Sonia Nazario, Colbert King Win Pulitzer Prizes
The Los Angeles Times series “A Boy Left Behind” by reporter Sonia Nazario and photographer Don Barletti, and Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Colbert I. King were among the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winners announced today.
?A Boy Left Behind? followed a young Honduran boy making the treacherous journey north to the United States to be reunited with his mother. It also won this year’s grand prize in the RFK Journalism Awards. Barletti also won the Pulitzer for feature photography.
The L.A. Times reported that Nazario said her story began with a series of conversations across the kitchen counter with her Guatemalan housekeeper, who told of hardships her family members had endured attempting to immigrate to the United States. She and Bartletti spent months tracking impoverished youths from Central America on their risky journey north to attempt to reach the United States by whatever means they could find, the Times said.
Bartletti, Nazario said in the Times, “took extraordinary risks with me, jumping on top of a train from car to car.”
The Pulitzer Prize for public service went to the Boston Globe for its series on sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Greg Moore, now editor of the Denver Post, was Globe managing editor for the first year of the reporting for the series. At the Globe today, roving national correspondent Tatsha Robertson was among those mentioned for her work on the project.
King won for commentary. At a ceremony in the Washington Post newsroom, King was joined by his wife, Gwen, and oldest son, Rob, deputy managing editor for visuals and sports at the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We forget we are not responsible for the talent, we don’t choose our looks, our physical ability, or where we were born,” he told the throng. We have “to give thanks to where it belongs, that God from whom all blessings flow.”
King, who has been at the paper 13 years, first thanked the late editorial page editor Meg Greenfield, who hired him. When Greenfield was sick, King said, she told him, “‘I’m not going to leave here until you win a Pulitzer.’ I said, ‘That’s a good deal. I hope I never win.’ Today I can let Meg go. Thank you very much, Meg.” Greenfield died in 1999. King also thanked “the people of the city, especially those with small voices and those who are fearful to speak up and allowed us to be their megaphone.”
Another Post winner, film critic Stephen Hunter, thanked assistant managing editor for Style Eugene Robinson, the first African American to hold that job. “There is no guy you’d rather spend a night with in a foxhole with,” he said. “He’s a big guy, but he acts your size,” Hunter said.
Winners are posted on this site.
Few Kelly Tributes Mentioned People of Color
The abundance of tributes to Michael Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly’s editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist who became the first American journalist to die in the war with Iraq, all ignored Kelly’s views on issues of concern to people of color. Kelly, 46, had also been editor of the New Republic and National Journal and Washington editor of the New Yorker.
This piece by senior editor Mike Hoyt in the March-April 1997 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review explains what was left out:
“. . . Kelly is a writer of passion, and he occasionally lets that passion push his logic just past the facts. For example, in an otherwise strong July 15, 1996, New Yorker piece about how politicians and the press dealt with black-church burnings in the South — first ignoring then oversimplifying and hyping the phenomenon — Kelly’s long lead was flawed.
“It centered on President Clinton’s June 8 speech on the issue, which addressed the burning of the Matthews Murkland Presbyterian Church, in Charlotte, North Carolina, two days earlier. Clinton told the nation that while there was no evidence to date of any national conspiracy, ‘it is clear that racial hostility is the driving force behind a number of these incidents.’ But, Kelly went on to report, in the Murkland case the arsonist turned out to be ‘an emotionally troubled thirteen-year-old girl. Although the child was white, there wasn’t the slightest suggestion that she had been motivated by racial animus.’
“There was, however, Kelly and his researcher had gone with the assumption that the girl’s tender age ruled out racial animus. They did so even though USA Today had reported earlier, on June 28, in part of that paper’s massive examination of the church burnings — a series Kelly lauded in his article — that the girl ‘had anti-black views.’ Given that background, says Richard Price, who co-authored the USA Today series, ‘you have to ask, “would she have burned a white church?” ‘ Further, Clinton’s assertion that racism was behind ‘a number’ of church fires turns out to be a poor example of the exaggeration Kelly sought to portray. Some fires were found to be unconnected to racial motives, others remain mysteries, and others were indeed sparked by racism.
“In his December 9 TRB column, Kelly addressed the famous Texaco tapes, in which company executives were secretly recorded plotting to destroy documents that had been demanded in a federal discrimination lawsuit, and in which, it was first thought, an executive used the word ‘nigger.’ But after outside tape experts analyzed the recording, the suspect word was found to be ‘Nicholas,’ as in Saint Nicholas. What Kelly objected to is how civil rights types kept crying racism after the more accurate tape came out. ‘In short,’ he wrote, ‘while the tape does catch Texaco executives talking about destroying damaging papers in the discrimination case, it simply did not demonstrate racism.’ Yet the tone and content of that tape makes such an assertion questionable at best. Texaco’s chairman, for one, said the new tapes ‘set the record straight’ but ‘do nothing to change the categorically unacceptable context and tone of the conversations.’ More important, Kelly managed to diminish the larger issues: the case was not about improper speech, but about Texaco’s employment history, and it was that history, not a single epithet, that cost the company some $ 176 million. Kelly’s no-‘nigger’-no-problem reasoning didn’t hold water.”
