Maynard Institute archives

FCC to Form Diversity Committee

by richard0625

FCC to Form Diversity Committee

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell announced his intention to form a federal advisory committee to assist the FCC in formulating new ways to create opportunities for minorities and women in the communications sector, the agency announced.

“Specifically, the Diversity Committee will advise the FCC on policies and practices designed to increase the diversity of ownership and create employment opportunities in the communications sector as well as other related sectors of the economy,” the announcement said.

“The Diversity Committee will also prepare periodic and final reports to aid the FCC in its oversight responsibilities and its regulatory reviews in this area. In conjunction with such reports and analyses, the Diversity Committee will make recommendations to the FCC concerning the need for any guidelines, incentives, regulations or other policy approaches to promote diversity of participation in the communications sector. The Diversity Committee will also develop a description of best practices within the communications sector for promoting diversity of participation.”

At an FCC hearing Feb. 27, Alfred C. Liggins III, CEO and president of Radio One, the largest black-owned radio network, endorsed a call by the National Urban League, the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, and 15 other organizations for the FCC to convene a hearing this spring devoted exclusively to finding solutions to the minority ownership dilemma. James L. Winston, executive director and general counsel of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, at the same hearing, urged the commission not to relax its ownership rules, but instead to revise them to include “a review of the impact on minority ownership of flagged transactions.”

Journalist organizations of color have urged the FCC to delay its scheduled June 2 decision on media-ownership rules to get more public comment, but Powell has said he will stick to the June 2 date.

2 Commissioners Plan Ownership Hearing Tuesday

Commissioners Michael J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein of the Federal Communications Commission, the two members most skeptical of plans to relax rules on media ownership, plan a roundtable discussion of 20 “of the diverse groups supporting media localism, diversity and competition” on Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. at the FCC offices in Washington, says a release from Copps’ office.

“Twenty organizations are expected to participate. The diverse group includes the Catholic Conference of Bishops and Common Cause, the Family Research Council and the Future of Music Coalition, and the Parents Television Council and the Caucus of Writers, Producers & Directors. A wide range of journalists associations, consumers groups, broadcasters, creative artists groups, labor organizations, religious groups, and child advocacy groups will also each have a representative,” the release says.

Nominee Won’t Enforce Media Diversity

Despite pleas from senators to be more aggressive in guarding against media consolidation, R. Hewitt Pate said Wednesday that the Department of Justice will not block industry mergers unless they undermine competition, reports Yahoo’s news site.

“Addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing to be assistant attorney general for antitrust, Pate said issues such as media diversity are outside the realm of antitrust law.

“Pate stressed that the Justice Department, under the Sherman Antitrust Act, would narrowly review such deals for their potential economic impact on local markets, rather than for their effect on television and radio programming,” reported the Washington Post.

“I can certainly assure you we will be in place and if there are transactions that present anticompetitive problems we will stop them,” Pate said. “When we step in, that may, as a byproduct, also preserve a diversity of voices and that’s all for the good,” reported the Post.

FCC Officials Accept Free Trips From Broadcasters

Officials at the Federal Communications Commission have accepted nearly $2.8 million worth of free trips over the last eight years from regulated businesses, a new study reports, says the Los Angeles Times.

“Commissioners and staff members accepted nearly $450,000 in free travel from radio and TV broadcasters, a finding that is particularly sensitive as the agency moves to modify its media ownership rules. Trips were taken by commissioners and staff members alike, under Republican and Democratic administrations. The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity said the expenditures raise questions about whether the FCC can remain independent as it embarks on a controversial reform of the media industry.

How Paper Got Journalists Out of Saddam’s Prison

“The last contact I had with Matt McAllester was around 1:40 p.m. Eastern Time, by e-mail, informing me that he planned to file two stories later that day [March 24] ? one on an appearance on Iraqi TV by Saddam Hussein, and the other about the U.S. bombing of a residential complex in downtown Baghdad. The promised stories never came. Matt, who completed a four-year assignment last year as our Middle East bureau chief, was covering the war in Baghdad, along with Moises Saman, a staff photographer.”

So begins Newsday foreign editor Dele Olojede’s account in the Columbia Journalism Review, “How Newsday Got Its Journalists Out of Saddam’s Prison,” in which African American editors Les Payne and Lonnie Isabel also played roles.

Chris Lopez Named ME in Contra Costa

Chris Lopez is the new managing editor of Knight Ridder’s Contra Costa Times Newspapers in California, the papers announced.

