NAJA Sticks to Call to Ban Indian Sports Names
Despite a decision by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis to reverse its nine-year-old ban on using Native American nicknames for sports teams, the Native American Journalists Association, disagreeing with the decision, plans to call on “people of conscience everywhere to cease publishing and broadcasting sports teams’ Indian mascot names and images,” according to a draft statement prepared for the NAJA conference in Green Bay, Wis., next week.
“Since 1992, six U.S. newspapers have demonstrated that it is possible to report accurately on professional, collegiate and local high school sports while avoiding the use of words and images that disparage Native Americans, their cultures, their religions and their appearance:
“The Oregonian, of Portland, Ore.; The Portland (Maine) Press Herald; The St. Cloud (Minn.) Times; The Kansas City (Mo.) Star, The Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star and The Minneapolis Star Tribune set standards of decency over racism when their editors established policies that ended the printing of words such as Redskin and images such as the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo,” the draft says.
In his Sunday column, Star Tribune Editor Anders Gyllenhaal wrote, “The paper will no longer ban the team names. They will appear in the paper as they come up in the news. But reporters and editors will remember that these can be loaded phrases, and that how they’re used is as important as whether they are.”
“We’ll avoid the slang and cartoonish cliches the names tend to attract and pay close attention to headlines, subheads and captions, which often speak the loudest. We’ll use city, state or school names in box scores and daily listings, the clearest way to serve up what are the most prevalent references to most of these teams. We’ll run alternate logos for teams that have them.
“But all of these choices will be guided by a different principle from in the past: Instead of a ban, which newspapers rarely apply to any words, editors and reporters will use judgment and care to produce respectful coverage. That’s the approach we take with other potentially offensive words, including most profanity.
” . . . The move has less to do with nickname disputes than with the need to clarify the paper’s standards of journalism and respond to the changing society covered in these pages.”
In an editorial Monday, the newspaper added that “newsrooms should reflect reality as accurately as possible. But it’s also reality that Indians do not like the use of ‘Braves’ and ‘Redskins’ and other nicknames that have been appropriated by sports groups. The teams themselves should drop them.”
Replied NAJA in its draft: “For 500 years, the popular images about Native Americans, who we are, how we look and how we live, has been shaped and reshaped by other people. Over the last 100 years, Native American story tellers, image makers and dream keepers have eroded our colonizer’s misconceptions of us.
“NAJA looks forward to the day when these images are retired along with Little Sambo, Fu Manchu and the Frito Bandito.”
A week from today, NAJA plans to release the 2003 edition of “Reading Red,” a “report and content analysis on coverage by the largest newspapers in the United States.”
Sulzberger: It Wasn’t Blair Who Toppled Editors
New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. says Jayson Blair didn’t cause the resignations of Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald M. Boyd, the blame goes to what he euphemistically called “cultural issues.”
“It was a much broader series of issues that people have written about and reported on about engaging the staff. About decision-making, and about being too hierarchical; not enough bubbling up from below; how personnel decisions were made; all of those things that bubbled up or more than bubbled up from the staff at our staff meeting back at the movie theater. Those were the real issues,” Sulzberger told the New York Observer.
“It was never Jayson Blair,” he continued. “Jayson Blair as an issue went away. It was not a tipping point. It was more what one would call a cultural issue.”
Sulzberger also took the opportunity to challenge reports that the board of directors pressured him to get rid of Raines and Boyd.
“‘I’ve read a lot of poor journalism on this subject. Let me be crystal clear,’ Mr. Sulzberger said. ‘The board of directors of the New York Times Co., whom I report to, was in complete support of these actions when we were trying to deal with the Jayson Blair issue, through the aftermath of the Jayson Blair issue, up to Howell and Gerald’s retirement. I never once felt pressure from them to make a decision or a call. The same is absolutely true of the family. The trustees . . . were entirely supportive of what we were doing and what we were trying to do. Up to and including Howell and Gerald leaving. If somebody told you differently, they don’t know the facts,'” the Observer wrote.
In other developments:
— A Pulitzer Prize won in 1932 by a Moscow correspondent for The Times, Walter Duranty, is being reconsidered. As the New York Daily News reports, Duranty, an admirer of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, earned the prize for stories about the Soviet dictator’s five-year plan that were published in 1931 — before millions perished in the Stalin-engineered famine that ravaged Ukraine. Duranty denied in reports for The Times that there was a famine.