CNN Discussion Turns to Black War Reporters
“CNN Newsnight’s” spirited discussion of the war with Iraq Saturday turned to the issue of the low numbers of African American war correspondents after Walter Fields, editor of Northstarnetwork.com, pointed out the reluctance of African Americans to support President Bush’s war policy.
“You don’t see any black journalists embedded with the troops,” said Fields. “I think the fact that you don’t see much coverage or much, you know, reaction from black soldiers in the field — there’s widespread skepticism among the African American community about the true intent of the government in this war and I think [it] reflects the fact that we don’t believe that this country can liberate another country when it hasn’t provided those freedoms to many of us here in the United States.”
Replied Tammy Bruce, a columnist for Newsmax.com: “It is selfish when you are saying you are not seeing the right skin color on the people who are reporting this war. . . . It is selfish and narcissistic.”
Text of the exchange at the end of today’s posting.
George Curry Reporting from War Zone
Add George E. Curry, editor of the defunct Emerge magazine who is now editor-in-chief of the news service produced by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, to the list of reporters in the war zone. Curry is in Doha, Qatar, for NNPA, the association of publishers of black newspapers.
Miami Anchor Shepard Flew in First Gulf War
Anchor Willard Shepard of Miami’s WTVJ-TV, an NBC affiliate, is also Major Shepard, a fighter pilot with the Air Force Reserve who was trained to survive in captivity before he flew 52 combat missions over Iraq and Kuwait in the first Persian Gulf war, reports the New York Times.
“Simply, I’ve lived this,” Shepard told the Times.
“As an officer and a newsman, Mr. Shepard has been intricately involved in his station’s war coverage as reporter and anchor. He says his experiences in the gulf help him explain to viewers the daily realities of war for soldiers on the front lines.”
“WTVJ executives say Mr. Shepard’s dual duties have provided the station with a competitive edge, rather than a conflict of interest,” the Times said.
A story on Shepard’s dual life as a reporter and one of the few African American fighter pilots ran in the NABJ Journal during the Gulf War in March 1991, when Shepard was at Cleveland’s WJW-TV.
David Broder Links Newsrooms, U-Michigan Case
The Washington Post, “my journalistic home for 36 years, has had an aggressive affirmative action program aimed at bringing more women and minorities into the newsroom. As a white male, I am in the category that some critics of affirmative action describe as ‘victims of reverse discrimination,'” wrote David S. Broder, known as “the dean of political reporters,” Sunday in the Post. “I can truthfully testify that I — and others like me — have been major beneficiaries of this policy.
?Despite their many differences, The Post and the University of Michigan have a couple of important things in common. Both enjoy reputations that make them attractive to many more qualified applicants than they can admit or employ. Both institutions are part of racially diverse but largely segregated communities.
?The leaders of both institutions decided that their own missions — educational in one case, journalistic in the other — can best be accomplished if the campus and the newsroom are places where people of diverse backgrounds are welcomed. The benefits of that decision are real. Affirmative action has made life at The Post far richer and more rewarding than it otherwise would have been. And the newspaper is better.
?People who are of a different age, sex or race see things that you miss — and their insights and perspectives help sharpen your own understanding. On the campaign trail, covering Congress or working on issues such as education and health care, I cannot begin to count the number of times a reporter very unlike me in background has noted something or made a comment that caused the light bulb to flash above my bald head.
?In addition, there are the rewards of friendship — something not easily achieved across racial lines in this society and something I had not experienced so plentifully since my days in the Army a long time ago.
“The complaint about affirmative action is that qualified whites are sometimes denied the opportunity to study or to work. But selectivity in a university or at a newspaper automatically implies that not everyone will win. Inevitably, The Post misses out on hiring some reporters who would do good work, just as it is sometimes turned down by talented journalists of all races who prefer to work elsewhere. None of that, in my view, vitiates the advantages gained from affirmative action.”
