez Fund-Raising
Kay Mills Wrote, Lived in the Spirit of King
Press-Freedom Groups Hail Fall of Tunisian Dictator
Israeli “Humiliation” of Foreign Journalists Protested
Pool photo by Vince Bucci Johnnie Cochran Jr. putting on a pair of gloves during O.J. Simpson’s trial in 1995. Six years later, responding to the contract offer made to Carole Simpson, he wrote ABC News President David Westin, “this development is shocking.”
As ABC Turned Screws, Simpson Turned to Johnnie Cochran
ABC News executives brought so much pressure on veteran anchor Carole Simpson to leave the network that she enlisted the aid of the late, fear-inducing defense lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. to fight back, Simpson discloses in her new memoir.
“They tried to make me so unhappy that I would quit,” Simpson writes in “News Lady.” “No, I would not make it that easy for them. . . . . I decided that since ABC had raised my discomfort level, I would raise its discomfort to a higher level. I called super lawyer Johnnie Cochran. Before he passed away, just his name struck fear in the hearts of anyone on the opposing side. I knew what his involvement would mean to the company. I didn’t know Johnnie Cochran, but he knew me from television and was a big fan.
“I was never interested in suing ABC News, but Cochran — after he heard my stories — thought I had grounds,” she wrote about negotiations with the network in 2001. “Top executives were playing hardball with me and I was going to play hardball back. Johnnie said he would send a letter to ABC News suggesting they not ‘mess’ with me. . . .
“The letter apparently sent parent company Disney and ABC News into a panic. I heard that Disney wanted no legal problems with Cochran and me and told the News Division to ‘fix this.'”
Cochran died of a brain tumor in 2005 at age 67. He had become a legal superstar after helping to clear O.J. Simpson during a sensational murder trial in which Cochran uttered the famous quote “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” However, the family said when he died that “he and his family were most proud of the work he did on behalf of those in the community.”
After Cochran’s letter to then-ABC News President David Westin, Simpson writes, “my agent went into negotiations with ABC over the provisions of the contract. They made a better offer and we reached agreement. I decided to sign it and make the most of the silly little assignment I was given as ABC’s Ambassador to Schools.”
Simpson anchored her last “World News Tonight Sunday” on Oct. 19, 2003, and worked as ABC’s schools ambassador until budget cuts killed the program in 2005. She wrote that she traveled to 31 cities and probably reached close to 5,000 students discussing the importance of a free press, the First Amendment and keeping up with the news.
As media writer Howard Kurtz noted this month in the Daily Beast, “Simpson is bringing out the book through the self-publishing firm AuthorHouse. She says she began sending her proposal to literary agents before leaving ABC. ‘All of them turned me down over a three-year period and said things like, “it wasn’t sexy enough,” “I could get sued and publishers are fearful of that,” and similar rejections . . . I think there was concern about the people and institutions I criticized.’ So she decided to do it herself.”
Simpson has produced an eye-opening account of the everyday expressions of sexism and racism in the television news business, recounting the graphically offensive statements made to her by colleagues over the years, most times without identifying the perpetrators by name.
She says sexism was more of a problem than racism, asserting that black men and white men relate to each other with “guy talk” in ways that mean black men have a leg up on black women in the business.
Although the book could use another run through a copy editor, it showcases Simpson’s storytelling abilities and will provide any journalism student with an unvarnished look at how the television news business really operates. There are valuable lessons, too, in balancing family and career.
Westin gave a party for Simpson after they agreed on her post-broadcasting role, she writes. There, Simpson broke into the Gloria Gaynor song, “I Will Survive.”
She sang, “At first I was afraid, I was petrified, thinking I couldn’t live without ABC on my side . . .
“I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong, and I grew strong. I learned how to carry on.
“I’ve got all my life to live and I’ve got all my love to give and I’ll survive. I will survive.”
“Before Westin left the gathering he leaned over to me and said, ‘You’ll do just about anything, won’t you?'”
Black Alumni at Columbia J-School Raise $100G for Scholarships
The Black Alumni Network of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism has raised more than $100,000 to create and endow a scholarship fund named for the late Phyllis T. Garland, the first woman and first black faculty member to receive tenure at the school.
That “not only means that the fund will be endowed, creating a scholarship that will be awarded annually in perpetuity, but it also means that we are the first endowed fund to receive Kluge Matching Scholarship Challenge funds!” Wayne Dawkins reported in the Jan. 15 issue of his Black Alumni Network newsletter.
