Mark Whitaker Jumps From NBC to CNN

Switch Gives Peacock Network a Latino as D.C. Bureau Chief

NBC News Boss Calls Evening Anchor of Color “Inevitable”;

NABJ Fundraising Gala Draws 300 in Aftermath of D.C. Snowstorm

Journalists Covering Egypt Protests Targeted and Beaten

Jury Acquits Sports Anchor, but His Job Has Been Filled

Daily News Editors Killed Mention of David Hardy Lawsuit

Samuel F. Yette Hailed as Example of Journalistic Courage

Anchor Takes Viewers Along as She Battles Breast Cancer

Short Takes

Switch Gives Peacock Network a Latino as D.C. Bureau Chief

Mark Whitaker has jumped ship from NBC News, where as vice president he was the highest-ranking person of color, to CNN, where he will hold that same distinction. Whitaker was named to the newly created position of executive vice president and managing editor, reporting directly to Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, CNN announced on Friday.

Whitaker’s switch between two news organizations that have won plaudits for their diversity efforts led to another milestone: Whitaker’s deputy at NBC News, Antoine Sanfuentes, was named Washington bureau chief.

“I’m very proud of that,” Whitaker told Journal-isms.

Sanfuentes is of Latino background.

“In his new position, Sanfuentes will report to NBC News President Steve Capus, and his daily responsibilities will include the oversight of all bureau management, administration and editorial affairs, working closely with NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd and NBC News executives including Alexandra Wallace and David Verdi,” an announcement said.

“In addition, Sanfuentes will have executive oversight of ‘Meet the Press.’

Just three years ago, NBC News had two African Americans at that level, Whitaker and Lyne Pitts. Pitts resigned in January 2009 to help her husband, CBS correspondent Byron Pitts, write a memoir, and to move “to the next phase” of her career. Paula Madison remains executive vice president of diversity for the parent NBC Universal.

Walton said in CNN’s news release, “Our aim is to position a strong managing editor, working closely with the head of each CNN network and Web site, to generate reporting and analysis that consistently stands out, sparks conversation and captures the true meaning and relevance of the events in the news. Mark is a distinguished journalist and news executive who is experienced in leading large enterprises, and I am pleased that he will help direct our long-term editorial approach and strategy.”

The release also said, “As managing editor, Whitaker will be responsible for overseeing and integrating news and editorial content across all of CNN’s domestic and international networks and digital platforms, and charting long-term editorial strategy for the organization. Drawing upon CNN’s global newsgathering infrastructure, he will be tasked with leveraging the best of CNN Worldwide’s reporting to create a more powerful and distinctive dialogue about the top news stories of the day.”

Whitaker, former editor of Newsweek magazine and then senior vice president of NBC News, became NBC News Washington bureau chief in 2008 after the death of Tim Russert. At CNN, he will be based in New York.

“You know, I’m mixed-race. My dad is black. My mother is white,” Whitaker told Michel Martin of NPR’s “Tell Me More” then. “I grew up in both worlds. I think, as a journalist, that’s been a plus in terms of my understanding and I think my feel for issues, both in the black community but also in the white world. But I think my success, such as it is, has been the result, you know, that I’ve gotten to where I’ve gotten the way most people do, which is just to sort of go to work and work hard.”

After a piece last year by former Newsweek colleague Sylvester Monroe that was critical of Whitaker’s diversity efforts at the newsmagazine, Whitaker outlined what he had accomplished at Newsweek and at NBC:

“At NBC, I have promoted former Senior White House Producer Antoine Sanfuentes, who is of Hispanic origin, to be my Deputy Bureau Chief with day-to-day responsibility for managing the Washington bureau. I have pushed to get our Senior Congressional Producer, Ken Strickland, and White House producer Athena Jones, who are both black, on the air as analysts. And I have advocated for awarding MSNBC contributor contracts to Eugene Robinson and Jonathan Capehart from The Washington Post, Maria Teresa Kumar of Voto Latino, among others.

“As I told Michel Martin in our interview, I aspire to be the best possible Washington bureau chief for NBC News I can be, not just the best /black/ bureau chief, and I had the same view of my role at Newsweek. But I have been proud to promote the combination of diversity and excellence in both positions, and I think my record of success speaks for itself.”

Whitaker told Journal-isms Friday, “That all still stands, and now Antoine will succeed me as NBC’s Washington bureau chief. I’m very proud of that.”

