Carole Simpson Loses ABC Weekend Anchor Job
Carole Simpson, an Emmy-winning senior correspondent at ABC News, announced last night that she was vacating the weekend anchor desk after 15 years, leaving network prime-time newscasts with no African American anchors.
“It’s been my great pleasure to have brought you the news on the weekends for 15 years,” Simpson said. “Thank you for allowing me into your homes. I will miss you,” she told the audience in remarks recorded by the National Association of Black Journalists.
“Simpson told viewers she would be staying with ABC News, filing reports on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and on the weekly Sunday broadcast. She ended by looking into the camera and saying with her one-of-a-kind voice: ‘I’m Carole Simpson and I used to tell you every Sunday, “Have a good week and good night,” but now it?s time to say goodbye,’ ” NABJ reported.
Spokesman Jeffrey Schneider told Journal-isms last night that under Simpson’s new contract with ABC, running through 2005, Simpson will be a senior correspondent for “World News Tonight” and “World News Weekend,” serve as an ambassador to schools on behalf of ABC News, continue to anchor the “Portraits of Pride” segments that run during Black History Month, and provide radio commentary for ABC News Radio.
He said the weekend show would have various hosts for the time being, and continued to praise Simpson’s contributions to ABC.
NABJ expressed its disappointment. “For far too long there has been a void for black anchors on the networks in prime time,” said Vice President-Broadcast Barbara Ciara, managing editor and anchor at WTKR-TV in Norfolk. “The last major player was Bryant Gumbel (on NBC’s ‘The Today Show’) and before that (NABJ founding member) Max Robinson on ABC News before Peter Jennings took over. So we’ve made no progress over the decades in terms of diversifying the network newscasts.”
“We all realize that we must do more, but ABC News was a pioneer,” Schneider told Journal-isms.
Asked who else was in the pipeline at ABC for anchor jobs, he mentioned Robin Roberts, who has anchored “Good Morning America,” and Elizabeth Vargas, who anchors on “Prime Time Live.”
“It was a good long run,” Simpson said in the New York Daily News. “It lasted longer than I thought I would. I can’t say I won’t miss it. But I’m quite excited about the challenge ahead.”
Of her new school assignment, she told the News’ Stephen Battaglio, “I love young people and I’m concerned about their future. I feel they have no clue as to what is going on.”
“Simpson said she has been alarmed at hearing friends’ anecdotes about young people refer to direct-mail catalogues as magazines and Rush Limbaugh’s opinionated talk show as radio news,” the News said.
“I’m not trying to get kids interested in journalism,” she told the newspaper. “I want to talk them about freedom of the press and the First Amendment.”
As Battaglio noted, Simpson was the only black woman ever to regularly anchor a Big Three network newscast.
AP Considers Rewards for Diversifying Sources
New Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley says “a strong effort is being made to bring more of an ethnic voice into the AP’s reporting by focusing on minority sourcing.
“To that end, Curley said he was toying with implementing an award system to raise incentives among reporters,” reports Joanne Yuan, who covered the Associated Press Managing Editors convention in Phoenix for the convention newspaper, the Gazette.
Curley also said the news cooperative would “accelerate the AP’s expansion into international markets, with the organization already working to create a Chinese Associated Press and a news wire distributed entirely in Arabic,” Yuan reported.
Curley, who became CEO when Lou Boccardi retired June 1, made the comments during “A Conversation with Tom Curley” on Thursday.
Curley had been publisher of USA Today, which, like its parent Gannett Co. became a lightning rod for conservatives opposed to such efforts as encouraging reporters to diversify their source lists and making sure front pages featured a diversity of faces.
The AP, meanwhile, was accused of rolling back diversity efforts — a charge strongly denied by management — during contract negotiations earlier this year with the News Media Guild.
In other developments at the conference:
- The Freedom Forum previewed a 26-minute documentary that examines the role the press played in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. The film is to be the centerpiece of the Newseum’s “Civil Rights and Diversity” exhibit to open in Washington in 2006, Lynh Bui reported.
Moses Newsom, Gene Roberts and John Seigenthaler, who reported on the front lines of the movement, participated in a panel discussion afterward. Newsom was a reporter, editor and executive editor of the Afro-American newspapers in Baltimore; Roberts covered protests and school integration for the New York Times and Seigenthaler was editor and publisher of the Nashville Tennessean.
- The Navajo Times plans to go before the Navajo Tribal Council this week to ask that the paper be allowed to become independent, according to its publisher, Tom Arviso Jr., the Associated Press reported.
“Unlike other tribal newspapers, we really do advocate and stand up for the people’s right to know. We believe in freedom of the press, and we practice that to the best of our abilities. With most tribal newspapers, they are controlled by their government officials. . . . The Navajo government tried to censor us a few times, and we stood our ground,” Arviso said in a q-and-a with Amanda Lee Myers of the convention newspaper. Arviso appeared on a panel called “Publishing in a Language Other Than English” with Gilbert Bailon, president and editor of Al Día, a Spanish-language branch of the Dallas Morning News; and Luis Manuel Ortiz, editorial director for Ashland Media, a Phoenix-based company that publishes La Voz and TV y Más, Spanish-language weeklies, Lynh Bui reported.