Garland died in 2006. She was also New York editor of Ebony magazine
“The matching funds [matched 1:1 to what we raised for the BA Network/Phyllis T. Garland Fund] will create the BA Network/Luther P. Jackson Jr. ’51 Fund,” the story continued. “We are thrilled to be able to double the amount of scholarship aid that will be named in honor of the Black Alumni Network and two distinguished faculty members.”
Jackson, who taught at the school for 24 years, died in 2008 at age 83. He was the first African American professor at the school and one of the first black journalists at the old Newark (N.J.) Evening News and at the Washington Post.
Texas Monthly, Innocence Project Team to Free Inmate
“When Anthony Graves was arrested for capital murder, he thought it was a practical joke. A surveillance camera in the Brenham, Texas, police station captured Graves shaking his head and smiling,” Lauren Kirchner wrote for the January/February issue of Columbia Journalism Review. “ ‘This is a big mistake,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s messing with me, right?’
“It was a mistake, but it wasn’t a joke. Graves, then twenty-six, didn’t know he was about to begin an eighteen-year fight to clear his name of a gruesome crime he did not commit. He would spend most of those years in solitary confinement on death row.
“Graves was charged with the brutal murder of six members of the Davis family in Somerville, a small city northwest of Houston. Robert Carter, the absent father of the youngest victim, four-year-old Jason Davis, became the first suspect when he showed up to the family’s funeral with burns on his face and a shaky alibi. But from the investigation’s outset, the police worked from the assumption that Carter couldn’t have committed the horrific murders alone, because multiple weapons had been employed: the victims were attacked with a knife, a hammer, and a gun before the house was set on fire.
“When his interrogators pressured him to name an accomplice, Carter, to deflect attention from his wife, also a suspect at the time, offered the name of someone he barely knew: his wife’s cousin, Anthony Graves. Though there was no evidence connecting him to the crimes other than Carter’s accusation, Graves was convicted and sentenced to death.
“Carter was executed in May 2000. His last statement from the gurney was a declaration that Graves was innocent. “It was me and me alone…. I lied on him in court,” Carter said, just minutes before being dosed with a lethal injection. Graves remained on death row, his case unexamined.
“Graves gained a powerful ally in 2002, when Nicole Cásarez, a journalism professor at Houston’s University of St. Thomas, began investigating his case with her students as part of an Innocence Network project. . . . .”
“The Houston Chronicle and other papers wrote periodic updates on Graves’s case through the years, but it took a Texas Monthly senior editor, Pamela Colloff, to do justice to Graves’s story. Colloff began speaking with Cásarez in the spring of 2010, and for months, Cásarez made thousands of pages of court documents — and Graves himself — available to Colloff as she worked to wrangle the convoluted record into a coherent narrative. The story that came out of that work, in the October 2010 issue, “Innocence Lost,” is a gripping, utterly unsentimental, can’t-put-it-down read, with the detail and depth that months of research and weeks of writing allowed.
“. . . This LAUREL goes to Nicole Cásarez, who investigated this story over eight years, and to Pamela Colloff, who deftly translated the facts into a compelling narrative for a wider audience.”
Toledo Jews Divided Over Rick Sanchez Fund-Raising
“Last month, former CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez made the Top Ten list — of infamy, not popularity,” Alan Abrams wrote Thursday for the Cleveland Jewish News.
“His inflammatory remarks about Jews and their influence in the media were rated as Number 7 on the compilation of the 2010 Top Ten Anti-Semitic Slurs widely disseminated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. This followed the firing of Sanchez as a CNN correspondent after he made the comments in a radio interview.
“That’s why the news that Sanchez would be highlighting two fundraising events organized by Adelante, a Latino social service agency in Toledo, raised eyebrows and some concerns within the city’s Jewish community. The events are being held Jan. 18, the day after the city pays tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King and diversity.
“Adelante’s executive director Julia Torres Barden said last week she is ‘not ready’ to publicize either event, a private luncheon with Latinos and a public forum in conjunction with the Toledo Leadership organization to address the high dropout rate among school age Latinos. Only one person interviewed for this article had heard about the events.
“ ‘I am sort of disappointed that they are doing this,’ says Howard Friedman, professor emeritus of the College of Law at the University of Toledo and author of the popular Internet blog Religion Clause. ‘Sanchez seems to be an unfortunate role model to hold up to the community.
