Mentor to “At-Risk” Kids Faces Abuse Charges
Cincinnati television reporter Stephen Hill, who mentored “at-risk” children and has served as a licensed foster parent, was taken into custody Friday, accused of having sexual contact with minors.
“Police say they had to break down the door to take him into custody — possibly saving his life in the process,” his station, WCPO-TV, reported.
“‘Fearing for Mr. Hill’s safety, officers forced entry into the home and found Mr. Hill in a rear portion of the home with several self-inflicted wounds,’ said Captain Vince Demasi, of the Cincinnati Police Department.” Hill remains hospitalized, according to Cincinnati news reports, although the cuts are not life-threatening.
The station said the 45-year-old investigative reporter, who has worked there since 1989, remained employed, and family members and some of the people he mentored as youths rushed to Hill’s defense.
“He’s one of the most influential persons in my life,” Demetrius Al-Lateef, of Columbus, told WCPO-TV , Hill’s station, “if not the most influential person in my life.”
“Ain’t no way possible would I even fathom or think about Steve doing something like this,” said Al-Lateef. “That’s not the man I know. That’s not the man I’ve known for 8 years.”
“Gene Watt, Hill’s brother-in-law, said the family believes the allegations are false and possibly fabricated by inner-city boys Hill mentored,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
“Watt called his brother-in-law a crusading journalist, who grew up in inner city Newark, N.J. and felt called to help other high-risk urban youths.
“‘He’s really into helping black kids not get lost in life, not end up in jail,’ Watt said. ‘He’s given his time, money and energy to kids going through tough times.'”
Hill was charged with eight counts of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor between March 2001 and January 2004, according to court documents filed Saturday, the Enquirer said.
The station bio said Hill worked on the station’s “I-Team” from 1989 until January.
Hill has also been a reporter at WMAR-TV in Baltimore and WSMV-TV in Nashville. He is a native of Newark and a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, the bio says.
Reporter John McQuiston attended the police news conference, the station reported.
“These are serious charges and you’re never prepared to hear details of accusations like these and then you hear that the person charged is someone you know and respect and whose desk sits three feet away from yours in the newsroom, like Stephen Hill’s does mine,” said McQuiston during Friday’s 11 p.m. newscast.
Reporter Recounts “My Harrowing Escape in Haiti”
“Another day of burning barricades did not cause much alarm yesterday morning when I set out to detail Haiti’s torment, but by midday, I was part of the story, surrounded by angry men with guns and jagged rocks the size of basketballs,” Haitian-American reporter Leslie Casimir writes today in the New York Daily News.
“A young man with a crooked grin on his face and hatred in his eyes changed all that. He told us all — my Haitian driver and my colleague Guy Delva, head of the country’s Haitian Journalist Association — to get out of the car.
” . . . It didn’t make a difference that I was back in my parent’s homeland, Haiti Cherie, and could communicate with them in Creole, that I could understand their misery, for I have heard about those pains all my life.
“All I heard was my father’s voice before I left New York asking me why I wanted to come here.
“‘Your life is worth much more than a story,’ he said.”
The gunmen snatched the driver’s money and took the car, but Casimir lived to report the story.
Critics Debate Spin in Gay-Marriage Stories
“Is there any richer story right now on the news landscape?” asks William Powers, “On the Media” columnist in the National Journal. “Yet, if you’re paying attention to the coverage, you may have noticed the mainstream media are not totally engaged by it, certainly not as engaged as they have been by analogous stories of the past. Think of the civil-rights story . . . Or, if that seems a stretch, consider the feminism story of the 1970s, which in some ways is more closely parallel: A great subgroup of Americans suddenly rises up to claim a new place in society.
“Yet compared with what I know about those stories — which, admittedly, I only witnessed as a child — the coverage of gay marriage has a tentative, muted feeling. As filtered through the mainstream media, gay marriage seems not so much a righteous cause, inherently worthy of our attention and concern, as another strange, colorful chapter in the never-ending ‘culture war,’ a phrase that appears over and over in the mainstream coverage. The media, which are normally so good at creating heroes, have not yet given us a gay Rosa Parks or even a gay Gloria Steinem.”
In the Washington Post, media writer Howard Kurtz writes of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson: “Hundreds of news accounts have provided an upbeat portrayal of Newsom as a pioneer and the San Francisco weddings as a happy occasion, even as partisan rhetoric hardened last week over President Bush’s endorsement of a constitutional amendment to ban such marriages. While those opposed to gay marriage and Newsom’s maneuver are certainly quoted, the media spotlight has shone most brightly on the mayor and those (including Rosie O’Donnell) tying the legally disputed knot.”
