N.Y. Times Piece on Help for Athlete Draws Fire
A 2,540-word Sunday piece by the New York Times’ Mike Freeman headlined “When Values Collide: Clarett Got Unusual Aid in Ohio State Class,” on star football player Maurice Clarett, has drawn an unusual op-ed page rebuke from Guido H. Stempel III, professor emeritus of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.
Freeman, who is black, wrote that “Clarett walked out of a midterm exam last fall in an introductory course in African-American and African studies without completing the exam. He never retook the midterm and did not take the final exam. But he passed the course after taking oral exams instead, an Ohio State official said.”
Freeman quoted an associate professor, Paulette Pierce, saying “she worked directly with Clarett and administered the two oral exams because she wanted to motivate him and because his lack of academic preparation required her to use unconventional means to test his knowledge.
“The graduate student, who spoke on condition that she not be publicly identified, contended that Clarett had been given preferential treatment because he was a star football player. Two graduate assistants said they thought that Clarett had been the only one of about 80 students in the course who had been given oral exams by Pierce,” the story continued.
Freeman followed up Monday with a story quoting the president of Ohio State, Karen A. Holbrook, saying the university would investigate the allegations.
But yesterday in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch, Stempel blasted the story as “not up to accepted standards of journalism in several ways.
“The two sources didn’t agree with each other on several points relating to Clarett’s performance and testing in an African-American and African Studies course, yet Freeman chose to build his story around what the anonymous assistant told him, even though he related in the story that she is no longer at Ohio State, that she had psychiatric problems and that she was evicted from the hotel in which she lived,” Stempel writes.
“That doesn’t sound like the ideal source, does it? Why, then, did he opt to go with her version? I’m afraid the answer is that it was more interesting; he chose sensationalism over accuracy.” Apart from the anonymous sourcing, and the focus on only one course, Stempel criticizes the Times for not trying hard enough to reach the player.
“The anonymous teaching assistant may be right about everything, but I have seen stories like this before, and they don’t usually turn out that way. That The New York Times would run a story so inadequately reported so soon after the controversy over fraudulent reporting by Jayson Blair is surprising,” Stempel concluded.
There is no sign that the Times is backing down from the story. Two corrections have run, but on relatively minor points. One was on the location of a high school, the other said the Times got the name of the Columbus Dispatch wrong.
“Last Hispanic Owner of Hispanic Media” Makes Plea
“You’re looking at the last Hispanic owner of Hispanic media,” said Raul Alarcon, CEO of Spanish Broadcasting System, reports Media Week. Alarcon is making a last-ditch effort to derail Univision Communications’ $3.5 billion acquisition of Hispanic Broadcasting Corp., neither of which is owned by Hispanics.
Alarcon told a news conference of his most recent filing against the merger with the Federal Communications Commission. “This is a very potentially dangerous transaction in terms of the FCC’s policies to ensure diversity, localism, competition and minority ownership,” he said, according to Media Week. “This is a very potentially dangerous transaction in terms of the FCC’s policies to ensure diversity, localism, competition and minority ownership.”
Media Accused of Underreporting Iraq Deaths
“According to official military records, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq since May 2 is actually 85. This includes a staggering number of non-combat deaths. Even if killed in a non-hostile action, these soldiers are no less dead, their families no less aggrieved. And it’s safe to say that nearly all of these people would still be alive if they were still back in the States,” writes Greg Mitchell in Editor & Publisher.
“Nevertheless, the media continues to report the much lower figure of 33 as if those are the only deaths that count.
“A Web site called Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is tracking the deaths, by whatever cause, of U.S. military personnel in Iraq, based on official Pentagon and CENTCOM press releases and Army Times and CNN casualty trackers. Their current count is 85 since May 2.”
“Univision Not Told Not to Show Protests, but . . .”
A panel on Iraq war coverage at the recent National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention concluded the coverage was “simplistic, unapologetically patriotic, and generally unquestioning of military pronouncements,” according to Mary Sanchez, writing in the Kansas City Star.
“Maria Elena Salinas, an anchor with Univision, noted that some television stations in America were told by management that viewers tuned out, or turned off, the stations they felt gave too much coverage of war protesters.
“Salinas said Univision was not told to not show protests, but she noted Spanish-speaking viewers were very interested in seeing reports on their soldier sons and daughters,” Sanchez writes.
Jim Sleeper Responds on Race Card, Expectations
Back on June 4, we wrote the following: “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.” The correction the paper ran is in the June 4 column.
Sleeper responds, chiefly to another part of the item, in a letter at the end of today’s posting. He says in the letter and elsewhere that the editor was actually covering for Wakefield, whom he compared to Jayson Blair.
Ownership Rules Dealt Setback in House
“The recent decision by federal regulators to loosen media ownership rules, already under fire in the Senate, took another blow in Congress yesterday,” reports the New York Times.
“This setback was dealt by the House Appropriations Committee, which approved a budget amendment that would make it harder for big broadcasting companies to acquire more television stations.
“The vote represented a defeat for Michael K. Powell, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, who has led the effort to change the rules. It was also a rebuke to the Republican House leadership and the Bush administration, strong supporters of the commission’s efforts.”
In an op-ed piece the same day, William Safire offered this analysis of thhe move: “Take the force of right-wingers upholding community standards who are determined to defend local control of the public airwaves; combine that with the force of lefties eager to maintain diversity of opinion in local media; add in the independent voters’ mistrust of media manipulation; then let all these people have access to their representatives by e-mail and fax, and voilà! Congress awakens to slap down the power grab. Or at least half of it.”
