The “Soft Bigotry” of Writer Jim Sleeper?
Imagine this scenario: Black journalist writes a book review. The white editor mistakenly pastes in copies of a previous review via computer. The editor runs a correction noting her error. But it’s still the black journalist’s fault. Another result, we’re told, of affirmative action.
That’s the scenario that liberal-turned-conservative writer Jim Sleeper unveiled in an op-ed column on the Jayson Blair case May 13 in Connecticut’s Hartford Courant, in a piece that was then picked up by other newspapers.
“When I called the ‘author’ of the [San Francisco] Chronicle review for his account,” Sleeper wrote, describing the 1996 incident, “he stunned me: ‘As an African American, I would never “lift” a story, because we are already under the cloud of Janet Cooke,’ he said, referring to The Washington Post reporter who had fabricated her Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of a young boy on heroin. Recovering my voice, I said simply, ‘I really don’t care what race you are.’ He insisted that his editor’s story of a mix-up was true and promised to send me his original version. It never came. And he remained at his post for several more years.”
But the book reviewer, Dean Wakefield, tells quite a different story. In fact, Wakefield, who started in the business in 1979, and has been op-ed editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times and worked briefly on the editorial pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says Sleeper’s comments are “outrageous.”
“I’ve never, ever talked to Sleeper! And for him compare two people just because they happen to be black is disgusting,” Wakefield told Journal-isms. “What I did was not a mistake. As a matter of fact, I got a raise after that. . . . This is defamation.”
Sleeper’s column continued: “If people like Jayson Blair and the Chronicle’s reviewer weren’t hired or kept on to assuage white managers’ moralistic enthusiasm and guilt, there would still be many fine black journalists in American newsrooms. But too many newspapers are driven by corporate policy to finesse the heavy lifting that should have been done for more black kids much earlier in life, at home and in school.”
The headline on the column by Sleeper, author of a book called “Liberal Racism,” was “The Soft Bigotry Of Low Newsroom Expectations.” Among those running it were the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Myrtle Beach (S.C.) Sun-News.
Here is the correction that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle of July 20, 1996, on Page E3:
“Because of an editing error, the Sunday Book Review’s June 30 review of ‘Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson‘ by Michael Frady carried some paragraphs from a review of the same book that appeared in the Washington Post. The problem occurred when a wire-service version of the Post review was placed in the wrong computer file and inadvertently spliced into the review. Our apologies to the Washington Post and its reviewer, James Sleeper.”
Wallace Terry Services Friday in D.C.
Funeral services are scheduled for noon Friday, June 6, for Wallace Terry, pioneer black journalist and author of “Bloods,” the 1984 book of oral histories of African American soldiers in Vietnam. (See the May 30 Journal-isms.) Friends and admirers will gather at the National City Christian Church on Thomas Circle in Washington, D.C.
First Student Awarded Flip Wilson J-Scholarship
The estate of Flip Wilson, the comedian perhaps best known for his character Geraldine Jones, has created scholarships for African American journalism majors at five universities, as USA Today reports.
And Daniel Wallace, 20, of Detroit, is Wayne State University’s first recipient of the $25,000 scholarship, adds the Detroit Free Press. The money will cover Wallace’s tuition, fees, room and board and books for the upcoming academic year. The endowment for scholarship fund is between $1.5 and $2 million, according to fund executor James Murphy, said the Free Press.
Kathleen Fearn-Banks, Wilson’s close friend and former publicist, now a communications professor at the University of Washington, helped convince the comedian that journalism was a field where his money could make an impact on African Americans after his death.
“I am in journalism and always have been,” she told Journal-isms. “My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in journalism. I worked in newspapers, magazines, and television news before I moved into public relations at NBC. Even then I kept writing magazine articles. . . . as a professor, I teach public relations and also journalism. So when Flip (before he was ill) asked me what did I want in the will, I said ‘a journalism scholarship.’ He remembered when he did his final will a few weeks before he died. Angie Hill, his assistant, telephoned me after the will was done and told me he had done something very nice for me and told me about the scholarship. He was concerned with education and often gave kids scholarships just because they seemed smart or ambitious to him. He often said that if he had had the opportunity to go to college, there’s no telling what he might have become. I agree.”
Wilson died of liver cancer in 1998. The scholarships are being set up at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., the University of Washington in Seattle, Wayne State University in Detroit, California State University-Northridge and Howard University in Washington, D.C.
“Applicants, most of whom may be too young to remember Wilson’s sassy female alter ego, Geraldine, and her favorite excuse, ‘The devil made me do it,’ must write an essay that requires research on the comedian’s life and work,” as the Free Press said.