SPJ Honors Series on Forced Sterilization
“Against Their Will ,” a series by the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal on North Carolina’s history of forced sterilization of the “unfit,” has won the Green Eyeshade Award of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Atlanta SPJ Pro Chapter. The awards recognize the work of journalists in 11 southeastern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Other winners included Mary C. Curtis of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, and Eric Deggans, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, first and second places, respectively, for criticism; Tim Chavez, The Tennessean in Nashville, first place, humorous criticism; Robert Gonzalez, Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel; and Raquel Garcia, Donna Green Townsend and Bill Beckett, ?Ground Water Garrison: The War Over Water in Central Florida,? WUFT-FM and WJUF-FM, Gainesville, Fla., first place for radio documentary in markets 101 and over.
Senate Panel to Review Media Ownership Again
A divided U.S. Senate Commerce Committee will again delve into the thorny issue of what limits should be placed on media ownership before federal regulators finish overhauling those rules in June, a committee official said Sunday, Reuters reports. The panel will likely hold a hearing on the subject before the Federal Communications Commission plans to issue the revamped regulations on June 2, committee staffer Bill Bailey told reporters.
Will Malkin Apologize to Embedded Reporters?
On the day Michael Kelly died, Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar of the Poynter Institute, recalls Michelle Malkin, who became a conservative darling when she denounced Unity ’99 and the idea of race-based journalism organizations (she’s of Filipino background).
“Not long after September 11, 2001, I wrote a column to the effect that American journalists on the home-front need not wear flag lapel pins or read their reports in front of patriotic banners,” Clark writes on the Poynter site. “They wear ‘invisible uniforms,’ I argued, and serve their country through performance of their journalistic role, which often includes being the messenger of unpopular truths.
“That column was written in response to another by a young, conservative columnist named Michelle Malkin, whose work often appears in the St. Petersburg Times and who, at least on one occasion, criticized the work of the Poynter Institute. (Here’s Malkin’s column.)
“Back then she wrote, ‘The media snobs are at it again. Wrinkling their noses at flag pins and patriotic ribbons. . . . Hey, newsies: Get off your high horses. Impartiality is no excuse to behave like four-star ingrates.” She blasted news managers who seem “lethally allergic to red, white and blue. Do they plan on boycotting the Fourth of July, too?’
“Ms. Malkin concluded that piece with this evocation: ‘There will be no 21st century Ernie Pyles in our war on terrorism because modern journalists wouldn’t be caught dead in a foxhole, wearing a military uniform, bravely recording and communicating the hopes, fears, dreams, anger and pride of the American soldier.’
“On the day of Michael Kelly?s death, I think that Ms. Malkin, from the comfort of her own chair, owes the embedded journalists an apology.”
Telemundo Broadcasters in Chicago Vote For AFTRA
News anchors and reporters at Telemundo’s WSNS-Channel 44 in Chicago voted 6-3 to authorize the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists as their collective bargaining agent, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
Once the results are certified by the National Labor Relations Board, contract negotiations are expected to be scheduled between the unit and Telemundo’s NBC/General Electric parent, the Sun-Times said.
The AFTRA vote marks the first successful effort to unionize Spanish-language broadcasters in Chicago.
In January, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists expressed concern over allegations by some of the Telemundo employees of discriminatory treatment and anti-union practices by their new NBC management.
CBS Forced to Cover Masters Without Commercials
CBS Sports plans to cover the Masters, the first of the year’s Grand Slam golf tournaments, as it always has, with one difference: The controversy will force the network to do without advertisers, the New York Times reports.
Protesters plan to picket on Saturday against the Augusta National Golf Club’s men-only membership policy, the culmination of a nearly yearlong campaign led by Martha Burk, the chairwoman of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, the Times says.
CNN Discussion on Blacks and the War
ANDERSON COOPER: Welcome back. Every night we check the pulse of America and hear what people are saying in different parts of the country. Joining me tonight from New York, Walter Fields, the editor of Northstarnetwork.com from Portland, Oregon, Mark Zusman, editor of the newspaper, “Williamette Week,” and joining us in L.A. Tammy Bruce a columnist for Newsmax.com. Let’s start with Tammy. Tammy, what are you hearing from your readers on Newsmax.com? What’s their take on things so far?
TAMMY BRUCE, COLUMNIST, NEWSMAX.COM: Well first, there was a lot of concern about the anti-war protests about the comfort it potentially was giving to the enemy putting our young men and women further at risk but more interestingly it’s like a mobilization emotionally that happened after September 11. It is so clear especially with embedded reporters like your Martin Savidge and Christiane Amanpour that there is good and evil, right and wrong involved here and America is obviously involved in something that’s important and right and the support for the war has increased even with the casualties and Americans once again despite the howling from the far left in this country are realizing and coming together gosh, you know this is something we must be doing. Iraqis do need us. The leadership there is barbaric and they’re seeing the Iraqi people really as an example in the lawyer who saved Private Lynch, the Iraqi lawyer and his family are the people that we’re saving. So there is a much clearer view of why we’re doing this and the importance of doing it.