— A growing number of commentators are questioning why more hasn’t been made of the acknowledgment by Times reporter Judith Miller that her main source for articles on the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein had been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is close to top Pentagon officials, as Howard Kurtz wrote May 28 in the Washington Post. “Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?” Kurtz asked then, and subsequently, Newsweek magazine, Pacifica’s “Democracy Now!” The Nation magazine and a number of cable commentators have asked as well.
— Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. told the Washington Association of Black Journalists last night that the Blair case was “in no way about diversity” and would not affect Post diversity efforts.
— At a Cleveland forum on the Times saga prompted by a broadcast from there of National Public Radio’s “Tavis Smiley Show,” Debra Adams Simmons, managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, said that “Other African-Americans who work at the New York Times and other newspapers across the country are now under the microscope because of Jayson Blair . . . I’m mentoring a young man who is an intern this summer at the New York Times, and this is the worst possible time for him to be there because every phone call he makes, every sentence that he writes, is being scrutinized,” the Beacon Journal reported.
— In another assessment of Gerald Boyd, Times reporter Ginger Thompson said that Boyd fought resistance within the Times newsroom to make sure that the “How Race is Lived in America” series, in which 20 Times reporters and photographers spent a year traveling the country to describe America’s race relations, “asked hard questions about one of society’s most troubling topics,” Martin C. Evans and James T. Madore reported in Newsday.
“He was a very important internal force in driving those stories when some were questioning whether the Times really should be spending so much time on them or devoting so many reporters,” Thompson said in the piece.
— In a passionately argued essay on africana.com, Amy Alexander wrote that “What you didn’t hear, and likely still haven’t heard, is the underlying truth of the current humiliating debacle: that Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, despite their in-house reputations as stand-offish and unapproachable, challenged the journalistic status quo on issues the industry has never privileged, including the fair and equitable treatment of women, ethnic minorities and other groups usually left outside of the White Boys Club that controls mainstream media. In doing so, they made a lot of enemies. . . . Boyd, it goes without saying, likely had any number of enemies inside the paper simply because a black man who rises to the second-highest editorial position at the nation’s top newspaper is damn sure going to piss off many white guys who believe that by birthright, they deserved the job he got.”
— Vernon Jarrett, black journalists’ elder statesman who came into journalism nearly 60 years ago “to change racial relations in America through the pen,” said in a column by E.R. Shipp in the New York Daily News that he was disappointed in Blair, black man, as much as Blair, journalist.
“Do you know how many blacks would die to get to The New York Times? And for him to take it so lightly. Here’s a little dude who showed no appreciation even for Boyd,” Jarrett was quoted as saying.
— In the “Whew!” category, the New York Post’s Page Six says, “We hear that ‘West Wing’ creator Aaron Sorkin — who coincidentally dates Times op-ed columnist and Raines favorite Maureen Dowd — has passed on a prospective TV miniseries about dysfunctional newsrooms for which Blair would have served as a consultant.”
FCC’s Powell Says He Heard the Public
Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael K. Powell dismisses as ”garbage” claims that the interests of the American public went unheard when the FCC last week approved landmark changes allowing further consolidation of media ownership, according to an interview Powell gave to the Boston Globe.
Also, Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., chairman of the Commerce Committee that oversees the FCC, is mounting a public defense of the commissioners’ relaxation of media ownership regulations, which some lawmakers want to roll back, reports Media Week. The agency’s action was “reasonable and justifiable,” Tauzin said in a letter to be sent to colleagues today.
“From Newspapers’ Blacklist to Bestseller”
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez “was the L.A. Times reporter who bowed out of journalism with all the flourish a 3,400-word resignation letter affords (the lengthiest newspaper stories, the kind we never seem to read to the bitter end, don’t take this long),” writes the Miami Herald.
“That player-hating missive . . . accused her employer of everything from sexism to racism to genocide against Native American people. It named names, namely those of colleagues ‘simply not smart enough or talented enough’ to have the column-writing gigs she coveted.
“She threw one of those take-this-job-and-shove-it tantrums, threatened to write a novel and wound up on Medicaid.”
Now she’s author of “The Dirty Girls Social Club,” “which hooked a $475,000 publishing deal and (according to the hype) was written in six days at Starbucks,” the Herald says.
Derrick Blakley Resurfaces at Chicago’s CBS Station
Three months after he signed off from Chicago’s WMAQ-Channel 5, Derrick Blakley is about to return to Chicago television news — but this time via WBBM-Channel 2, reports Robert Feder in the Chicago Sun-Times.
