N.Y. Times’ Jayson Blair Resigns Under Pressure
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“Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who copied portions of a Texas newspaper’s story about a woman whose son died during the war in Iraq, resigned under pressure yesterday,” as Howard Kurtz reports today in the Washington Post.
“The executive editor of The Times, Howell Raines, said in a statement that the reporter . . . resigned after ‘questions were raised’ about the article, which described the anguish of the family of Specialist Edward Anguiano of Texas, who had been missing in Iraq. ‘We have been unable to determine what original reporting he did to produce it,’ Mr. Raines said,” reported the Times, which ran both a story and an editors’ note on the developments.
“We continue to examine the circumstances of Mr. Blair’s reporting about the Texas family. In also reviewing other journalistic work he has done for The Times, we will do what is necessary to be sure the record is kept straight,” Raines said.
The Post story listed a history of mistakes by Blair, 27, saying “he has been involved in a number of controversies and the paper has run 50 corrections on his stories.”
Examples, from a database:
“An article on Monday about the Rev. Tandy Sloan, whose 19-year-old son, Pfc. Brandon U. Sloan, was killed in Iraq, misstated the name of the Cleveland suburb where the family had lived. It is Bedford Heights, not Bedford Hills,” said one on April 10.
“An obituary yesterday about Harvey B. Scribner, a former New York City schools chancellor, misspelled the given name of a surviving brother. He is Maurice Scribner, not Morris,” ran one on Dec. 25.
Blair could not be reached for comment.
“A call to Mr. Blair’s cellphone was returned by Lena Williams, a Times reporter and an official of the Newspaper Guild of New York, the union that represents Mr. Blair. She said he was ‘not talking,'” the Times reported.
But Barry Lipton, president of the New York Guild, told Journal-isms today that “his resignation brought a conclusion to the situation,” and that the matter would thus no longer be in the Guild’s jurisdiction.
Blair attended the University of Maryland, where he was editor of the student newspaper, the Diamondback, a rare achievement for a black student. The paper reported that “journalism college administrators said Wednesday that the incident was troubling, but spoke highly of Blair,” also noting that he left the university before graduating. There was also scuttlebutt, not quoted in the story, that there had been concerns about attribution of material while Blair was at Maryland.
Text of journalism dean Tom Kunkel’s statement at the end of today’s posting.
Gilliam Leaving Post to Train Advisers Nationally
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Dorothy Gilliam |
Dorothy Gilliam, board member and former chair of the Maynard Institute and director of the Washington Post program encouraging high school journalists, is leaving the Washington Post after 35 years to help train high school journalism advisers nationally. She will be a fellow at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, it was announced today.
“After a tenure spanning more than four decades as a reporter, editor, columnist and leading-edge newsroom educator ? not to mention president of the National Association of Black Journalists ? Dorothy will exit this newsroom center stage at the end of June,” Post deputy managing editor Milton Coleman said in a memo to the staff. The university made a simultaneous announcement.
Athelia Knight, a longtime reporter who has been assistant director of the Young Journalists Development Program for the past three years, becomes director of the Post program on July 1, Coleman’s memo said. “This is an opportunity to take the Young Journalists Program nationally,” Gilliam told Journal-isms. “We want to develop a summer institute by next year,” eventually with journalists of color as instructors. The university has a relatively new media center that her program will use, she said.
“It was the IJE experience that made me want to become more and more involved in diversity,” recalled Gilliam, a founding board member of what was then simply called the Institute for Journalism Education. In 1978, she said, the Institute came up with a 10-point strategy for diversity, and “the first one was a national project to attract minority high school youngsters to journalism. Maynard has always been a part of the development of my thinking,” she said.
In an announcement to the Washington Association of Black Journalists, WABJ president Keith Alexander, a fellow Post staff member, said that ?while we at WABJ are excited for Gilliam’s new opportunity, we are also saddened by the incredible void that will be left in the Post’s newsroom.
?Indeed, many of our most talented and seasoned journalists are leaving our newsrooms for academia,? he said, noting a May 13 panel discussion on the topic at the next WABJ meeting.
Text of the Post announcement at the end of today’s posting.
FCC’s Copps Makes Plea to Journalists of Color
Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps, who has been barnstorming the nation to raise awareness of the FCC’s upcoming vote on how much to “reconfigure the media landscape,” urged journalists of color today to “help bring the issue to the American people,” even if they have reported on media consolidation already.
