Beating Death Puts Cincinnati in Media Spotlight
“By Monday, the videotape of six officers engaged in a violent struggle Sunday with a 350-pound [black] man in North Avondale was airing on every national cable network,” Gregory Korte wrote in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“The BBC and the French newspaper Le Monde were calling, and all of them wanted to know what effect the incident would have on a city torn apart by four days of rioting following the 2001 police shooting of Timothy D. Thomas in Over-the-Rhine.
“‘This will get more scrutiny because it happened here,’ said Mayor Charlie Luken, a former television news anchor.
“Luken said he was frustrated that the national media were playing the same segments of the police cruiser tape over and over, with little context. ‘The first thing I see is a police officer violently attacked,’ he told any reporter who would listen,” Korte continued.
Korte elaborated yesterday on National Public Radio’s “The Tavis Smiley Show”: “I’m a little surprised — I shouldn’t be perhaps — but I’m a little surprised at how quickly this became a national story, and I think that’s just a function of how extraordinary the video is,” Korte said.
“The video is sensational. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s brutal and it’s violent, and for me, at least, it was tough to watch. I think you have to go back to 2001 and the events that led to the 2001 riots here . . . the conventional wisdom here is that one of the things that led to the frustrations that boiled over into street violence is that information about who killed Timothy Thomas, and why in a foot chase . . . did not get out immediately.
“And the lesson that was learned from that, for better or for worse . . . from the police was get the information out there immediately. And so what you saw on Sunday was within hours of the incident, the video was on local TV news, and from there, it was just a short track to national TV news.”
Smiley opined that perhaps all sides –including the news media — reacted before having all the facts.
Transparent Jones inquiry needed (Cincinnati Enquirer editorial)
Use PCP and become another statistic (Courtland Milloy, Washington Post)
Job opening on Enquirer editorial page
Mike Davis Dies, First Black Reporter at Constitution
Michael D. Davis, who in 1964 became the first black reporter on the Atlanta Constitution and went on to report for several other news organizations and to co-author a biography of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, died of liver failure in Washington. He was 65 and died Nov. 15, the Washington Post reports.
Davis’ father, Harvard Law School graduate John P. Davis, defended the Scottsboro boys, nine blacks framed in 1931 for allegedly raping two white women in Alabama. Dad also owned “Our World,” Ebony magazine’s chief competitor at the end of the 1940s. Ebony publisher John H. Johnson bought its assets after what Johnson has written was “a life-and-death struggle” between the two.
The younger Davis talked with Journal-isms back in 1992, when this column ran in the NABJ Journal. He said that when he arrived at the Constitution, where he said he was the first black reporter, “Negroes” were identified by race and were called “Mr.” and “Mrs.” only in obituaries.
He had graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he participated in civil rights sit-ins in the early 1960s, the Post said.
Davis also worked for the Baltimore Afro-American, where he was a Vietnam war correspondent; the Baltimore Sun; the San Diego Union; the Washington Star and WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., where he was metropolitan editor for three years.
At the Star, which folded in 1981, Davis covered City Hall, and later went to work as press secretary for Washington City Council members, including the late Chairman David Clarke.
Of “Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench” (Birch Lane Press), written with Hunter R. Clark, Davis told Journal-isms, “It’s more than just a book on Thurgood Marshall. It’s the story of the civil rights movement. It will give black journalists background on the things they need to know to be contemporary journalists. It’s a good reference tool, written by journalists from a journalist’s perspective. This is the real stuff, with first-hand observations.”
A Gallup Poll in Harlem: Rest of the Story
Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz Monday summarized a pre-Jayson Blair incident recounted in Arthur Gelb’s recent memoir “City Room” this way:
“Former New York Times managing editor Arthur Gelb reveals a Gallup Poll mini-scandal back in 1968. The paper had Gallup survey 399 black residents of Harlem, but was unable to locate some of the respondents for follow-up interviews. A ‘distraught’ George Gallup said that two temporary pollsters, ‘fearing to enter the decrepit buildings, had confessed to creating fictitious interviewees and answers to the questionnaires.’
“The poll was killed, Gelb says, and Gallup vowed to double-check such findings in the future.”