COOPER: Walter Fields is the editor of Northstarnetwork.com, an African American public affairs web site.
Is it clear to your – to your readers, to the people that go to your Web site what this is all about?
WALTER FIELDS, EDITOR, NORTHSTARNETWORK.COM: Not at all. I mean our readers aren’t looking at this as Operation Iraqi Freedom. They’re viewing it more as a sequel to the “Thief of Baghdad,” and I think it reflects a widespread opposition among most black Americans to this war and one of the real concerns is, you know, our view that much of the coverage has been extremely sanitized in terms of the real impact of this war particularly on civilians in Iraq. I think certainly the fact that you don’t see any black journalists covering this war for the most part. You don’t see any black journalists embedded with the troops. I think the fact that you don’t see much coverage or much you know reaction from black soldiers in the field. There’s widespread skepticism among the African American community about the true intent of the government in this war and I think reflects the fact that we don’t believe that this country can liberate another country when it hasn’t provided those freedoms to many of us here in the United States.
COOPER: Mark, I believe you’ve actually in your community suffered some losses during this war. How tolerant is the community for the price they have so far paid?
MARK ZUSMAN, EDITOR, “WILLIAMETTE WEEK”: Well Anderson, you’re correct. We – Oregon has lost four men and women which is really out of proportion to our population and it’s kind of interesting because Oregon is not a state with either a large defense industry or you know we don’t have any Camp Lejeunes nearby. We don’t have sort of the institutional support that would suggest that we would be pro-war but we certainly have more than our share of men and women serving over there.
I haven’t seen any good polls in Portland to reflect the opinions of people here and my guess is it’s probably pretty close to the national sentiment but I will tell you that in Portland there has been a very vocal minority that has been protesting the war since the day the bombs dropped. Virtually every day or night there have been rallies of one sort or another in Portland a couple of which have been quite sizable and I do think that there is a pretty substantial at least minority of people in this city who are questioning at least the motives of the war and I guess moreover, questioning whether or not we’re going to be able to win the peace as well.
COOPER: Tammy, Walter Fields was saying that some 70 percent or so of his readers do not support the war and he brought up a lot of points about his readership primarily African American, their lack of support for this war. Are you seeing that among your readership or …
BRUCE: Not at all, not at all and the polls don’t show that either. We’re not only not seeing a stabilization of the numbers. Support for the war across all Americans is increasing exponentially.
(CROSSTALK)
FIELDS: That’s not true. That’s not true not among African Americans. African Americans — no. Gallup — every poll that’s indicated has shown that black Americans are extremely opposed to this war.
(CROSSTALK)
BRUCE: And what I do want to say is that Americans also are tired of the moral relativism and the cynicism and the refusal of some people to want to help and free Iraqi people who only have the “coalition of the willing” to depend on to be so selfish and so narcissistic to say that we shouldn’t be there or do this is really beyond the pale (ph)…
FIELDS: It is not a point of being selfish.
(CROSSTALK)
FIELDS: First of all, African Americans are probably the most loyal segment of the American society…
BRUCE: It’s a selfish position to take to be against this war.
FIELDS: My great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. My father and his an aunt were World War II veterans and…
(CROSSTALK)
FIELDS: You can’t find a more loyal segment of American society than black Americans. It’s not selfish.
BRUCE: Yes it is.
FIELDS: There’s no higher responsibility for a U.S. citizen than to stand against it own government when we believe that government is wrong, and it’s taking positions that are opposite to the (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
BRUCE: It is selfish when you are saying you are not seeing the right skin color on the people who are reporting this war.
FIELDS: Excuse me?
BRUCE: It is selfish and narcissistic.
FIELDS: No, we’re not seeing the right skin color. I don’t see black journalists reporting this war…
BRUCE: That is absurd.
FIELDS: It is absurd?
BRUCE: And that’s what this is about for you? That is what this is about for you?
FIELDS: Name black journalists that are reporting of this war. Excuse me?
BRUCE: People are dying, and this is what this is about for you. That’s selfish.
(CROSSTALK)
FIELDS: What this is about is whether or not this is a legitimate exercise of authority by the United States government so it’s not a point of selfishness. It’s a point of looking at the reality of this country, which you can’t speak from as a white female for the viewpoints of African Americans.
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: Tammy, Walter, Mark. I am sorry. We are going to have to leave it there. We are completely out of time. Appreciate you joining us for this — this pulse of the nation. Thanks very much. © 2003 Cable News Network LP, LLLP.