“Channel 2 officials are expected to announce this week that they have signed Blakley to a long-term deal as a Monday-through-Friday news anchor at the CBS-owned station. At the outset, he is expected to anchor the 4:30 p.m. newscast alongside Mary Ann Childers,” Feder wrote. “Blakley, 49, has been off the air since March 3 , when he abruptly broke off negotiations with Channel 5 bosses. He had been working without a contract since his previous agreement with the NBC-owned station expired last July. . . . His move to Channel 2 marks a return to CBS, where Blakley spent seven years as a network correspondent for CBS News.”
Tim Reid Officially Joins Comcast-Radio One Venture
Actor, producer and director Tim Reid will serve as senior executive supervising producer for TV One, the new cable television network targeting adult African American and urban viewers backed by Comcast Corp. and Radio One, the new network announces.
“Reid’s New Millennium Studios will also play a significant role as a content provider for the new channel scheduled to launch in January 2004.
“New Millennium Studios will offer the network a first look at all of its original content targeting African American adults and will provide three made-for-TV movies that will premiere on TV One, three entertainment series and three non-fiction series, including a public affairs program, to the new network. New Millennium will also serve as TV One’s main post- production house and provide a variety of editing and production services.
“In addition to a public affairs series, non-fiction series to be produced by New Millennium are expected to include ‘American Legacy,’ based on provocative and fascinating tales featured in American Legacy magazine, which will chronicle the accomplishments, tragedies and the greatness behind some of the most unique African-Americans who helped to shape America; and ‘After the Glory,’ which will take a penetrating look inside the world of some of America’s greatest sports heroes and discover how they are coping with life now that the cheers and glory have faded.”
The announcement was made at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association convention in Chicago.
In a progress report on TV One before last weekend’s convention, Krissah Williams reported in the Washington Post that CEO Johnathan Rodgers and his consultants “have spent countless hours sifting through a pile of show ideas and tapes shipped by writers and producers pitching their concepts. For now, the network has no plans to produce any original situation comedies or movies.
“Rodgers has also been flying around the country to meet with black celebrities and Hollywood producers and to negotiate licensing fees with studios for the right to air black shows that ran years ago. Licensing fees for old favorites can cost millions of dollars a year, according to cable industry executives.
“. . . Indeed, says Rodgers, the most frustrating part of this undertaking has been the amount of time he has had to spend explaining why he thinks there is room for more than one major cable network focused on African Americans. His channel is shooting for an older audience than D.C.-based BET, whose rap and hip-hop music-video shows target a younger demographic.”
Tribune Co. Considering Spanish Daily in Chicago?
“Is Tribune Co. looking to replicate in its Chicago hometown the success of its New York Spanish-language daily Hoy?” asks Editor & Publisher. “Tribune won’t comment, other than saying through a spokesperson that the paper is ‘looking at how to serve all our markets, including Chicago.’
“However, company officials have noted pointedly that Louis Sito, who launched Hoy from Newsday in 1998, was named last February to the newly created position of president of Hispanic media with a mandate to look at new products. Rumors about a Chicago Spanish-language daily have been flying since Chicago Tribune “Media and Marketing” columnist Jim Kirk reported that the paper was considering expanding its Spanish-language weekly Exito to Monday-through-Friday publication, and changing its name to Hoy.
Angelo Figueroa Leaves People en Español
Angelo Figueroa, the founding editor of People en Español, left the magazine to work with Time magazine and AOL on a Latino project that will launch this summer, reports Pareja Media Match.
“Prior to coming to People en Español, Figueroa worked at the San Jose Mercury News, as both a news columnist and later as the founding editor of its Spanish language weekly, Nuevo Mundo. He also worked as a journalist at the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Examiner and the Long Beach Press Telegram. The 46 year-old Puerto Rican is married with three children and currently resides in New Jersey.
“Richard Perez-Feria will be taking over Figueroa’s position.”
Figueroa is also a 1987 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists.
Al Jazeera Denied Space in D.C. Office Building
“Qatar-based al-Jazeera is a 24-hour news network that has drawn praise for being more independent than most Arab media — and criticism, especially in the United States, for showing video of American POWs during the Iraq war and for its perceived sympathy to Saddam Hussein,” reports the Washington Post.
“The network wants to sublease 17,000 square feet of studio space from a television production company in a K Street office building. But landlord Cafritz Co. denied permission for the sublease, describing al-Jazeera and its television production arm in a letter as ‘potentially being a target for people who do not understand or do not agree with its business principles and philosophies of those of its ownership.’
“Conus Communications Co., which is trying to sublet the space to al-Jazeera, sued Cafritz in D.C. Superior Court last month, seeking a court injunction to allow the sublet.”