Kurtz reports that, “Deb Price, a Detroit News columnist who married her partner, Joyce Murdoch, in Canada last year, says the coverage has been out of context.
“‘The news media tends to take this major civil rights movement and turn it into a game of politics, not a look at why gay people want to marry,’ Price says. ‘Something remarkable is happening here, and it’s being covered as a political football.’ Few newspapers cover the gay community as even a part-time beat, she says, ‘which reinforces the pariah status of gay people.'”
Race Angle Surfaces From Blair’s College Days
The Baltimore Sun has broken from the print media’s general reluctance to devote much space to disgraced reporter Jayson Blair as the March 6 publication date for Blair’s book about his life at the New York Times approaches.
In a 4,216-word piece in the Sunday paper, media writer David Folkenflik traces Blair’s time at the University of Maryland at College Park, reporting that race played a part in Blair becoming editor of the student newspaper, The Diamondback.
“On campus, encouraged by [assistant dean Christopher] Callahan, Blair set his sights on another plum job: the Diamondback editorship,” Folkenflik writes.
“Dave Murray, then the paper’s sports editor, was the overwhelming favorite of staffers to become the paper’s next editor in chief. But the decision was up to the Maryland Media board, which included Callahan, a few student journalists, alumni and community members.
“When Blair, with just a year on campus, announced his application for the job, it sparked outcries from Diamondback staffers. . . .
“Olive Reid felt there was a racial element to the protests. Only one African-American had been editor since the paper’s founding in 1910: Current Sun reporter Ivan Penn, who sat on the Maryland Media board at the time. ‘The black community’s perspective on the Diamondback was that they’re not going to give you a chance,’ Penn says. ‘An opportunity for a legitimate, solid African-American candidate to become editor was a welcome thing.’
“Callahan was Blair’s most ardent champion on the Maryland Media board. Ultimately, Blair was appointed editor in chief. Furious staff members demanded a new way to pick editors. Callahan resigned from the board, saying he did not want to serve at odds with students.”
When Newsweek Women Were Mail Girls
“More than 150 former writers, editors and news assistants for Newsweek gathered at the Union League Club in Manhattan on Saturday for a reunion, the first for what was being called the Golden Age, or, alternately, the Glory Days, of the magazine,” Mel Gussow reports today in the New York Times.
“During the 1960’s the magazine was a male (and white) bastion, and women were generally relegated to roles as mail girls and, at best, researchers. Nora Ephron, Susan Brownmiller, Ellen Goodman and others quickly moved on to more rewarding employment. When women questioned their inferior roles at Newsweek, they were told that there was no policy saying that women could not be writers, ‘we just don’t have any.’
“That changed in 1970 after a lawsuit was brought by female employees against the magazine for its exclusionary practices.” Referring to then-editor Osborn Elliott, Gussow writes that, “When Newsweek wanted a cover article on the women’s movement, Mr. Elliott said in an interview, there was no qualified woman on the staff to write it, so the magazine hired a freelancer, Helen Dudar.”
Betty S. Wong Named at Working Mother
Betty S. Wong has been named executive editor of Working Mother magazine. She was previously senior editor at Parents and editor-in-chief of Parents Baby, Media Bistro reports.
Executive editor Susan Lapinski moved up to editor-in-chief.
Book Portrays “Liberal Female Media Cabal”
“Sometime between editing features on Jell-O molds, tummy taming and ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ longtime Ladies’ Home Journal editor Myrna Blyth learned how to lob hand grenades. Two years after retiring, Blyth, 64, has written a book ?- ‘Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America’ ?- that has some of the biggest names in television and publishing in an uproar,” writes Peg Tyre in Newsweek.
“Equal parts political rant and industry tell-all, the book offers an acid portrait of what Blyth calls a liberal female media cabal. In Blyth’s world, Katie, Diane, Barbara and a dozen or so women’s-magazine editors are conspiring to rob millions of otherwise intelligent women of their self-confidence and good sense.”
Knox Robinson Editing “The Fader” Magazine
“Independent music/lifestyle magazine The Fader has appointed Knox Robinson — a longtime contributor and an editor at large — its new editor in chief, Matthew Flamm reports in Craig’s New York Business.
“The Fader — the name refers to the equipment a DJ uses to switch records — has won design awards, including one for black-and-white photography from Folio magazine,” but, according to publisher Peter Ferraro, “it has yet to be recognized for its journalistic achievements,” Flamm writes.
