In 2002, Top Newspaper Jobs Eluded Journalists of Color
David M. Shribman, the Boston Globe’s Washington bureau chief and a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, last week was named executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The same Wednesday, The Denver Post announced that Gary R. Clark would become managing editor for news, reuniting editor Greg Moore with his former colleague at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland.
While the two might be excellent journalists, their appointments seem to continue a trend: With the exception of Moore, who is African American, few journalists of color were chosen to fill vacancies in editors’ or managing editors’ jobs at major papers.
A partial list of those named in 2002 in major and secondary markets:
Editor, Albany (N.Y.) Times Union — Rex Smith
Editor, Atlanta Journal-Constitution — Julia Wallace
Editor, Denver Post — Greg Moore, who is African American
Editor, Memphis Commercial-Appeal — Chris Peck
Editor, Cincinnati Enquirer — Tom Callinan
Editor, Arizona Republic, Phoenix — Ward Bushee
Executive editor, Detroit Free Press — Carole Leigh Hutton
Executive editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — David M. Shribman
Executive editor, Star Tribune, Minneapolis — Anders Gyllenhaal
Executive editor, Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer — Melanie Sill
Executive editor, USA Today (reporting to the editor) — Brian Gallagher
Executive editor, Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger — Ronnie Agnew, who is African American.
Managing editor, Star Tribune, Minneapolis — Scott Gillespie
Managing editor, Albany (N.Y.) Times Union — Mary Fran Gleason
Managing editor, Detroit Free Press — Thom Fladung
Managing editor/news, Atlanta Journal-Constitution — Hank Klibanoff
Managing editor/initiatives and operations, Atlanta Journal-Constitution — James Mallory, who is African American.
Managing editor, Philadelphia Inquirer — Ann Gordon
Managing editor, San Francisco Chronicle — Robert Rosenthal
Managing editor for features and sports, St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press — Catherine Straight, who is African American
Managing editor for news, St. Paul Pioneer Press — Chris Worthington
Managing editor, Raleigh News & Observer, John Drescher
Managing editor for business, Boston Globe — Caleb Solomon
Managing editor, Denver Post — Gary R. Clark
Managing editor, Salem (Ore.) Statesman Journal — Victor Panichkul, president of the Asian American Journalists Association
Still open is the managing editor’s job at the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio.
Ed Gordon Praised, BET Knocked After Lott Interview
Interviewer Ed Gordon won near-unanimous praise from news media critics for his Monday night interview with embattled Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., but a number of writers also used the occasion to air critical comments about Black Entertainment Television’s decision to cancel two of its three news shows — one of them being “BET Tonight With Ed Gordon.”
About BET:
Verne Gay in Newsday began his piece:
“Black Entertainment Television announced 10 days ago there would be a few little adjustments in the program lineup and, as a result, a few little shows would have to go.
“The shows? Certainly not ‘Cita’s World,’ or ‘106 & Park,’ or ‘ComicView’ or ‘Rap City,’ the flagships that have helped make BET the most watched cable network in black homes in America.”
In the Los Angeles Times, Condace Pressley, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, was quoted as saying, “The network has had shaky credibility in the African American community in the areas of news and information. This offer to Sen. Lott from BET is more of a publicity stunt to move the discussion away from the cancellation of the network’s news and public affairs programs.”
“BET doesn’t have any intellectual credibility in the black community,” said Chuck Stone, a longtime editor and newspaper columnist who was the first president of NABJ, in the Baltimore Sun.
“They’re entertainment – a ‘shake your booty’ kind of thing.'”
In the Boston Globe, media writer Mark Jurkowitz began:
“It’s hard to know which party needed last night’s much-anticipated Trent Lott interview on Black Entertainment Television more desperately. Was it Senator Lott, who wanted to make amends for inflammatory remarks that conjured up the bad old days of the segregated South? Or was it BET, the critically panned African-American cable network that recently announced it was slashing its public-affairs programming?”
The pans for BET were matched by praise for Gordon:
“Gordon, with journalistic deftness, essentially handed Lott his own head,” said Tim Goodman in the San Francisco Chronicle.
L.A. Times media writer Howard Rosenberg began his piece: “Besieged Senate Republican leader Trent Lott on cable’s Black Entertainment Television?
“He was forthright. He was incisive. He was earnest. He was strong. He was bold. He was commanding. He was believable. He was intelligent. He was perceptive. He was shrewd. In other words, he was everything viewers could have asked for in an eagerly anticipated televised one-on-one with national political implications.
“But enough about interviewer Ed Gordon.
“And Lott? Surely he’d had better nights.”
The focus on Gordon gave him a chance to plead the case for keeping his show. He told USA Today that the “BET Tonight” audience has increased 40 percent in the past year, and said, ”At some networks, they’d be throwing me a party.”
In a number of the BET-Lott articles, there was news about journalists:
The New York Times reported, for example, that black conservative editorial writer Robert George‘s “outspoken criticism of Mr. Lott over the past week led one of the publications he writes for, The New York Post, a conservative newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, to call for Mr. Lott to step aside.”
On the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, conservative academic Shelby Steele began his piece by disclosing that, “On the Tuesday after Trent Lott’s racial gaffe, I was approached by people close to the senator for advice on an appropriate apology. There was real desperation in their voices as they spoke into a speakerphone, but I had already concluded that he deserved what he was getting. That such a thought–segregation as a deliverance from ‘all these problems over all these years’ — was rambling around in his head under the category of humor was clearly chilling. But they were also asking a perfectly reasonable question: How does a white male Mississippian, who has made an amazingly ugly racial gaffe, apologize? Could he have a political redemption?