Detroit’s beneficiary, Wallace, says he didn’t know much about the comedian until recently, the Free Press said.
To research a 500-word essay for the scholarship, he listened to an old Wilson album his grandmother owned. “The content was just hilarious,” he told the newspaper.
Tentative AP Pact Includes Partner Benefits
Negotiators for the News Media Guild and The Associated Press have reached tentative agreement on a proposed three-year contract that includes domestic partnership benefits for gay and lesbian couples but not heterosexuals, and the Guild “got the company to engage us more often on diversity issues,” Tony Winton, president of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America Local 31222, the News Media Guild, told Journal-isms.
Monday’s proposed settlement includes pay raises of 2.71 percent, 2.98 percent and 3.38 percent to take effect on June 3, 2003, Dec. 1, 2003, and Dec. 1, 2004, respectively, a Guild statement says.
During the negotiations, hundreds of AP workers, including more than 50 in its Washington bureau, handed in their AP key chains carrying the slogan, “AP Diversity Many Views, One Vision,” to protest what they called a rollback of diversity at the news cooperative, as reported in January. In the same column, AP management affirmed its commitment to diversity.
The union maintained that merit pay was unevenly distributed between men and women and between whites and people of color, and that the news cooperative was losing staff members because it fails to extend benefits to domestic partners.
Winton said that merit pay was beyond the scope of the contract, but that “the company told us they were appreciative of the analysis [performed by the Guild] and will factor it in.” On domestic partners, he said “the company has taken the position that people who were heterosexuals have the option of getting married.” But, he added, “it took us 20 years for AP to join the rest of the world” on the same-sex benefits.
In a proposed new section of the contract, the Guild designates a member of its Human Rights Committee to meet with management twice a year “to share ideas.” This is intended, Winton said, to “get the company to engage us more often on diversity issues.”
Another proposed new section forbids “the deliberate introduction of false information into material intended for publication or any alteration of a photo or image by any means and/or for any reason,” and says that employees who violate the policy will be terminated.
The tentative agreement goes next to the union’s executive committee, then to members for a ratification note. The results should be ready by the first week of July, Winton said.
Public Outcry Against Consolidation Not in Vain
To some political analysts in Washington, the remarkable fact about Monday’s Federal Communications Commission media decisions was not their deregulatory sweep but that so much public outcry had been mustered against them, writes Jennifer Lee in the New York Times.
“Compared with 18 months ago, when the dry details of caps, cross-ownership and market contours were almost exclusively debated by corporate lawyers, the F.C.C. staff and the federal courts, the public had recently rallied to the issue – in strident opposition.
“More than 520,000 comments on the proceeding were sent in by citizens. And as the two dissenting commissioners pointed out in their statements today, nearly all of them were against relaxing the media ownership rules.
“While the public opposition did not dissuade [Michael] Powell and his two Republican colleagues on the commission from voting in favor of the rule changes, some consumer advocates say the protests may have helped set some boundaries – like the slight tightening of radio ownership rules – and could prove useful as some members of Congress seek to roll back the F.C.C.’s actions and opponents mount appeals in federal court,” Lee wrote, outlining how “four longtime consumer advocates, working in tandem,” split responsibilities to mobilize opposition.
Senate to Hear FCC Testimony on Changes
Lawmakers want the Federal Communications Commission to justify its decision to broadly relax decades-old media ownership restrictions, particularly a change that allows companies to own television stations reaching nearly half the nation’s viewers, the Associated Press reports.
“The agency’s five commissioners were to testify Wednesday before the Senate Commerce Committee.
“Many committee members have criticized the FCC’s decisions, with some threatening congressional action to roll back the changes. Committee Democrats repeatedly asked FCC Chairman Michael Powell to testify before the commission’s vote, but committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., rejected those requests.
“South Carolina Sen. Ernest Hollings, the committee’s ranking Democrat, has proposed legislation setting the national TV ownership limit back to 35 percent from the FCC’s 45 percent.
“’This is such a disastrous proceeding,’ Hollings said after the FCC vote. `There’s no reason for it other than greed.’
“McCain has opposed legislation that would change the ownership cap, but he has not completely ruled out congressional action on the ownership rules,” AP reported.
NAHJ Expecting 2,000 for N.Y. Convention
David Westin, president of ABC News; Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News and Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News, are scheduled to discuss “Is Bigger Better?: Diversity and News Standards in the Changing Industry” when the National Association of Hispanic Journalists gathers some 2,000 people in New York June 26-28 for its annual convention.
The June 27 luncheon plenary is to focus on the state of newsroom diversity, network coverage of the war in Iraq and the nation’s changing media landscape.