“‘Non-profits are having a difficult time fundraising, so they often turn to bringing in a controversial speaker hoping people will respond by attending,’ Friedman adds. ‘The best response would be for people not to attend. If they lost money on it, maybe they’d think twice next time.’”
- Ryah Aqel, Arab Detroit: Helen Thomas Takes Her Seat at the Front of the Bus
- Society of Professional Journalists: SPJ board of directors votes to retire Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award
- David Taintor, Talking Points Memo: Rabbi Helps Tearful Rick Sanchez Try To Set Record Straight
Kay Mills Wrote, Lived in the Spirit of King
“As we prepare to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, we reflect on a time when minorities and women struggled for equality in the United States,” Sandra Fish wrote for Politics Daily.
“King was the motivation and the spirit behind the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, but many others did their part in the continuing efforts to bring about equality for all in America.
“Kay Mills was one of those people. She was a friend of mine, and of hundreds of other women journalists for whom she helped blaze a trail. She died Thursday of a heart attack at age 69 in Santa Monica.
“. . . She lived her life in the spirit of Rev. King — and in the spirit of those lesser known leaders of the movement. In 1991, she left the newsroom to write books and freelance, covering the issues of equality that were near and dear to her heart.
“‘This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,’ paid tribute to one of the unsung heroines of the civil rights movement. Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer and attended the 1964 Democratic National Convention as vice-chairwoman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a challenge to her state’s all-white delegation.
“As an Alicia Patterson journalism fellow in 1995, Kay worked on the project ‘Faces of Head Start,’ which later became part of her book ‘Something Better for My Children: The History and People of Head Start.’ And in ‘Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case That Transformed Television,’ she recounted the successful challenge to a Jackson, Miss., TV station’s license for its failure to cover the civil rights movement.
“‘Kay was fearless,’ wrote Pat Sullivan, a longtime friend of Kay’s and a Washington Post staff writer, in an e-mail. ‘She left a steady job because she believed there was an audience for serious nonfiction about women and civil rights figures, and she proved that to be true. She dug and dug, finding the untold anecdote, the unheralded pioneer and the unexamined trends in our common history. She then told those tales so that the rest of us could understand why it mattered.
” ‘Her work took her to Montana Indian reservations, Mississippi sharecropper huts and inner-city Head Start programs in Los Angeles, not to mention the days spent in the National Archives warehouses in Washington, D.C., ‘ Sullivan wrote.”
- Judy Belk, Los Angeles Times: Black man’s burden
- Sylvester Brown Jr., St. Louis Beacon: The long ‘Dream’ continues
- Mary C. Curtis, Politics Daily: School Desegregation Battle: A Thing of the Past?
- Eric Deggans blog, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: My thoughts on MLK day: When will news media stop enabling anti-gay activists?
- Bob Kravitz, Indianapolis Star: On this special day, we search for perspective
- Tim Wise, ColorLines: We Twisted King’s Dream, So We Live With His Nightmare
- Dorothy M. Zellner, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: King’s words live in Palestinian city
Press-Freedom Groups Hail Fall of Tunisian Dictator
“The Committee to Protect Journalists is heartened by news reports that three jailed Tunisian journalists have been freed as the repressive regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has fallen. CPJ calls on the new interim Tunisian government to release one other journalist believed to be still in custody,” CPJ said on Friday. “Bloggers Azyz Amamy and Slim Amamou, arrested on January 7, were reported released from Mornaguia Prison on Thursday shortly after Ben Ali made his final speech to the nation. During the speech, Ben Ali belatedly acknowledged his government’s repression, saying that censorship of conventional and online media would come to an immediate end. Instead, his long regime ended.” secretary-general Jean-François Julliard of Reporters Without Borders said, “President Zine el-Abidine Bel Ali was an all-powerful dictator for 23 years, tolerating no criticism and never hesitating to jail his detractors. His departure must now lead to a complete break with the years of repression.”
Israeli “Humiliation” of Foreign Journalists Protested
“The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the humiliating treatment of several journalists by security personnel assigned to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. CPJ calls on the prime minister to ensure that similar episodes are avoided in the future,” the press-freedom group said on Friday.
“. . . On Tuesday, journalists arrived at the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem to cover an annual meeting of the Israeli prime minister with representatives of the foreign press, according to a statement released by Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera’s Jerusalem bureau received the invitation several days in advance and, as required, sent the names of reporters and crew members who would be transmitting live coverage of the conference. Al-Jazeera has been taking part in the event for seven years, according to the station.