• Jason Horowitz, Washington Post: Before meeting the press, they met green-room attendant ‘Mr. Aly’
  

Correction: An earlier version of this post said that “Unlike Whitaker, Sanfuentes will not be an NBC News vice president.” In fact, Sanfuentes was already a vice president and will keep the title, according to an NBC spokeswoman [Added Feb. 3.]

Steve Capus, president of NBC News, with Kathy Times, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, at NABJ’s Hall of Fame gala on Thursday. Capus said he would put up NBC News’ diversity record against anyone’s. (Credit: Jason Miccolo Johnson/NABJ)

NBC News Boss Calls Evening Anchor of Color “Inevitable”

NABJ Fundraising Gala Draws 300 in Aftermath of Washington Snowstorm

Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, says “it’s inevitable” that people of color will be hosting prime-time news shows on cable television — but that MSNBC is happy with the evening team it installed after the departure of Keith Olbermann last week in the 8 p.m. Eastern slot.

Olbermann surprised viewers a week ago by saying he had “been told” it was his last “Countdown” after nearly eight years. He had been the highest-rated evening anchor on MSNBC but had butted heads with management over the years.

Journal-isms asked Capus, who was attending the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony Thursday night at the Newseum in Washington, when an evening show would be hosted by a person of color. It was a concern expressed by NABJ and most controversially by former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who lost his job when he also discussed Jews in making his point.

Capus described MSNBC as a “smart, progressive” operation and named daytime host Tamron Hall, pundit Eugene Robinson, who sits on political roundtables, and theGrio.com, NBC News’ African American-oriented website, before saying of prime-time anchors of color, “it’s inevitable. It will happen.”

But he said that MSNBC had already settled on Lawrence O’Donnell in Olbermann’s slot at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times, followed by Rachel Maddow at 9 p.m. and Ed Schultz at 10 p.m. That leaves only a 6 p.m. opening. He also noted that NBC announced in September that Martin Bashir, formerly of ABC’s “Nightline,” would have an afternoon show on MSNBC.

Capus said he would put NBC News’ diversity record “against anyone.”

Hall hosted the induction ceremony at the $150-per-person NABJ fundraiser that in the aftermath of a Washington snowstorm drew just over 300 people, including such bold-face names as CNN’s Wolf Blitzer; NBC’s Andrea Mitchell; Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund; Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Gray; Rushern L. Baker III, the county executive of neighboring Prince George’s County, Md.; NPR CEO Vivian Schiller; Katharine Weymouth, Washington Post publisher; Kevin Klose, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland; Jannette Dates, dean of the John H. Johnson School of Communications at Howard Univeristy; former NPR “Morning Edition” host Bob Edwards, representing the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists; Al Hunt, Bloomberg Washington Bureau chief; Beth Frerking of Politico; Joanna Hernandez and Onica N. Makwakwa of Unity: Journalists of Color; Wanda S. Lloyd, executive editor of the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser; founders, former presidents and other prominent members of NABJ; and fans and associates of the honorees, among others.

White House senior aide Valerie Jarrett read a letter written for the occasion by President Obama, and “Tell Me More” host Michel Martin of NPR, declaring that many diversity-oriented fellowships don’t provide a means for the recipients to showcase their work, announced two new fellowships developed by the NABJ founders. They honor Maurice Williams, a 24-year-old black reporter killed in 1977during a takeover of Washington’s city hall, and columnist Vernon Jarrett, an NABJ co-founder who had become a Chicago institution before he died in 2004. The fellowships are to be awarded in conjunction with the Phelps Stokes Fund.

Several of the late Ed Bradley’s colleagues from CBS’ “60 Minutes” watched as Patricia Blanchet, Bradley’s widow, accepted his posthumous Hall of Fame honor and said of her husband, “This man had no idea of his iconic stature. He’d be surprised that he is still remembered today as such a beacon.” She urged “transferring his life into a living legacy,” asking, “Who among you will be the next Ed Bradley?”

Walterene Swanston, the retired director of diversity management at NPR who received the Ida B. Wells Award, noted her long record in the news business and said, “I’ve left behind a number of people in news operations around the country whose voices have been heard for the first time.”

Jack Marsh, president and chief operating officer of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, spoke for the Newseum, host of the event, and declared, “NABJ and the Freedom Forum have never wavered from their commitment to diversity, and we never will waver. . . . We think of NABJ as extended family.”