- A huge gap separates how journalism schools educate students and what reporters face in the newsroom, according to a panel of five journalists on “Educating Future Journalists.”
Susan Goldberg, executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, “said diversity, both in newsrooms and in coverage, was a relatively new concept in journalism and something students should be educated about,” reported Sara Thorson in the convention newspaper.
“‘When I went to journalism school, nobody talked about diversity or covering a diverse society,’ she said. She added that future journalists also need excellent ethical decision-making and critical-thinking skills,” Goldberg said in Thorson’s story.
- Calvin Stovall, managing editor of the News Journal in Wilmington, Del., was one of 11 new members elected to the APME board of directors, reports Noah Austin.
Bay Area’s Faith Fancher Succumbs to Breast Cancer
Faith Fancher, a longtime reporter for KTVU-TV San Francisco, died Sunday after a six-year battle against breast cancer. She was 53.
“After her cancer diagnosis, Fancher and several of her friends founded ‘Friends of Faith,’ which raised money to promote breast cancer research and to help low-income women with breast cancer,” the Contra Costa Times reported.
A 2000 report by WebMD and CNN began:
“Diagnosed in 1997, Fancher had a mastectomy. Then last June, she found ‘a little pimple’ in her reconstructed breast, in which a small amount of tissue had been allowed to remain. It was cancerous; Fancher had a lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation, which left her too weak to work or even putter in her garden.
“Yet she continues to make the rounds of luncheons and fund-raisers, fired by a simple fact that she repeats again and again: While African-American women are less likely than white women to get breast cancer, they are much more likely to die from it.
“‘It knocked me for a loop,’ says Fancher, who spends much of her time now lobbying for more money for early-detection programs, including mammography and breast self-exam. ‘I mean, my first thought was, why are we dying?’
Another 2000 report in The Berkeleyan at the University of California at Berkeley began:
“When Journalism Professor Bill Drummond looks out over each new class, he counts how many women are left-handed. Usually it’s one in eight — about the same number that will be stricken with breast cancer at some point in their lives, he sadly calculates.
“‘It’s a statistic that has burrowed into my brain,’ said Drummond, whose wife has battled breast cancer for the last three years. ‘Because of what we’ve gone through, I can’t help thinking about it.'”
“Fancher began working at KTVU in 1983 and covered many important Bay Area stories, including the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1991 East Bay firestorm,” the Contra Costa Times story continued. She was a native of Franklin, Tenn.
Post Ombudsman Disagrees on Killing “Boondocks”
“Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. comes right to the point: ‘The Boondocks strips in question commented on the private life of the national security adviser and its relationship to her official duties in ways that violated our standards for taste, fairness and invasion of privacy,'” writes the Washington Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler.
“As for the lack of an explanation [to readers, Downie] says: ‘We edit all parts of the paper every day, including the comics, and do not usually notify readers about what we are not publishing or why.'”
The sequence in question had the characters in the strip deciding to fix up Condoleezza Rice with a man in hopes of leading the administration to a less warlike posture.
“McGruder’s strip is popular and about 250 newspapers publish it. An editor at Universal Press Syndicate, the distributor for ‘The Boondocks,’ says that The Post was the only newspaper to kill this series of strips. There were no calls or complaints about it from other papers, he says,” Getler continued in his Sunday column.
“Once Post readers caught on, and caught up with the strip in other papers and Web sites, plenty of complaints were made — against the paper. . . . Many felt The Post was engaging in censorship, and that plenty of other comics and cartoons can be viewed as insulting to a public figure. ‘The Post has committed the cardinal sin of the humorless,’ added another. ‘It failed to recognize satire when it saw it. As the strip makes clear, we’re laughing at the guy who suggested finding Condi a guy, not at Condi.'”
“I may need a refresher course in sensitivity training, but I also found the sequence of strips within the bounds of allowable satire,” Getler concluded. “I don’t know a thing about Rice’s personal life, nor do the characters in the strip, and I think readers understand that. The ‘Boondocks’ characters, and their creator, were being mischievous and irreverent, in their mind’s view of the world, about a high-profile public figure, and that seems okay to me.”
“Where’s Outrage” Over Remarks on Asians?
“LPGA veteran Jan Stephenson says in the November issue of Golf Magazine that, ‘The Asians are killing our Tour. Absolutely killing it. They lack emotion, their refusal to speak English when they can. They rarely speak,'” writes Aski Soga of the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, who chairs the Media Watch Committee of the Asian American Journalists Association.
“She goes on to say, ‘Our Tour is predominately international and the majority of them are Asians. They have taken it over.'”