“Al-Jazeera said its crew, consisting of multiple reporters and two cameramen, arrived early after taking into consideration the complications of security inspections. Despite being one of the first teams at the hotel, Al-Jazeera staffers were stopped and made to wait for two and a half hours while other foreign journalists were allowed to enter. Al-Jazeera said its journalists had to undergo a humiliating physical examination. Najwa Simri, Al-Jazeera news producer, endured a ‘thorough, painstaking and physical security screening even though Simri had told the guard that she is pregnant,’ Al-Jazeera’s statement said. The station said a female guard ordered Simri to remove her bra; when Simri refused, she was informed that she would be denied entry. Simri then had to wait 15 minutes until her clothes were returned so she could leave.
“Other journalists, including a Wall Street Journal reporter, were strip-searched and forced to take off their pants, according to a statement released by the Foreign Press Association in Israel, or FPA. Walid Al-Omary, Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief, had to undergo a similar, humiliating inspection, according to Al-Jazeera. Several members of the press corps walked out of the event.”
Short Takes
” “I look forward to reading the first edition of This Week from Indian Country, but in the back of my mind I will always wonder how many Native writers were censored before the magazine went to press,” Tim Giago wrote Monday for Native Sun News. “Ray Halbritter, Publisher and CEO of Indian Country Today weekly newspaper announced last week that the newspaper will become a weekly magazine to be called This Week from Indian Country Today. . . . The Oneida Nation has owned Indian Country Today going on 13 years. I founded ICT and owned it for 18 years prior to selling the paper to them. . . . In the 13 years Ray Halbritter has owned Indian Country Today, the newspaper has never published a letter, a column or a news report that was critical of him, the Nation, or the newspaper.” - “Veronica Garcia is starting a new job as an assistant Long Island editor at Newsday. Her first day on the job is Jan. 31. She was most recently an editor/writer for the Los Angeles Community College District’s Sustainable Building Program, BuildLACCD,” Veronica Villafane reported Monday for Media Moves. “Veronica spent 17 years at the Los Angeles Times before she was laid off in 2008.”
- “Raymond Royal Marshall was a producer for the Neal Boortz radio talk show, but he was as much a radio personality as Mr. Boortz himself,” Rhonda Cook wrote Sunday for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “. . . Mr. Marshall, 43, died early Saturday, but the cause of death was unknown at press time. He told his wife he wasn’t feeling well and walked into a bathroom in their home and collapsed, Mr. Boortz said. He was rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital but could not be revived.”
- Teshima Walker, senior supervising producer for NPR’s “Tell Me More,” has been promoted to executive producer
of the show, NPR said on Thursday. “Walker created and implemented a strong editorial vision for the program, set a highly professional team in place and formed productive relationships with managers at NPR Member stations across the country. Tell Me More’s cume audience has grown by 12 percent under Walker’s leadership,” an announcement said. - “Last week, Anne Hays put her latest copy of the New Yorker back in the mail, with a note explaining that the august publication owed her a refund for putting out the second issue in a row featuring almost no pieces by women,” Tana Ganeva wrote for AlterNet. “In a December issue of the New Yorker content by women made up only three pages of the magazine’s 150; one January issue contained only two items by women, a poem and a brief ‘Shouts and Murmers’ item.
- “CNN International anchor Isha Sesay is joining CNN’s ‘Anderson Cooper 360?’ as a news anchor on the program,” Chris Ariens reported for FishbowlNY. “She’ll continue anchoring the 10amET edition of the CNNI program “International Desk.” Sesay, a Brit who’s parents emigrated from Sierra Leone, also hosts and reports from CNNI’s weekly series ‘Inside Africa.’ ”
- “No one’s sun sign has changed, despite the misinformation about the constellation Ophiuchus that is scampering around the web this week in reaction to some completely amateurish reporting,” Mary Barron wrote Friday for Examiner.com. “What has changed is that journalists used to have editors who would do fact-checking and require reporters to consult with someone who actually knew something about the subject matter before they would rush a story into print.” As the Associated Press reported on Friday, “Countless people reacted on social networks Friday to the ‘news’ that the stars have shifted alignment, astrologically speaking. No matter that the astronomy instructor who started it all in a weekend newspaper interview said it was an old story very old; 2,000 years old, actually and that astrologists were insisting it wouldn’t change a thing. The story had traveled around the blogosphere like, well, a shooting star.”