“I offered nothing that wasn’t obvious. He should talk about growing up in a segregated society and admit that he was affected by it. He should discuss in detail how he came to the realization that segregation and racism were wrong. Was there an epiphany, an incident, a process? They asked for language, so I gave them what I wanted to hear: ‘I loathe segregation and racism with everything in me. This loathing is, for me, the starting point of human decency.’ ‘He won’t do all this,’ one of them said. ‘Then he should go down,’ I said.”
Meanwhile, journalists of color offered their own perspective:
In the St. Petersburg Times, television writer Eric Deggans said, “Monday’s show also should prove a news flash for Viacom. Stop hiding behind the channel’s black executives, show some corporate backbone and turn shows such as Lead Story, Teen Summit and BET Tonight into appointment viewing. Take a cue from the good senator and admit your mistake. When it’s about saving good TV shows and making them better, I have a feeling the public will be far more forgiving of you than of him.”
On the TV Barn Web site, Tom Jacobs wrote:
“It was one last moment of glory for the hard working folks at BET News, a chance for them to go out with their heads held high, even if they know their work had little value to their employers.”
And on the sfgate.com Web site, Emil Guillermo wrote that, “there hasn’t been this much national attention given to race since the second O.J. trial. Which is why we should keep Lott around. We’re talking about race again. And maybe even doing something about it.”
The Lott interview was a hit in the ratings, relatively speaking. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted BET spokesman Michael Lewellen as saying that that the overnight national rating for the interview was .94, or approximately 830,000 viewers, up 84 percent over the average rating for the Monday night slot, when BET usually airs movies.
Argentina, Attica, Suburban Racism Pieces Win DuPonts
CNN en Espanol became the first-ever foreign-language awardee in the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism today when it won a silver baton for “La Doble Desaparecida” (“The Twice Disappeared”), which examined the infamous Argentine “Dirty War” of the 1970s, in which the military dictatorship kidnapped and killed thousands of the country’s citizens.
The top award — the gold baton — went to “Frontline,” produced at WGBH Boston, for a series of seven programs on PBS about the origin and impact of terrorism by Islamic militants.
Other silver baton winners of note include:
— ABC News for “Nightline: Heart of Darkness,” a five-part “Nightline” series on the ongoing war in the Congo that has claimed more than 2.5 million lives in the last few years alone.
— Court TV and Lumiere Productions for “Ghosts of Attica,” a two-hour documentary that examined why prisoners rioted at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York in 1971 and what happened after state troopers stormed the prison killing 29 inmates and 10 prison guards. “It is a kaleidoscope of social injustice pitting the color and culture of black inmates against the power and prejudice of white-dominated politics,” the judges said.
— KPBS San Diego and independent producer Lee Harvey for “Culture of Hate: Who Are We?” an hour-long study of racism in Lakeside, Calif., a San Diego suburb.
— WFAA-TV, Dallas, Brett Shipp and Mark Smith, a silver baton for “Fake Drugs, Real Lives,” a series of 16 reports in which WFAA’s investigative unit uncovered how Dallas police department informants planted powdered gypsum as evidence to convict poor and immigrant defendants on drug charges.
Hollywood Diversity Coalition Under Fire
NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, National Latino Media Council Chairman Esteban Torres, American Indians in Film & Television President Sonny Skyhawk and leaders of the Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium launched a campaign in early 2000 to pressure the four major networks to increase cultural diversity in their prime-time lineups, reports the Los Angeles Times. They announced at a press conference that executives at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox were signing agreements promising to increase minority representation in front of and behind the camera.
But as the third anniversary of those agreements approaches, it is the Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition that has come under fire, from inside and outside its ranks.
Two of the four networks — NBC and Fox — have bluntly challenged the group’s credibility, calling it misguided, unwieldy and unfocused. And even Mfume, its most influential member, is questioning the coalition’s effectiveness with the networks, suggesting that the group has lost direction, the story says.
Condit Interviewer Hernandez Switches to San Jose
KOVR-TV Sacramento reporter Jodi Hernandez — who turned heads when she landed a rare interview with embattled former Rep. Gary Condit nearly 16 months ago — has left the station after eight years to take a job with KNTV, the NBC affiliate in San Jose, reports the Sacramento Bee.
Hernandez began her new job Monday, working out of the station’s Bay Area bureau — a perfect geographical fit, since she and her husband own a restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission district, reports media columnist J. Freedom du Lac.
A Philly-Chicago Union That Began at AAJA Convention
Former WPVI-TV Philadelphia reporter Rose Tibayan tells Stu Bykofsky in the Philadelphia Daily News that she is still working on her book, but has opened a new chapter in her life.
On Dec. 8, Don Villar took her to Paris and proposed at the base of the Eiffel Tower, Bykofsky writes.
A Filipino-American like herself, Villar is a writer/producer at Chicago’s WLS-TV. The two met at an Asian American Journalists Association convention in 1996 and were “just friends” until they started dating in August. Tibayan expects to be married at Philadelphia’s Cathedral of Sts. Peter & Paul in a year or so.
AAJA protested Tibayan’s March 18 suspension from WPVI, made after the station said she was using the station’s name to write a book for aspiring TV journalists and was not given approval by WPVI for the book project. She left the station in May.
Youth See Record Number of Beer Ads
Young Americans are exposed to more television commercials for beer than for sneakers, gum or jeans, according to a study, reports the Associated Press.
Young people ages 12 to 20 saw two beer or ale ads in 2001 for every three such commercials aired on programs viewed primarily by adults, the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University found.
The study says that youth were routinely overexposed to alcohol advertising in 2001 on five networks – WB, UPN, Comedy Central, BET and VH-1.
Breakout by TV market.