Ryan Williams, the managing director of the NABJ office who said the day was his last official one with the organization, said of the event, “This is our White House Correspondents Dinner, and you all deserve it.”

• Amy Alexander, theLoop21.com: MSNBC Has a Lack of Diversity to Go With Lack of Olbermann
• Bill Carter and Brian Stelter, New York Times: Olbermann Split Came After Years of Tension
• Eric Deggans blog, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC legacy: Proving funny + news + liberalism = ratings
• Jim Harrington, Oakland Tribune: Longtime Bay Area broadcaster Ray Taliaferro notches another honor 
• Tweets from Hall of Fame gala
• WUSA-TV: JC Hayward Inducted Into The NABJ Hall Of Fame

BBC Arabic reporter Assad Sawey tells the BBC’s Lyse Doucet that his arrest by police in Egypt had been “brutal.” (Video)

Journalists Covering Egypt Protests Targeted and Beaten

“Even with the Internet and some telecommunications down, many reports are coming out of Cairo that journalists are being targeted among the protestors by police,” Kat Stoeffel wrote Friday for the New York Observer.

“Assad Sawey, a BBC journalist, was beaten by Egyptian police and then went on air in his bloodied shirt. When the police saw his camera, he was beaten and electrocuted with steel bars. Although he argued for transportation to a hospital, he said that other foreign journalists were being carted off in trucks to an unknown location.

“The Guardian’s Jack Schenker was punched repeatedly by plainclothes state security officers and high-ranking uniformed officers. He was captured with about 40 other protestors and dropped in the middle of the desert. He was only released because he happened to have been captured with a high-profile politician’s son who negotiated their release.

“. . . AP photographer Nasser Gamil Nasser had his right cheekbone shattered when a policeman saw his camera and hurled a stone at his face.

“Of course the violence is not reserved for international journalists. At least six Al-Masry al-Youm staffers have been roughed up, including Lina Attalah, the managing editor of Al-Masry al-Youm’s English edition. ‘Four policemen pulled me by my hair and kicked me in my face and back,’ Attalah told the [Committee] to Protect Journalists. Al-Jazeera correspondent Mustafa Kafafi was also beaten, CPJ writes. Yesterday the English language weekly Al Ahram had firsthand reports from beaten and detained journalists but the site is down now.”

• Committee to Protect Journalists: Egypt instigates media blackout, police target journalists
• Tom Foremski, ZDNet.com: Have US companies helped in Egypt Internet crackdown?
• Roy Greenslade, the Guardian, Britain: BBC protests at police assault on its Cairo correspondent
• Peter Hart, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting: Defining a Dictatorship: The U.S. Role in Egypt
• Peter Hart, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting: NYT vs. Guardian on Egypt WikiLeaks
• Alex Pareene, salon.com: War Room Al Jazeera’s Egypt coverage embarrasses U.S. cable news channels
• Reporters Without Borders: Journalists targeted by police violence, arrests

Former Cleveland sports anchor Terry Brooks tells reporters, “Justice was served today.” (Video)

Jury Acquits Sports Anchor, but His Job Has Been Filled

A jury in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, has found former WEWS sports anchor Terry Brooks not guilty on all charges of rape and kidnapping, as WEWS’ Mike Waterhouse reported Thursday, but the station says that does not mean Brooks can have his job back.

“Terry Brooks resigned from our station last October. The position he left vacant was recently filled,” spokesman Dan Coyle told Journal-isms on Friday. “If Terry ever applied for any open position here at NewsChannel 5, he would of course be considered like any other applicant.”

Waterhouse reported, “Brooks resigned from his position as weekend sports anchor at WEWS on Oct. 7 after the indictment was announced Aug. 4. Throughout the case, he has maintained he was innocent of the charges.

“. . . Brooks embraced his wife, Nicole, after the judge ended the proceedings. Both then spoke with members of the media.

” ‘God is good, number one. It’s very unfortunate that I had to endure this, that my wife had to endure this — that these lies even reached this point,’ said Terry Brooks. ‘Justice was served today. I never had anything to say because once the indictment came down, I knew that this had to go the entire course.’

” ‘Through this situation, I supported my husband 100 percent, even when this all came down,’ said Nicole Brooks. ‘They tried to destroy us; they tried to destroy our marriage. But I knew my husband didn’t do this,’ said Nicole Brooks.”