Copps appeared before a board meeting of Unity: Journalists of Color in Washington and said he was pleased with the reaction. He said that “people of color and minority journalists have an awful lot riding on” moves to allow further consolidation within the media, as Chairman Michael Powell has said he favors. Although Copps, as a Democrat, is in the minority, he told Journal-isms after the meeting that he is not conceding a victory by Powell. No commissioner has seen the motions that will be voted on, he said.
“We have a month to have a discussion and a dialogue,” he said. The law requires “diversity of viewpoint, of programming and of opportunity in the industry,” he told Journal-isms. “The public owns the airwaves.” Journalists of color should be “gearing up a dialogue. We need to seriously discuss the pros and cons.” Television networks have been especially reluctant to devote airtime to the issue, said Copps.
In other developments:
- Media writer Mark Jurkowitz, writing in the Boston Globe, wrote about four activists fighting against media consolidation: Jenny Toomey, “rock ‘n’ roll activist;” Gene Kimmelman, consumer advocate; Jeff Chester, “committed gadfly” and Andrew Schwartzman, public interest lawyer.
- FCC Chairman Michael Powell said the agency’s broad media ownership rulemaking is proceeding “quite well” toward its scheduled June 2 vote, according to Media Week.
- Thirty-four pop artists have urged the FCC “to give the public and lawmakers a chance to review any changes made in the regulations that govern media ownership,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The letter was signed by Jackson Browne, Thurston Moore , Jimmy Buffett, Stevie Nicks, David Crosby, Joan Osborne, Neil Diamond, Van Dyke Parks, John Doe, Pearl Jam, Don Henley, Sandy Pearlman, Tom Petty, Indigo Girls (Amy Ray and Emily Saliers), Bonnie Raitt, Billy Joel, Kevin Richardson, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith, Toby Keith, Stephan Smith, Ian MacKaye, Stipe, Ray Manzarek, Tom Waits, Ellis L. Marsalis Jr., Jennifer Warnes, Mya, Saul Williams, Tim McGraw, Nancy Wilson of Heart, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and Sam Moore.
Magazines Shy Away From Asians on SARS Covers
The editors at Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and The Economist all had SARS as their cover story this week, the Chicago Tribune reports, but only The Economist had an Asian person on the cover.
“It was a very conscious decision on our part to pick a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who looked like she got off the beach at Laguna,” Jim Kelly, Time managing editor, told the Tribune. “We wanted to go with a Western woman because we felt the disease was stigmatizing Asians unfairly. A couple of colleagues told me of being on the subway when a Chinese man sneezed and everyone on the car got nervous.”
The Asian American Journalists Association has objected to characterizing severe acute respiratory syndrome as an Asian disease.
Noberto Longo, Soccer Broadcaster, Dies at 62
Noberto Longo, a pioneer of Hispanic soccer broadcasting in the United States, died April 19 after a heart attack, Soccer Times reports. He was 62.
“Longo, who currently worked as a sports announcer for Spanish-language Telemundo, first gained great popularity with Spanish-language Univision, announcing the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. with veteran anchor Andrés Cantor. Longo, a native of Argentina, entered the hospital . . . complaining of chest problems.
“Longo also gained notoriety for his conflict with Argentina’s president and military dictator Juan Peron before moving to Miami in 1982. ‘I know I’m going to die in the U.S., perhaps in Miami,’ he told Miami’s El Nuevo Herald during an interview three years ago.
“Longo is survived by his third wife, former Argentine tennis star Emilse Raponi,” the publication said.
Univision to Acquire Two More Stations
Univision Communications, parent of the Univision and TeleFutura Hispanic broadcast networks, announced the acquisition of two stations, KFTL-TV in California?s Sacramento-Modesto area, and full-power TV station WKFT in the Ralieigh-Durham-Fayetteville, N.C., market, Media Week reports.
WKFT “expands the number of Univision’s owned-and-operated full-power stations to 32 in 23 markets nationwide. Univision currently reaches 97 percent of the nation’s 37 million Hispanic viewers,” the publication says.
Wickham Ashamed of Vietnam War Booty
“I’ve been guilt-ridden ever since it was reported that a few American journalists were caught trying to bring some trophies from the Iraq war into this country,” writes columnist DeWayne Wickham in USA Today.
“Like them, I was dispatched to cover a war and returned home with some ”reminders” of that experience. Unlike them, I made it through customs with my war trophies undetected.