Lopez, 41, assistant managing editor for local and regional news for the past eight months, assumed day-to-day supervision of the Times newsrooms May 12, the papers said. In addition to the Contra Costa Times, Contra Costa Newspapers publishes the Valley Times, San Ramon Valley Times, West County Times, Ledger Dispatch and 10 weekly publications.

“Lopez came to the Times as regional editor in 2000 after seven years at the Denver Post, where he served as a city hall reporter, assistant city editor, state/regional editor and Sunday/metro editor. He left the Post as its city editor. He helped lead the Post’s coverage of the Columbine High School shootings in 1999 that earned the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage.

“The managing editor position at the Times has been vacant since November of 2000, when Saundra Keyes left to become executive editor of the Honolulu Advertiser.”

Art Coulson to Lead St. Paul Editorial Pages

Art Coulson will be the next editorial pages editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, publisher Harold Higgins announced.

Coulson, described as active in the Native American Journalists Association. previously served as senior editor for suburban coverage and joined the Pioneer Press in 2000. Before that, he worked as deputy editorial page editor for the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., the paper reported.

Coulson succeeds Ron Clark, whose decision to leave the Pioneer Press was announced in February.

Will Jayson Blair Show Up at NABJ Convention?

See Aaron McGruder’s “The Boondocks” cartoon

L.A. Times Examines Toll on Black Journalists

For a number of young black journalists, the Jayson Blair scandal “has triggered feelings that range from sympathy and frustration to wariness and anger,” write Reed Johnson and J. Michael Kennedy in the Los Angeles Times.

“In the days since Blair resigned under pressure and his former employer published a four-page spread chronicling the 27-year-old reporter’s transgressions ? which included plagiarizing the work of other reporters and making up sources ? young African Americans in newsrooms across the country have been trading phone calls and e-mails, swapping opinions and insights, and speculating how Blair’s actions may affect their careers.”

Some said “they’ve been taking extra precautions with their own work, double- or triple-checking quotes and facts,” Johnson and Kennedy write.

“For many mid-career and older African American journalists and former journalists, the events of the last few weeks have triggered memories of starting their own careers a generation ago, around the time when it was revealed that Janet Cooke, a black Washington Post reporter, had largely fabricated a Pulitzer Prize-winning story.

“‘ Once again it’s that double jeopardy thing we have,’ said Linda Jones, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. “We always say we have to work twice as hard to prove ourselves.'”

In other Blair developments:

  • The New York Times plans to hire 20 more journalists and the newspaper’s top editors have promised to be more inclusive in future decision-making, according to memos sent to employees, Newsday reports.

 

  • The Asian American Journalists Association called on news organizations to re-affirm their commitment to diversity in the face of suggestions by some critics that a case of gross misconduct and plagiarism by a young staff reporter at The New York Times was a “by product of affirmative action,” AAJA said in a statement.

 

  • Federal prosecutors dropped their probe into Blair’s behavior after the Times said it would not cooperate with any investigation, the New York Post reported.

 

  • In giving an interview to Newsweek, Blair could have been angry over Executive Editor Howell Raines’ public disclosure, in the Times’ own account of the scandal last week, that his former reporter spent time in an employee assistance program, business writer Paul D. Colford speculated in the New York Daily News. Such programs, which provide counseling for emotional, drug and alcohol problems, typically offer confidentiality.

 

  • Newsweek writer Seth Mnookin, who wrote the newsmagazine’s cover story this week on Blair, said in an online chat that ” while Raines himself has acknowledged that race likely played a role in why Blair was given so many chances, no one has said, and I don’t think anyone believes, that the Times would allow black reporters to get away with fabricating or plagiarizing for the sake of diversity. . . . Unfortunately, one man’s sordid story is being used by racists and ideologues to justify what are either offensive or just wrong headed views. It’s sad.”

Latinos Join Others of Color With Blair Columns

Latino columnists are among those weighing in with other commentators of color in the latest round on the Jayson Blair affair.

“Journalists are storytellers. So it?s hardly notable that the field attracts some folks who are much better at spinning yarns than at reporting facts. Any journalist of a certain age has run across his or her share of hard-drinking would-be Hemingways who can?t always be bothered with the facts. In my experience, most of those would-be Hemingways have been white. And no one thinks the problem is that the newspapers are focusing on hiring too many white men.”