Robinson told Journal-isms he had been assistant editor at Essence Books from 1998 to 1999, “where I edited a book or two” during the period he spent as a freelance writer, editor and researcher.
He also wrote for Code, the Larry Flynt-owned magazine for black men that lasted from 1999 to 2001. There, he became part of a story on hip-hop chronicler Kevin Powell when Katti Gray reported in Newsday that Powell’s “last major run-in with a man occurred in summer 2001 when he was arrested for ripping eyeglasses off the face of journalist Knox Robinson. Powell felt Robinson had misquoted him.”
Gray reported that “Robinson pressed charges. Powell got off without jail time, replaced the $500 prescription sunglasses and invited Robinson over a year later to apologize.”
Robinson, 29, has been an editor at the slick, five-year old magazine since 2000, named editor at large after reporting from Nigeria.
An editorial in the 192-page December-January issue says that, “we just try to find stuff we find interesting or cool or crazy insane and then document it as a way of sharing it with you. Sometimes the stuff is staring you right in the face, and at other times we have to go digging for it. You’d be mistaken if you think we’re obsessed with trawling the bleeding edge of hip, though. We read Eastern European authors, dig obscure jazz and watch Colombians battle Mexicans at soccer matches in Red Hook as much as the next urbanite . . .”
The magazine’s “hipness” is certified by its liberal sprinklings of four-letter words.
One letter to the editor is headlined, “Hi Bitch!” and begins, “your magazine has been xxxx steadily for a while now.” The xxxx stands in place of terminology for oral sex.
Of the headline, Robinson told Journal-isms, “While I am against censorship, I don’t condone language that diminishes or marginalizes other people. I believe in a loose and slangy editorial tone, but as editor in chief you won’t be seeing any more headers like that one.”
As for the text, he said, “as a staff we don’t overthink it. As writers and editors we tend to love and celebrate the mercurial, expressive, viral (and venal) aspects of language — we love it when it’s poetic, when it’s crass and those rare occasions when it’s both.”
K.C. Star Remembers Pioneer Black Sportswriters
“Never become part of the story and don’t get chummy with the people or teams you cover. These core principles are Journalism 101,” Blair Kerkhoff wrote yesterday in the Kansas City Star just as Black History Month ended.
“But if John I. Johnson of The Call in Kansas City had gone by the book, American Legion baseball in this city might not have been integrated for years.
“If Wendell Smith of The Pittsburgh Courier and Sam Lacy of The Afro-American in Baltimore had kept their objective distance from Jackie Robinson, baseball’s color barrier might have fallen later ? or with a player less tolerant than Robinson.
“And if players like Marion Motley of the Cleveland Browns hadn’t come across black sportswriters like George Dunmore, they wouldn’t have known where to place their trust in the community.
?’As newspaper men we had to be fair,’ said Dunmore, who wrote for historically black newspapers for 27 years and now lives in Olathe [Kan.] But what was fair?’
“Not sports. Not for most of the first half of the 20th century, when the major leagues and many college and high school teams were segregated. Equality on the field and court may have been inevitable but progress needed a push, a voice.
“Black sportswriters provided it.”
Sports Columnist Misses Strong Black Press
Complementing Blair Kerkhoff’s piece, star Kansas City Star sports columnist Jason Whitlock writes that, “We could use a John I. Johnson and a strong Call newspaper today.
“A modern-day Johnson might use his platform to preach to African-American professional athletes about how to best use the freedom and wealth they enjoy today. Johnson, Smith and Lacy called for the ‘establishment’ to reach a higher moral ground. Now professional athletes have tremendous power, wealth and influence. Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, Donovan McNabb, Barry Bonds and Co. are the establishment.
“They would benefit from a black press that consistently appealed for them to take the high road, to give back to the black community, to carry themselves in a way that reflected positively on the rest of the black community.
“That’s what I ? perhaps naively ? believe Johnson would be writing about today. That would be his crusade.
“African-American athletes now share some of the power that was once held completely by the owners. Are African-American athletes using that power appropriately? Are they using it to help solve problems that African-Americans constantly ask the community to fix?
“Johnson had a unique perspective. He didn’t write the obvious. He called for Negro Leagues owners to protect their players and protect their businesses. He believed that integration would be beneficial, but he also recognized that black people’s destiny rested in their own hands.
“Too many of us have forgotten that and could use the voice of a strong black newspaper to remind us.”