“Stephenson did offer an apology the next day, although it was of the sort we hear so often these days when a public figure gets caught being a little more candid than it might be good for their careers: Sorry, but I meant no offense,” Soga writes.
“Where’s the outrage? Where’s the play on the TV news? Where’s the columnists and editorial writers lining up to condemn yet another instance of racism in professional sports, perhaps the most integrated public arena in our society?” asks Soga.
Baltimore Sun Seeking Diversity in Opinion Writing
“We have made a conscious decision to increase the diversity on our commentary page,” Jean Thompson, associate editor at the Baltimore Sun, tells Journal-isms.
“We currently run the syndicated columnists Leonard Pitts and Clarence Page, once a week each, and we run the occasional commissioned pieces and commentary from the wires. We’ve always said, however, that we could do better, recognizing the demographics of Baltimore (65 percent African American) and of our readership region, which includes the surrounding counties (25 percent African American). So we’re making a conscious effort to improve. We’re shopping for another column, and we’re going to be quite deliberate about running commentary by black writers more frequently.”
In addition, Thompson said, the Sun is looking for an editorial writer. “Experienced editorial writers, and reporters who have at least five years of experience, are encouraged to apply. The opening is the result of a retirement: C. Fraser Smith, longtime state politics reporter and columnist, has left us to write a book and do radio commentary. He’s keeping his column, I should add, so our vacancy does not include a column. . . . See our editorial page at www.sunspot.net. Applicants can contact me at 800-829-8000, Ext. 6872.”
The developments are significant given the Sun’s recent history: In the early 1990s, Garland S. Thompson and Wiley Hall III were writing mainstream black commentary in the Sun and the now-defunct Evening Sun, respectively; since 1995, the black voice has been Gregory Kane, who bashes “black liberals” and the “P.C. crowd.”
Jacqueline Thomas left as editorial page editor in December 2001 after heading the editorial page for four and a half years, replaced by Dianne Donovan. Though Thomas is African American, her relationship with the black community and other blacks on the staff had soured, Hall said then.
Today, Thompson is the only African American on the Sun’s 10-member editorial board.
Trotter Group Hearing Marc Morial, Kenneth Kaunda
New National Urban League President Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans; and Kenneth Kaunda, the founding president of Zambia, are among those scheduled to address 24 members of the William Monroe Trotter Group, the informal group of African American columnists meeting this week in Nashville at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center.
Trotter members heard last night from John Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, on the war on terrorism, and are to hear from Reynaldo P. Glover, board chairman at Fisk University; Dr. James A. Hefner, president of Tennessee State University; and the Rev. St. George Crosse, a Baltimore activist who was a special ambassador under Ronald Reagan, who is to discuss the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada.
Kaunda remains a senior statesman in his southern African country, which borders the Congo and Angola. Last week, his name was floated to chair a national symposium being held this week to discuss the country’s problems, but it was decided he was too close to the current administration.
FCC’s Ownership Rules Get Court Date
“The Federal Communications Commission’s controversial media ownership rules will get their day in court,” reports Daily Variety.
“The Philadelphia appeals court that placed a hold on the new regs two months ago has skedded oral arguments for those appealing the rules to begin Jan. 12.
“Several groups of affiliated TV broadcasters and radio companies such as the National Assn. of Broadcasters, the Network Affiliated Stations Alliance and Prometheus Radio are challenging the rules in court, arguing that they give big media congloms too much power.
“Meanwhile, Fox Entertainment Group and Viacom/CBS believe the new rules are still too strict and want even more flexibility to purchase more stations and other media companies; they too are challenging the regs in court.”
Could Malkin Be a “Brown Jelly Bean” After All?
Some of us first heard of Michelle Malkin after Unity ’99 in Seattle, when she dissed the gathering of 6,000 journalists of color in her Seattle Times column, which began:
“I am not a brown jelly bean.
“I am more than my skin color. I am more than my parents’ homeland. I am more than the bean-counters’ box on a job application. For better or worse, I want readers to know me for my ideas, ideology and idiosyncrasies — not for my Filipino heritage.
“This is why, after more than a half-dozen years in the newspaper business, I refuse to join race-based organizations such as the Asian-American Journalists Association.”
Malkin since left Seattle for the national spotlight and the more lucrative life as a syndicated conservative columnist.
Thus, it was surprising to see a Malkin column last week attacking the unfair treatment she said Louisiana Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal, a conservative Indian American, had received at the hands of New York Times editorial columnist Adam Cohen.
“Such chutzpah the Times has to preach to the rest of us about racial inclusion! For a look at whom the pasty-faced Mr. Cohen parties with every morning, check out the photos of all but one of the 15 ghost-toned, porcelain-skinned and moderately marshmallow-colored Times editorial board members at http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/editorial-board.html,” she concluded, apparently unaware that two of those “moderately marshmallow-colored” members are Hispanic.
More important, though, could Malkin be endorsing the dreaded “racial bean-counting?” And would that make Malkin a “brown jelly bean” after all?
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