Renee Poussaint, Camille Cosby in Oral History Project
The New York Times and Washington Post featured stories over the weekend on the efforts of Camille Cosby, philanthropist and wife of Bill Cosby, and Renee Poussaint, former ABC News correspondent and onetime anchor at Washington’s WJLA-TV, to produce a videotaped oral history archive of African Americans in their 70s and 80s.
The interviews are to be made available through a digital database accessible through the project’s Web Site, with the hope that it will ultimately reach a broader audience through television and CD-ROM, the Times’ Lena Williams reported. The goal is to complete 60 interviews a year for five years, aspiring to do for African Americans what Steven Spielberg‘s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation has done for Holocaust survivors. That project has preserved the testimony of more than 50,000 people.
The first collection includes Judge Constance Baker Motley, former New York mayor David Dinkins, photographer Gordon Parks, artist Elizabeth Catlett, businessman Percy Sutton and former U.S. senator Edward Brooke. Cosby chose Poussaint to help her because she admired her documentary on the eminent historian John Hope Franklin and Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Post’s Jacqueline Trescott wrote.
The Black World Today reports on the reception launching the project.
Les Payne Says Don’t Take Douglass’ Name in Vain
Black journalists hold few historical figures in higher regard than Frederick Douglass, the great human-rights advocate of the 19th century who published the abolitionist newspapers The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper and whose name ennobles the National Association of Black Journalists’ highest award.
So when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas quoted Douglass in a concurring opinion as the court upheld school vouchers, a reference noted approvingly in editorials in the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Newsday columnist Les Payne saw red.
Payne, himself an early president of NABJ, calls Thomas everything but a child of God, including “the most celebrated ‘Uncle Tom’ in the land” and one whose idols run closer to Justice Roger B. Taney, who stated in the Dred Scott case that blacks “have no rights that whites are bound to respect.” Not to mention, Payne says, that the justice misread Douglass.
Speaking of Calling *&@!! Names . . .
First Amendment advocates and conservative parents groups, generally antagonists in the debate over raunchy broadcasts, have long agreed that the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts at policing indecency and profanity are inconsistent and confusing.
Now, reports Broadcasting & Cable, the FCC appears to have created more confusion in dismissing an indecency complaint filed against WGR-AM in Buffalo, N.Y.
And in an editorial, the publication says, “the FCC once again has demonstrated how inconsistent, and thus indefensible, its indecency-enforcement policy is. Indecency calls are in the eye of the beholder and change with the political winds. These winds appeared to be blowing from Wonderland.”
National Press Club’s Conflicting Signals
Last week, the National Press Club named William McGowan‘s factually challenged “Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism” winner of its book award for press criticism, though it was the only entry in the category.
But the Press Club president, John Aubuchon, who does work for Maryland Public Television, promised a commitment to diversity during his Jan. 19 inaugural address, which mentioned the McGowan book and rejected its argument. He said:
” . . . This will be the year the National Press Club reaches out. We will reach out to our community, to the people of our region. We will reach out, too, to the broader journalism community, nationally and international. We will be forming partnerships with other leaders in journalism. We will accept our responsibility to be a voice for diversity. Already I have joined with the leadership of UNITY: Journalists of Color and the National Association of Black Journalists to undertake jointly a pilot co-sponsored project. We also will work earnestly for greater diversity within the National Press Club.
“Let me take a moment to talk about diversity. A veteran journalist, William McGowan, argues in a new book that journalism has become gripped by — his words — a “disturbing conformity, a race and gender-conscious pro-diversity agenda that has distorted the news.” I reject that. We who report, write and edit have never done that perfectly. And the views which color our perceptions of events and issues always have been shaped by our times. But we have not always reflected the broader society. Events, views and issues of importance to minority communities have been ignored or worse. The heart of the push for diversity in newsrooms has been the realization that only by bringing journalists of color fully into our editorial process will we — can we — change the content of our newspapers and broadcasts to reflect accurately the faces of our communities. That was and remains a valid and valuable principle. I join Mr. McGowan in rejecting any orthodoxy or political-philosophical litmus test for continued newsroom employment. But I oppose the all-too-eager effort to overturn the underpinnings of what is, at heart, better journalism.”