But there’s more to say about the African American involvement in the episode.
According to the book, Gallup had used 26 black questioners, of whom at least two confessed to creating fictitious interviewees. Not that the opinions weren’t genuine, however. “In some cases, they admitted, they had conducted their interviews in the street and made up the name and addresses of respondents,” Gelb wrote.
Moreover, it was two black journalists, reporter C. Gerald Fraser and photographer Don Hogan Charles, who discovered the misdeed after Gelb asked the two to check the list of respondents, which Gelb had requested so that the paper could take their pictures.
“When they began checking the list, they were nonplussed to discover that in a number of cases they could not find the respondents named as living at the addresses on the list. Other residents in those buildings told them they had no knowledge of the respondents,” Gelb wrote.
“‘We’ should not leave ourselves out of the history,” says Fraser. “It wasn’t that ‘the paper’ was unable to locate Gallup Poll respondents. . . . In journalism, ‘names make news.'”
Where’s Ed Gordon When We Need Him on R. Kelly?
Leave it to “Huggy Lowdown,” a morning gossip man on Washington, D.C.’s WPGC-FM, to remind us that Ed Gordon isn’t on BET when we need him.
A Gordon interview with R&B singer R. Kelly aired on May 8, 2002, on the since-canceled “BET Tonight With Ed Gordon,” shortly after Kelly’s arrest in Chicago. The singer was “sued by three women who allege he had sex with them when they were underage. A 26-minute videotape was sent anonymously to the Chicago Sun-Times showing what appeared to be Kelly engaging in a variety of sexual acts with a 14-year-old girl,” as the Sun-Times put it at the time. What is purported to be that tape has circulated widely.
“I want America to know that you can’t believe everything you hear, and nowadays you can’t believe everything you see,” Kelly told Gordon, who left BET after the network canceled most of its regular news and public affairs programming a year ago.
“I’ve done a lot of wrong things in my life,” Kelly continued, “but I am not a criminal. I’m not a monster that people — that people are saying I am, and if people out there have a tape of me, and they’re saying it’s me and a young girl, a minor, then they’re sadly mistaken or they’re lying.”
Today, Kelly’s lawyers are taking a different tack, according to the Associated Press — apparently no longer denying that it’s Kelly on the tape, as Huggy pointed out this morning.
“Included in the 11 motions Kelly’s attorneys filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court is the argument that the case should be dismissed because prosecutors failed to specify the date of the alleged crime in their indictment against Kelly, 36,” AP reports.
“By alleging that the illegal acts happened between November 1997 and February 2002, Kelly’s attorneys argue, the girl could be anywhere from 13 to 17 years old. If she was 17 at the time, she would have been old enough to consent to sex.”
One of Gordon’s last television appearances was in September, when he co-moderated a Democratic presidential candidates debate in Baltimore. He was introduced as a contributing editor of Savoy magazine, the publisher of which announced last week it was going out of business.
Howard Dean Would Reverse Bush’s Media Policy
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean says he would reverse the Bush administration’s moves toward media deregulation.
He said on MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews” that, “11 companies in this country control 90 percent of what ordinary people are able to read and watch on their television. That?s wrong. We need to have a wide variety of opinions in every community. We don?t have that because of Michael Powell and what George Bush has tried to do to the FCC.”
Dean, former governor of Vermont, added that, “We need locally owned radio stations. There are only two or three radio stations left in the state of Vermont where you can get local news anymore. The rest of it is read and ripped from the AP.”
Meanwhile, the Congressional Black Caucus alerted reporters this week that its communications director, Doug Thornell, had left to join the Dean campaign.
E&P Warns Newspapers that Unity is Coming
“When it comes to diversity, the newspaper industry suffers from a strange syndrome that combines attention deficit and seasonal affective disorders,” reads an editorial in Editor & Publisher this week.
“To newspapers, diversity is like baseball or hay fever: Something that does not get going until spring, and fades away as the evenings grow short and chilly. Industry attention to diversity follows a well-established cycle. In April, newspapers cluck about the usually dismal results from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) newsroom census of journalists of color. They murmur promises to do better, then bob and weave their way through the summer conventions of minority journalists, hoping to buy good will by sponsoring receptions and job fair booths.”