 

“As one who spent nearly two decades reporting for the Washington Post and The New York Times from the 1970s to the 1990s, this gives me a racially driven sense of, as Yogi Berra famously said, deja vu all over again.

“. . . The Jayson Blair scandal is really a story of two compulsions. The one compulsion is that of a personality type — the con artist — found in all human groups. The other compulsion – racial bigotry – is found not in all human individuals, but in all modern human societies, and certainly in this one. It is rarely far below the surface of the discourse.

“I know which compulsion I’d declare the more dangerous to the well-being of us all.”

 

“Am I here because I’m (choose your ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation)?

“I’ve felt such anguish over all this I almost called our executive editor at home over the weekend to ask him that question. And then felt embarrassed for even considering it.

“I know the answer. I’m here because of 14 years of coming early and staying late, and worrying about the value of each word and the placement of each comma. I’m here because when I applied for my first column job, applicants were asked to submit three sample columns. I turned in four. I’ve tried not to slow down since.

“It’s patently offensive that that question now hovers over those of us who are minorities and in journalism.

“And yet . . . it would be dishonest for me to suggest that the fact I’m Hispanic didn’t play a part in my being hired here.

“And that’s OK.”

 

“I coordinate a minority internship program for the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association. I don’t apologize for focusing on nurturing black, Hispanic, Asian and Native-American journalists in training. Newspapers, more than any profession, need a variety of viewpoints, backgrounds and experiences to draw from.

“. . . You see, in the end, the whole point about recruiting minorities is not the writer, but about the people their stories can bring to view and the trust readers ought to have in those stories. Too bad that Jayson Blair never understood that.”

 

  • Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “I’d rather consider the case of a young minority like Macarena Hernandez.

“Hernandez, 28, is a Latina reporter for The San Antonio Express-News who first cast doubts on Blair’s work when she noticed similarities between her story about a local mother of a missing soldier and the story Blair wrote for The New York Times.

“I’ve tried not to comment,” Hernandez said Wednesday, after I reached her on her cell phone in Texas.

“I didn’t want to get pegged as ‘the one who didn’t get the chance Jayson got and now she’s angry,’ ” said Hernandez, a reporter in the Rio Grande bureau of the Express-News.

 

“If race also contributed to Blair’s rise, which it probably did, it was because the editors wanted a liberal fashion accessory to belie the underlying truth of their lack of real diversity, and he was willing to play that role.

“Affirmative action doesn’t work when the people making decisions aren’t committed to anything more than looking good. Leadership that wanted real change wouldn’t have tolerated Blair.

“They wouldn’t have needed to because they would have believed in the competence and potential of all those journalists who have a moral center they won’t sell for a story or a position. Those are the people who demand deep change in their organizations. That can be uncomfortable, but it’s what affirmative action should be about.”

 

“Let’s not kid ourselves as to why many white-dominated institutions have come to favor outright racial preferences. It’s because it gets them off the hook for finding and cultivating the best and brightest among us.

“There’s no denying the beneficial role affirmative action has played. But to continue to substitute preference for equality only guarantees dependence. I prefer the course set out by Ernesto Guzman of Texas, who wrote in response to Hernandez: ‘. . . the future of Hispanics is not at stake. The future of Hispanics is powerful and promising. . . .A Hispanic child’s success will start at home with the parents, in our local churches, in our local elementary, junior and high schools, not in affirmative action.’ “

 

“Back in the day, I, too, was an aspiring reporter. Blair was 27 and had had only four years’ experience when he was promoted to the national staff. That just could not have happened when I came up. Promotion took a long time and was pretty difficult. Blair’s managers just were not being careful.

“. . . What hurts most is that Blair’s deeds have given media critics more reasons to vent. Which makes a hard job even harder.

“But you know what? Given what has happened, maybe the criticism is justified.”

 

“It was that a story that was really, at its heart, about accuracy and trust, about bad management and poor ethics, quickly morphed into a national dialogue about newsroom diversity and the perils of expanding opportunity.

“Ironically, many of those who pushed the discussion in that direction are journalists — the same folks who like to think of themselves as progressive, their profession as enlightened, and the rest of society’s institutions, from fire departments to universities, as being in constant need of a good strong lecture on the virtues of diversity.

“Now it turns out some of them may not be completely sold themselves — not if, at the first sign of trouble, they are willing to jump onto the notion that expanding opportunity necessarily means lowering standards. That’s nonsense.”