Daily News Editors Killed Mention of David Hardy Lawsuit

The New York Daily News’ five-paragraph obituary of David W. Hardy, leader of the successful racial discrimination lawsuit filed by four black journalists at the News in the late 1980s, originally mentioned the lawsuit, but editors deleted it, journalist Ron Howell reported Thursday on his blog.

“In some ways it was even more of a shock to learn Daily News columnist Clem Richardson had written an obit about Hardy, and that the paper had eliminated, totally, the references to Hardy’s historic lawsuit against the paper,” Howell, who has worked at the News, wrote. Richardson confirmed that he had included the information.

Moreover, Howell reported, “it seems that when Clem first turned in the story, nothing appeared in the following day’s paper at all. It was only when Clem began inquiring what the heck had happened that the story finally went all the way through the editing assembly line.”

News spokeswoman Jennifer Mauer did not respond to requests for comment.

Hardy, 68, died Jan. 14 after a heart attack. The suit was brought when the News was owned by Tribune Co. “The trial was considered a landmark because it was the first race discrimination suit brought by editorial employees of a large newspaper to go before a jury,” Alex S. Jones of the New York Times wrote in 1987.

A Jan. 18 obituary in the Star-Ledger of Newark likewise omitted mention of the lawsuit, after which the News agreed to a financial package of $3.1 million and an affirmative-action effort to be monitored by the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to the Times.

Similarly, the Times and other major papers have left Hardy’s death unreported.

 

Samuel F. Yette participated in a November 2002 gathering of photographers honoring Gordon Parks Jr. in Harlem. (Credit: Dwight M. Ellis)

Samuel F. Yette Hailed as Example of Journalistic Courage

The life of Samuel F. Yette, the reporter, teacher, author and photojournalist whose publication of the 1971 book “The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America” coincided with his dismissal as the first black Washington correspondent for Newsweek magazine, was used Friday to remind mourners of the shortcomings of the news media and the importance of family.

Yette was “an example of what it means to speak truth to power — power in the black community, power in the white community,” the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a onetime aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and former District of Columbia delegate to Congress, told about 350 who gathered at Washington’s Zion Baptist Church.

After Andrew Young resigned in 1979 as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations because he had violated U.S. policy by talking secretly to the Palestine Liberation Organization, Fauntroy said he and the Rev. Joseph Lowery, both of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, went to the Mideast to see Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat. “Sam went with us, not just to take part, but to make sure we were strong and fair in our message,” Fauntroy said.

The Rev. Lewis Anthony, one of several clergymen who spoke during the two-hour service, said, “in this time when we are facing a bought press and not a free press, and too many of us have the tongues of jellyfish,” how wonderful it was that God gave people someone through whom he could speak.

Yette, 81, died Jan. 21 of Alzheimer’s disease. His alma mater, Tennessee State University, issued a proclamation in his honor, which was read at the service. Yette’s sons, Michael and Frederick Yette, recalled him warmly, and Frederick Yette said he envied the journalism students his father taught at Howard University, a contingent of whom were in attendance, “because you got so much of him. He didn’t require us to read his book list.”

But the Rev. Keith W. Byrd Sr. said Yette’s attention to his boys provided its own lesson. One was raising his sons in a religious home. And secondly, “If we had more people who would find the time to be professional and parental at the same time, we would have fewer shrubs and more trees.”

• • Dwight Lewis, Nashville Tennessean: Yette worked for future of black journalists
  • T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post: Obituary: Samuel F. Yette, influential newsman, first black Washington correspondent for Newsweek
  • Dawn Turner Trice, Chicago Tribune: Making Alzheimer’s patients comfortable
  • Samuel F. Yette recollections on YouTube

In Indianapolis, anchor Deanna Dewberry uses her fight against breast cancer to educate viewers. (Video)

Anchor Takes Viewers Along as She Battles Breast Cancer

“As she courageously battles breast cancer, veteran anchor Deanna Dewberry has welcomed Indianapolis viewers to follow her journey,” Andrew Gauthier wrote Tuesday for TVSpy.

“Dewberry, who has been with Indianapolis’s WISH since 2005, was diagnosed with breast cancer on November 12. Instead of fighting the disease in private, she decided to use it as an opportunity to inform viewers on the journey that one takes after being diagnosed with cancer (this is Dewberry’s third cancer battle).