An NAHJ news release says other convention topics will include:
The role of the press in covering the political crisis in Venezuela. A discussion on coverage of the war in with NAHJ members who were embedded in Iraq. Is there a difference in the quality of programming between Spanish-language media owned by the mainstream media versus Hispanic-owned media? A discussion on whether local radio is serving the needs of the Hispanic community. NAHJ will hold a town hall media on the FCC’s decision to deregulate the media industry and discuss the effects the decision will have on journalism.
Inquirer Names First Woman Top Editor
Amanda Bennett, editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has been named editor and executive vice president of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the paper reports. Both Lexington and Philadelphia are Knight Ridder papers.
“Bennett, 50, will be the newspaper’s first female editor. She replaces Walker Lundy, 60, who surprised colleagues last month by announcing his intention to retire after 18 months at the Inquirer,” the Philadelphia paper said.
“Asked by staffers in an afternoon meeting how long she intended to stay at the paper, Bennett said she meant to finish her career here.
“‘I feel like somebody’s just handed me the keys to a Maserati,’ she said, ‘and I’ll be damned if somebody’s going to take them away from me.'”
New York Times Crediting Freelancers
“The New York Times has begun to give more credit to freelance writers who contribute to articles in the wake of a controversy that led to the resignation of Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg,” Newsday reports.
“In the past few days, the Times has made the unusual move of publishing the names of freelancers who conduct interviews and provide other material for stories.”
Diversity Exemplars? How About Bell and Payne
If you want to talk about affirmative action in newsrooms, says retired Newsday editor Tony Insolia, let’s talk about Dennis Bell, who went from porter to Pulitzer Prize winner, or Bell’s mentor, Les Payne, now the paper’s deputy managing editor.
“Unfortunately, just bringing up the question of affirmative action in reciting [Jayson] Blair’s misdeeds does an injustice to the worthiness of a program whose goals are fair and noble,” Insolia wrote in a Newsday piece last week.
“I will always be proud of the late Dennis Bell. He was a porter in Newsday’s pressroom, a proof boy in the composing room and then a clerk in the sports department when he came to see me about getting some training to be a reporter. I gave him an application and a writing test, routine for all our applicants. His writing was clear and grammatical – a good start. His reporting skills were nonexistent. We sent him to an 11-week course in journalism at our expense.
“Though he was not promised a job upon completion, he did well enough for us to hire him as a beginner reporter. As a staff reporter, he progressed to a point where he later was a participant in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on hunger in Africa. He was promoted to the Washington Bureau,” Insolia wrote.
Bell went through the Maynard Institute’s since-discontinued Summer Program for Minority Journalists in 1978. He died at age 46 in 1995, ten years after his Pulitzer, succumbing to congestive heart failure and pneumonia.
“His mentor was Les Payne, another black journalist with a hugely successful history at Newsday,” Insolia’s piece continued.
“Payne, one of the original six trainees, came to Newsday after a stint in Vietnam on Gen. William Westmoreland’s information staff. Now Newsday’s deputy managing editor, he has been involved in several efforts that have won Pulitzer Prizes.”
Payne told Journal-isms that the program Insolia referenced grew out of a decision by Bill Moyers, publisher of Newsday from 1967 to 1970, after the Kerner Commission report of 1968 that recommended that newspapers hire more black reporters. “Moyers set aside six Newsday reporter jobs for black staffers; Insolia remembers me as being one of those young black reporters hired under Moyers’ program,” Payne said.
Insolia retired in 1987 after 32 years at Newsday, the last eight as top editor.
“Mary (as in Janet) Cooke” but not “Mary Wilkerson”
“I vowed I wouldn’t add to the thousands of column inches written on Jayson Blair, and what his sins will cost the profession I’ve devoted my life to. But then I remembered something that happened in 1981, on my first day at The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson,” writes Mary C. Curtis in the Charlotte Observer.
“The desk chief introduced his new copy editor: ‘Meet Mary Cooke.’ Dead silence. Then, he blushed, coughed and quickly corrected: ‘I mean Mary Curtis.’
“In that moment, I realized I was starting out this job in a hole, one dug by someone I had never even met,” she writes, referring to former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, a black woman whose fabrication led her employer to return its Pulitzer Prize.
“To me, this [Blair] story is personal in another way. I worked as an editor at The New York Times for 8 1/2 years. . . .When I was there, there were also people like Isabel Wilkerson, a soft-spoken African American woman who won a Pulitzer Prize.
“Funny how no one’s ever called me Mary Wilkerson.”
- Fannie Flono in the Charlotte Observer:
” It’s not diversity that’s hurting this profession. It’s how we’ve done our jobs. Readers say too often our performance has been lousy.”