 

“Smelling the coffee now, Howell [Raines] surely knows that he didn’t do Blair any favors by easing standards in judging the young man’s qualifications. Sure, corners often have been cut over the years to benefit the preferred sons and daughters of the privileged. But there is no good reason for the Times to risk its mighty name and resources on one questionable Cheez Doodle-munching oddball, no matter what his color.

“No applicant should be unfairly cut out because of race, but neither should any be unfairly overlooked.

“And once we are in the door, we journalists [who] are minorities should not strive merely to meet the same standards that everyone else does. We should strive to exceed them.”

 

“If the Times had truly embraced diversity, then Blair wouldn’t have had to be Raines’ ‘teacher’s pet,’ plucked from nowhere and given responsibilities and opportunities he was not prepared to assume. There would have been an established system that would have allowed reporters of color to advance to the plum assignments.

“. . . It might be tempting to blame the unfettered ambition of youth, but that’s as one-dimensional as blaming diversity. When I came to this newspaper 23 years ago, there were a couple of then-veterans who were known for exaggeration or plagiarism. One reported the dying quote of a kidnap victim locked in the trunk of a car, pleading for his life. As his kidnappers were not in custody, there was clearly no way for the reporter to have gotten that quote. He made it up. Another was caught plagiarizing but was merely assigned to another beat.”

 

As Blair “dons his pointy hat and name tag, though, he should be joined by other journalists whose high-profile failures attest that affirmative action — in its various guises — doesn’t work. For some inexplicable reason, though, ‘affirmative action’ was never cited when they messed up. Go figure. . . . Take Mike Barnicle . . . Doris Kearns Goodwin . . . the late Steven Ambrose . . . Steve Glass . . . Ruth Shalit.”

 

“This is such an old story of the fundamental fraudulence of affirmative action, whether in the media, academia, or elsewhere. These stories are full of ignored warnings, arrogant self-righteousness by those who brush aside the warnings, and often the demonizing of anyone who dares to criticize either the policy or the incompetent individuals who got where they are because of the policy.”

 

“No one should be allowed free rein. The editor who now says Blair would call him ostensibly from North Carolina or some other locale, only to be seen in the New York City newsroom hours later, should be asked why this did not seem problematic. The editors who labored over Blair’s evaluations should explain themselves beyond the details of the errors of reporting and editing. And clearly, a star system is only as good as the person who institutes it.”

 

  • Lucas Wall, Houston Chronicle:

“For me, the distress is both professional and personal. I went to high school with Jayson Blair in Centreville, Va., where we worked on the student paper together. I was the editor in chief of the Centreville Sentinel, Jayson the news editor. We kept up with each other until shortly after The Times hired him in 1999.

“We have since lost touch, but every now and then I’d see Jayson’s byline and smile at knowing someone I grew up with had made it to the pinnacle of newspapering right after college — something we used to daydream about.

“. .. I feel sad for Jayson, but I’m also outraged at the damage he’s done to my profession. And particularly upset about the image of a young, big-city newspaper reporter he’s left in many readers’ minds.”

 

“A colleague at The Washington Times reminded me that I once had an occasion to reprimand Jayson Blair, the much-maligned reporter for the New York Times charged with plagiarism, among other offenses.

” It seems that the young Mr. Blair was seated in The Washington Times’ newsroom with his feet propped up on a desk and he was leaning back. He was “just chillin,’ ” as they say.

“Imagine my horror. Here was this young, black University of Maryland intern, who was doing a brief stint for the journalism school’s Capital News Service, seated in the midst of a conservative medium, yet he was acting as if he were John F. Kennedy Jr. and had it made in the shade. I would have none of that slacker image. Not here. Not that day.

“. . . As I had done countless times with other cub reporters, I started into my old-school speech: ‘You know ‘we’ have to be twice as good and run twice as fast just to keep up.'”

 

“Frankly, I think a greater threat to our credibility has been our inattention to the more dangerous deceptions propagated by our government. But the media have gone from watchdog to lapdog. So we obsess over Blair’s well-documented fictions. And certain pundits — unable to differentiate between the aberrant and the symbolic — have trained their sights on the convenient target of diversity.

“You say you want a colorblind society, where people are judged not by the hue of their skin but by the content of their character.

“I guess I missed the part that says, ‘until one of you messes up.'”

More links on the Trotter Group Web site and in the May 14 and May 19 Journal-isms.

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