Asian American Group Protests Fox Show “Banzai”
“An Asian-American media group Thursday protested the Fox network’s airing of ‘Banzai,’ a parody of a Japanese game show, saying it demeans and stereotypes Asian people,” Reuters reports.
“Outside a network presentation in Hollywood, about 20 members of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans carried signs and shouted into bullhorns, protesting the show. The program, which debuted to strong ratings last Sunday, features an off-screen announcer speaking in a clipped parody of a Japanese accent, fake Japanese language graphics,and a karate-chopping middle-aged Asian host known as Mr. Banzai.”
“I Hope Brokaw Reads This and Offers Her a Job”
“I can say it’s one of the biggest turning points in my life finding journalism,” says Gwen Lankford in Indian Country Today. “I feel like I’m blessed to have found my niche.”
Lankford, 28, has “already paved the way as the first American Indian news reporter at NBC affiliate KECI-TV in Missoula [Mont.] She’s also worked as a presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Interior, as a national advance worker for former Vice President Al Gore, and as a minority-outreach official at the 2000 Democratic National Convention,” the newspaper reports.
“Right now, she’s my greatest recruiter,” says Denny McAuliffe, associate professor of journalism, Native American journalist in residence at the Missoula program where Lankford studies, and a former editor at the Washington Post who returns to work there from time to time.
“She’s the simple reason why we need more American Indians in journalism. I hope she stays in journalism. I hope (NBC Nightly News anchor Tom) Brokaw reads this and offers her a job,” McAuliffe said.
Writers Continue to Weigh in on Bush’s Africa Trip
- Wiley A. Hall III, Afro-American newspapers:
“It is up to African Americans to demand that we invest as much in Africa as we have invested in Europe and the Middle East. “The continent, our homeland, is engulfed today in sorrow – civil war in Liberia, chaos in the Congo, poverty, disease and corruption from Cape to Horn. “We know there are no easy answers. There were no easy answers to the decades of chaos, famine and corruption we encountered in Europe.”
- Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press:
“Bush has made surprising positive strides with the AIDS initiative and the possible offer of American troops to Liberia, where a U.S. presence has been needed for the past three administrations.
“But going to Africa to preach to the choir was easy. I want to hear him make that same speech in front of his party’s most faithful and demand that they back his new efforts.
“American slavery was ‘one of history’s greatest crimes.’
“Now, Mr. President, come home and be the first president in history to seek justice for that crime.”
- Kweli Nziuto, BlackCommentator.com:
“Lessons on the evils and brutalities of slavery might be better served if they were delivered closer to Mr. Bush’s birthplace, where an entire community and a culture, to which he belongs, and one that forms the backbone of his political support and base, arose.
“. . . Africans themselves, having lived under racist colonial yokes for decades, understand only too well the nature of the beast they are confronting. They are therefore unlikely to be convinced that Mr. Bush’s heart all of a sudden has developed a soft spot for Africans and is dying to help them.”
- Mike Onwukwe, USAFricaonline (from Tanzania):
“The trip did not hold out any or serious hope for Africa, and will not sit or resonate well with the trend of things. Check your report card after the trip. Bush is advised by hardliners like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and VP Dick Cheney (who opposed Mandela’s release from prison under the racist apartheid regime). Some of these people in the U.S. see Africa as ‘the Hopeless Continent’ and they will continue to see Africa from the prism of malnourished child with permanent dripping nose and protruding stomach highly unlikely to develop its vast arrays of bestowed potentials.”
- Armstrong Williams, syndicated columnist:
“President Clinton did nothing for Africa. President Bush, on the other hand, has worked to create a new sense of possibilities throughout the sub-Saharan continent. He has done so by tripling our economic aid to Africa, providing military support, initiating a bold plan to stem the tide of AIDS and — gasp — actually meeting with the African heads of state (Something Clinton failed to do with any regularity). It would be nice if the Congressional Black Caucus could lend their support.
“Along the way, Bush has done more for Africa then any president in American history. Now that’s a fact.”
More From Jim Sleeper on Race and a Book Review
A letter to Journal-isms:
“I’ve never, ever talked to Sleeper!,” former San Francisco Chronicle writer Dean Wakefield told Journal-isms June 4, “And for him to compare two people just because they happen to be black is disgusting.”
I’m sorry to see Wakefield doing exactly what he did when I reached him on the morning of July 22, 1996, at his Chronicle extension (1-800-227-4423, ext. 6023), at his editor Patricia Holt’s urging, to ask how 12 paragraphs of a review I’d published in the Washington Post had showed up in his own review several weeks later. First, Wakefield insisted, as his editor did, that the fault in letting my work be published as his had been all hers. Then, just as he’s done now, he played the race card, linking himself to someone else who happens to be black, telling me, “As an African-American, I would never ‘lift’ a story, because we are already under the cloud of Janet Cooke.”
Difficult though it may be for some to believe, I had given no thought to Wakefield’s race. But his comment made me realize that if in truth he hadn’t plagiarized me, then his well-meaning, white-liberal editor had been scrambling to make him look good by confusing some of my review — which Wakefield had downloaded into his queue, without my byline or the Washington Post’s headline — for his own work. His editor had done that, but Wakefield had had several opportunities to catch the mistake. I don’t know why he didn’t; he didn’t give a straight answer — just as he doesn’t now, by insisting he never talked with me — and he played the race card then, too.
My May 13, 2003, Hartford Courant column recounted this incident in connection with the Jayson Blair debacle but never mentioned Wakefield’s name. I was attacking only the soft bigotry of liberal white editors’ low newsroom expectations. That’s what made the stories worth linking, and I’d hope both Wakefield and Blair would join in my criticisms.
Jim Sleeper