Gonzalez Elected NAHJ President
Juan Gonzalez, columnist for the New York Daily News and an NAHJ founder, was elected president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, defeating board member Marilyn Garateix, an education editor for the Boston Globe, 203 to 146. Those who backed Gonzalez said NAHJ needed a nationally known strong advocate; Garateix supporters said she had been doing the grunt work for the association all along.
It’s a leadership choice many organizations have faced: Choosing someone with a national profile or someone more intimately familiar with the organization.
Gonzalez reached out to Garateix after the results were announced. Promised freelance journalist Elaine Rivera: “Juan is the right person. He’s going to be a leader for everybody, not just Latino journalists, but all journalists,” according to the convention student newspaper.
“Windtalkers” Builds Native Pride, Writer Says
Grossing only $14.5 million, “Windtalkers,” the new film about Navajo codetalkers in World War II, finished third in the weekend box office tallies behind the “Scooby-Doo” cartoon ($56.4 million) and “The Bourne Identity” spy thriller ($27.5 million). But there’s no doubt about which movie boosts Native pride, writes Valerie Taliman, Southwest bureau chief for Indian Country Today.
“How ironic… that our language, once beaten out of our elders in government boarding schools, was used to defend America,” Taliman writes of “Windtalkers.” “By film’s end, I was in tears. Not because the hero dies, but because I finally realized what our Navajo soldiers had to go through to defend our homelands — again.”
The film depicts how 29 Navajo Marines were trained to use a secret military code based on the Navajo language. The code was the only one never broken by the Japanese and was instrumental in winning World War II.
Blacks on “This Week” Roundtable Four Weeks in a Row
When New York University Law Professor Kim Taylor-Thompson joined the discussion roundtable Sunday on ABC-TV’s “This Week,” it was the fourth week in a row that African Americans have been part of the discussion of the week’s news. June 9 featured Michael Eric Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania and Patricia Williams of Columbia University Law School; June 2, syndicated columnist Deborah Mathis; May 26, freelancer Debra Dickerson and Cynthia Tucker, syndicated columnist and editorial page editor at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
With former White House official George Stephanopoulos soon expected to be named the sole anchor of the show, this should be a sign that “This Week” plans at last to boost the diversity of the views it presents.
‘BET Nightly News’ Anchor as Superwoman
Jacque Reid can’t really leap over tall buildings at a single bound, but since February, when Black Entertainment Television’s tiny news department linked up with the giant one at CBS, the news anchor does feel a little bit like Superwoman, writes the Miami Herald.
“BET Nightly News” is in the midst of two weeks of special reports from South Florida.
New York’s Olga Alvarez Snares Jose Padilla Photo
Michael Starr reports in his New York Post column that Channel 41’s Olga Alvarez snared the only non-driver’s-license photo then available of “dirty bomb” suspect Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al Muhajir. It showed him dressed in Arab garb. The coup came thanks to Alvarez’s exclusive interview with Padilla’s sister, who saw Alvarez’s report on June 10.
The sister called Alvarez immediately after the 6 p.m. newscast.
“She said the family was in shock and wanted to let us know that her brother was innocent,” said Alvarez.
“She didn’t want to be interviewed on camera, and since we needed proof of who she was, I asked her if she had a photo of her brother. She said yes, and I asked her if we could shoot the photo for our TV coverage.”
Why the Disparity in Coverage?
Two girls are missing, one black, one white.
The national media flocked to Salt Lake City to tell the nation about Elizabeth Smart. Why haven’t the reporters descended on Milwaukee to tell the nation about Alexis Patterson, asks the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Slate.com’s Scott Shuger Dies at 50
Slate Founding Editor Michael Kinsley writes today about Slate reporter Scott Shuger, who delivered Slate’s daily “Today’s Papers” digest to thousands of readers. Shuger died at 50 in a scuba diving accident. Missing from Kinsley’s tribute is how Shuger enraged Arabs and Arab Americans after editors allowed this to get through, about the killing of two Israeli undercover soldiers by a mob of Palestinian civilians:
“And then there are the pictures. The most unforgettable, credited to Agence France Presse, appears on everybody’s front–in it, a piece of shit posing as a human being is only too proud to show the other turds below that on the West Bank, ‘having someone’s blood on your hands’ is not just an expression.” After Sept. 11, as President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft were urging Americans not to stereotype Arabs, editors let Shuger slip in a casual endorsement of racial profiling.
At NAHJ, U.S. Strategy Blamed for Migrant Deaths
As search-and-rescue efforts expand in the Arizona desert, human-rights activists and academics blame the recent deaths of 16 illegal border-crossers there on the U.S. government’s border-enforcement strategy for the Southwest.
The strategy is to push illegal border-crossers, mostly Mexican migrants, into more hazardous areas, and “the deaths will continue to accumulate,” Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California San Diego, told the NAHJ convention in San Diego.
More Highlights from the NAHJ Convention
— Former NAHJ president Gerald Garcia presented Jerry Sass with an award for his commitment to the formation of NAHJ. “We all know that none of this could have happened without Jerry Sass,” Garcia said.
— Felix Gutierrez was inducted into NAHJ’s Hall of Fame for his efforts to increase the number of Latino journalists working in the nation’s newsrooms. “Felix … is a giant,” said fellow Hall of Fame inductee Frank del Olmo, associate editor of the Los Angeles Times. “He is my mentor and my friend — and in a just world — would have had my job.”
— In panel discussions on Wednesday, 22 students participating in the campus program learned about the Chips Quinn Scholars program. Karen Catone, along with former scholars Manny Lopez, Eddy Ramirez and Blanca Torres, talked about the importance of newspaper internships to prospective journalists.
Thanks to Mark Trahant, Maynard chairman and chief executive officer