The editorial warns that Unity, the largest gathering of journalists of color, is scheduled for next Aug. 4-8 in Washington, and that “Procrastinating on diversity this winter could prove mighty embarrassing to the industry by this summer.”
“It’s surely too late in the calendar and too early in the recovery to push up significantly the numbers of the ASNE newsroom census, which last year found that journalists of color comprised just 12.5% of daily newsrooms in an America where 31% of the population are racial or ethnic minorities,” the editorial goes on.
“What can change is attitude and effort — especially among the most laggard newspapers. The 377 daily newspapers who told ASNE last year that they employed not a single minority journalist should vow to put a person of color on the short list for their next hire — and the 488 dailies that didn’t even bother to respond to that census should this year give an honest account of their newsroom diversity.”
Native Journalists Starting S.D. High School Program
“The Native American Journalists Association is starting a statewide program for high school students in an effort to diversify newsrooms,” the Associated Press reports from South Dakota.
NAJA “recently received a private grant of more than $150,000 to start a new program to teach journalism classes to American Indian high school students.
“Indians are the most underrepresented minorities in newsrooms, said Ron Walters, executive director of the Native American Journalists Association.
“Walters said he hopes the involve three to 10 South Dakota schools in the program’s first year and to have hundreds more interested in the second year,” the story said.
Walters could not be reached to identify the $150,000 grantor.
Spanish-Language ESPN to Go 24 Hours
“Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN will expand its Spanish-language sports channel, ESPN Deportes, to a 24-hour network starting Jan. 7,” Rich Thomaselli reports in Advertising Age.
“Somos ESPN Deportes [is] a show that will preview key programming and feature an array of Latino sports stars. The show will be followed by the inaugural edition of the new Spanish-language production of SportsCenter at 8:30 p.m. ET and by full, on-site coverage of a National Basketball Association game featuring the Dallas Mavericks and Golden State Warriors.
“Following the Jan. 7 launch, ESPN Deportes plans to showcase more than 200 live events in its first year, including NBA, National Football League and Major League Baseball games,” Thomaselli wrote.
Tamala Edwards Co-Anchoring “World News Now”
Tamala Edwards has been named anchor for ?World News Now,? ABC announces, filling the slot vacated by Liz Cho when she became a co-anchor at New York’s WABC-TV. It had been filled temporarily by Andrea Stossou. Edwards started on the overnight news anchor desk on Monday, and will be based in New York City.
?She?s a gifted journalist, and this is a wonderful opportunity for her to continue to grow as a broadcaster,? said ABC News President David Westin in a news release.
?World News Now? airs from 2 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. EST Monday – Friday.
“Ms. Edwards has reported for ABC News across all programs since she joined the network in October 2001,” when Time magazine, for which she was a Washington correspondent, cut its staff. She “covered the Bush White House, and she was embedded with the Air Force during the war in Iraq reporting from the Tallil air base, near Nasiriyah, Iraq. Ms. Edwards has covered a range of social issues for ABC News, including the contentious election of Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, and the Supreme Court?s decision on affirmative action in the University of Michigan case,” the news release said.
Before Cho’s departure in July, Derek McGinty left the program to anchor his own news show on Washington’s WUSA-TV, that station announced in May.
Mexico’s Azteca Adds 2 U.S. Affiliates
Mexico’s TV Azteca “announced continued expansion into the hotly contested U.S. marketplace with the addition of two new affiliates to its growing Azteca America network,” reports Daily Variety.
“In its latest expansion, Azteca has added KCIN Denver and K14JH-TV in the Yakima-Pascoe-Richland area of Washington State. Both areas have large Hispanic populations. The additions up Azteca America’s coverage to 31 U.S. markets, or roughly 69% of the country’s Latino population.”
“In October, Azteca added affils in Chicago, Charleston, S.C., and Chattanooga, Tenn. “But even with the acquisitions, 2-year-old Azteca America has a long way to go. “Univision, the market leader, . . . is in roughly 97% of Hispanic markets in the States.”
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