“WISH launched a special ‘Deanna’s Journey’ blog on its website in which Dewberry chronicles her everyday ups and downs as she undergoes treatment. The CBS-affiliate also began running a special ‘Deanna’s Discovery’ segment on its 6 p.m. newscast this month (video above).”

Short Takes

• “President Obama named Jay Carney as his new press secretary, and promoted a half dozen aides today, capping a three-stage reorganization of his inner circle that began last November with an overhaul of his economic team, Marc Ambinder of the National Journal reported Thursday. “Carney, an affable former journalist for Time magazine, has had the sometimes unenviable job of keeping his boss, the free-wheeling vice president, Joe Biden, on message and explaining away the times when Biden steps out of line. He is married to author and television correspondent Claire Shipman. He has no formal podium experience.”
• Mike Moore, a multiple Emmy Award winning photographer and special projects producer at WHBQ-TV in Memphis, was released from the Methodist Central Hospital Wednesday night after getting jumped by a group of students at a gas station while he and reporter Lauren Johnson were doing an interview about boys and teen pregnancy, WHBQ reported on Thursday.
• “Last week, Rush Limbaugh used Chinese President Hu Jintao’s state visit as an opportunity to mock Chinese culture by crudely imitating Hu’s speech,” Fae Jencks wrote Thursday for Media Matters. “State Sen. Leland Yee, chair of the California Senate’s Select Committee on Asian Pacific Islander Affairs, responded to Limbaugh’s comments by calling for an apology, saying that Limbaugh’s ‘classless act is an insult to over 3,000 years of cultural history, and is a slap in the face to the millions of Chinese Americans who have struggled in this country and to a people who constitute one-quarter of the world’s population.’ “
• An internal investigation launched by NPR’s board of directors in the wake of the Juan Williams affair broadened into questions about Ellen Weiss, former senior vice president for news, and her command of the newsroom, Paul Farhi reported in the Washington Post. “More than a dozen NPR employees, including some of its well-known hosts, aired long-standing grievances to investigators about Weiss’s management style, particularly the way she had carried out a series of layoffs and terminations in 2008,” Farhi wrote.
• In an interview in the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, the embattled president, told George E. Curry that President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and other western leaders should stop questioning the legitimacy of his re-election and accord the West African country the same respect the United States was given in the controversial 2000 presidential election contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, Curry reported in a series appearing this week in the black press.
• “David Kato knew he was a marked man,” Jeffrey Gettleman wrote Thursday in the New York Times. “As the most outspoken gay rights advocate in Uganda, a country where homophobia is so severe that Parliament is considering a bill to execute gay people, Mr. Kato had received a stream of death threats, his friends said. A few months ago, a Ugandan newspaper ran an antigay diatribe with Mr. Kato’s picture on the front page under a banner urging, ‘Hang Them.’ On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Kato was beaten to death with a hammer in his rough-and-tumble neighborhood.”
• “Over the hum of laptops and the persistent, attention-demanding chirps of a hundred BlackBerrys, the Minority Media & [Telecommunications] Council convened its ‘Broadband and Social Justice Summit’ in Washington, D.C., last week, a gathering of industry and government leaders, to discuss how broadband access and adoption can help bridge the digital divide and provide minority entrepreneurs with unprecedented opportunity in the digital realm, Latoya Peterson reported Wednesday for theRoot.com. “. . . Net neutrality, a huge point of contention for many members of the black digerati, was often demonized by speakers at the event. Net neutrality is the idea that the Internet remains free and accessible on an equal level to all users, rather than a tiered system in which wealthier users can dominate or restrict the bandwidth available to other users.”
• The nationally syndicated “Tom Joyner Morning Show” is returning to New York’s WRKS-FM, known as “Kiss FM,” after being dropped in 2003 in favor of building a local presence, Jerry Barmash reported Thursday for FishbowlNY. Syndicated morning radio rival Steve Harvey said to RadioInk, “I’m going to mop him pretty good. Welcome to the Big Apple, baby, but I’ve been biting on this apple for five years by myself, and I don’t need the company.”
• Pacifica Radio’s WPFW-FM in Washington was available only online for more than 40 hours because of a “[Power company] equipment failure at the transmitter site” after a snowstorm, Bob Daughtry, interim program director, told listeners on Friday. Meanwhile, the station has a new general manager, John Hughes, formerly of WHUT-TV, the Howard University station.

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