“The mementos . . . I picked up in Southeast Asia, are the plunder of war. They are the booty that soldiers of victorious armies have unthinkingly claimed as a spoil of battle. This might have been an acceptable practice in the Napoleonic Wars, but not in more recent times. Soldiers returning home from Vietnam were warned against bringing such contraband back. That I lacked both the good sense and ethical standards to heed this warning back then is now a matter of personal shame.”
“Reality” Idea: Drop Anglos into the Barrio
“Can privileged young Anglo-Americans survive in the barrio without their credit cards and other socio-economic advantages?
“That’s the question Sí TV, a new English-language network targeting Hispanic viewers that’s set for a fourth-quarter 2003 launch, proposes to answer when it gets into the reality game with Urban Jungle, a series created by Jeff Valdez, the network’s co-founder and co-chairman,” reports TV Week.
“Jungle will take 13 18- to 25-year-old middle-to-upper class young Anglos and drop them into the barrio, where they will compete for $100,000 to survive in the barrio’s unfamiliar multi-ethnic urban neighborhood, where the players are forced to go without the cushy comforts of Internet-ready cellphones, Beemers or mommy and daddy’s gold cards,? Mr. Valdez said in a statement that called on potential contestants to apply to Jungle’s Hollywood office.”
Milton Coleman Memo on Dorothy Gilliam
Memo from Milton Coleman, deputy managing editor of The Washington Post:
05/02/2003
Dorothy Gilliam is Leaving
ANNOUNCEMENT
Dorothy Gilliam is ending a very distinguished career at The Washington Post. After a tenure spanning more than four decades as a reporter, editor, columnist and leading-edge newsroom educator — not to mention president of the National Association of Black Journalists — Dorothy will exit this newsroom center stage at the end of June.
In her 35 years at The Post, interrupted by a stint as a local television reporter, Dorothy has always stood tall among her colleagues and even taller in important communities in this region and in the nation. She consistently represented well. Beginning as a reporter on the city staff in 1961, through eight years as an assignment editor in Style, and then for nearly 18 years as a Metro columnist, her knowledge, her insight, her voice and her presence made this newspaper fuller and better.
Six years ago, she launched the Young Journalists Development Program. With the tireless help of literally hundreds of newsroom volunteers, Dorothy has spread the good news of our profession to a rising generation. Every D.C. public school now has a resurrected student newspaper, and high school journalism is thriving on suburban campuses as well. The Post has partnerships with college journalism programs in our area and in various parts of the nation. Graduates of “Dorothy U” programs already are working at newspapers throughout the country, including our own. YJDP is being held out as a national model by top groups in our industry. And Dorothy herself has been honored, including receipt of the University of Missouri Honor Medal in Journalism in 1998 and induction last year into the D.C. Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame.
Dorothy will still be in the neighborhood. In September, she will join the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs as the 2003-2004 J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow, sharing her considerable knowledge and helping to develop a summer institute to train high school journalism advisers from minority communities.
Athelia Knight, who has been YJDP’s assistant director for the past three years, will become director of the program July 1. Lystra Lashley will remain as the program’s administrator. YJDP’s future is solid.
Thank you, Dorothy, thank you. It’s been one remarkable career.
Milton Coleman
J-School Dean’s Statement on Jayson Blair
To the Journalism faculty, staff and students:
By now you are aware that our friend and former student, Jayson Blair, has resigned from the New York Times, just as you are aware of the unfortunate circumstances that prompted his departure. I have not spoken with Jayson myself, nor am I privy to the Times’ internal examination of his work. But simply from the available evidence it’s clear that he committed a serious breach of journalistic integrity.
I wish I had some profound insight to offer here, but I don’t. Mostly I’m just terribly sad.
To our students, I would simply say this. If you have wondered why, from the first day you arrive here, we pound into you the importance of journalistic integrity and tell you that even one incident of plagiarism will get you thrown out of the program, it’s because we never, ever want you to be in the situation Jayson found himself in this week — having your reputation trashed from coast to coast, having your editors comb through past work looking for problems, having your future suddenly go dark. I am confident Jayson would tell you the same thing. Do you own work, credit other people’s contributions, keep your integrity at all costs.
To our faculty, I would say this is why we must keep driving home these messages. We can’t make any assumptions about the preparedness or ethical awareness of any incoming student.
I would also say that there seems to have been some glee in certain quarters — not here in the college, but elsewhere — about all this, and that I just find disgraceful. Over the years Jayson has contributed much to this college and this university, and I stand ready to help him in any way I can to confront the next chapter in his life. I’m sure those of you who know him so well feel the same.
Tom Kunkel
Dean, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland
