“Progressive” Talkers Based at Inner City’s WLIB
New York’s WLIB-AM, part of the black-owned Inner City Broadcasting Corp., is serving as the home base for the new progressive “Air America Radio” talk network that goes on the air March 31 with satirist Al Franken as its star host.
Pierre Sutton, Inner City CEO, told Journal-isms today that his company would operate the stations that Air America plans to own. The first ones are in Boston and Los Angeles.
The partnership “gives us an opportunity to impact on the world outside of our own community,” Sutton said. Asked how he planned to do that, he replied, “We have people we placed on the network who work for us within the network in news and in programming. We will ensure that we have an appropriate impact on the network so that it will reflect the views of the minority community.”
“We can also pull the plug,” he added, joking.
“Air America Radio has signed actress and comedienne Janeane Garofalo, hip hop icon Chuck D, radio personality Randi Rhodes, and political humorist Sam Seder to join Franken at the network. Environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “The Daily Show” co-creator Lizz Winstead, and business-of-the-media analyst on the public radio program “Marketplace” Martin Kaplan will also join the network,” according to a news release.
All programming except Kaplan’s show will be produced and broadcast from the WLIB studios, Mark Walsh, chief executive officer of Air America Radio, said in Newsday.
WLIB, which now broadcasts Caribbean music, is to lease its air time to Air America from 5 a.m. to midnight. Similar deals will be made with other stations around the country, including some of the 18 owned by Inner City Broadcasting, Sutton said. He said he hadn’t finalized alternative plans for Caribbean programming in New York.
Sutton said the partnership evolved after both Inner City and the Air America founders were seeking financing and the principals found their paths intersecting. Franken, for example, was at Sutton’s table last spring at the annual dinner of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, which is taking place again today in Washington.
Sutton said he had proposed to Franken the name “Radio Free America,” but that was already taken.
House Votes to Raise Fines for Indecency
“Saying much of the public is fed up with indecent television and radio programming, members of the House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to increase penalties on broadcasters and performers who violate federal standards,” Carl Hulse reports in the New York Times.
“Spurred by a racy Super Bowl halftime show, the House voted, 391 to 22, to raise fines to $500,000 for the holders of broadcast licenses and for entertainers, from $27,500 and $11,000, respectively. The measure would also force the Federal Communications Commission to act more quickly on complaints and move to revoke the licenses of repeat offenders.”
Shutdown of Paper Threatens LIU Reputation
The shutdown last month of the student newspaper on the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University has sparked a debate over journalism ethics, privacy and freedom of the student press, Michael Weissenstein reports for the Associated Press.
After the paper, Seawanhaka, ran the grades of a student leader who had resigned, the top student editor was suspended, the faculty adviser reassigned and the office locks changed, Robert S. Anthony, an editor who teaches a class on computer-assisted reporting at the Brooklyn, N.Y., school, told Journal-isms last month.
“That in turn prompted a terse response from the Society of Professional Journalists, which plans to send a task force to the campus to investigate,” Weissenstein wrote.
“We do change locks like that in Third World countries, but this is the United States of America,” Jim Highland, the Society’s national vice president of campus chapter affairs and a professor of journalism at Western Kentucky University, told the AP.
“Meanwhile, some members of the school’s journalism faculty worry the brouhaha could tarnish the campus’ image as a supporter of journalistic achievement. The university founded the George Polk Awards in 1949 to honor a CBS correspondent who died covering the Greek civil war,” the story continued.
“‘It is a slap in the face to the Polk,’ said Professor Robert Spector, the award’s administrator. ‘I think it’s very embarrassing.'”
The student editor, Justin Grant, “this week was putting together what he promised would be a thorough and even-handed edition on the controversy.” Both Grant, and the faculty adviser, Dr. G.M. “Mike” Bush, are African American.
Gays at N.Y. Times Divided Over Firing of Stringer
“Perhaps you’ve heard that the New York Times fired a stringer named Jay Blotcher because he’d been a member of the anti-AIDS advocacy group ACT UP nearly fourteen years ago,” writes Eric Alterman in The Nation.
“The Times is making its case not on Blotcher’s membership in ACT UP, which really would be McCarthyism, but on his role as a ‘public spokesperson for an advocacy organization.’ Executive editor Bill Keller notes that Blotcher was identified as such in the newspaper as recently as 1998.
“Blotcher explains that, yes, as a volunteer, he did a press release for a friend who was organizing a commemorative march for the tenth anniversary of ACT UP in 1997 and perhaps another one in 1998, in which he was listed as the ‘contact person.’ He distinguishes this from the role of ‘spokesperson,’ in which he served ACT UP, and later Queer Nation, more than a decade ago. (More recently he was the public face for Amfar, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, between 1995 and 1999.)
“Steve Reed, an editor for the NYT Regional Newspaper Group, who coordinates the Times Gay and Lesbian Caucus, thinks the editors made a reasonable decision, though he notes a division within the caucus itself. Bruce Lambert, a longtime Times reporter who covered ACT UP, complains of ‘an apparent blackballing’ and notes, ‘By the premise being imposed on [Blotcher] . . . a long-ago former activist on breast cancer issues would be barred from being a hockey reporter.'”
Bob Johnson Starts Regional Network for His Team
Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television and now majority owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats, will launch his own regional sports network to broadcast NBA games in the Carolinas, Johnson announced Wednesday.
“Carolinas Sports Entertainment Television will debut in October in North and South Carolina — in time for the inaugural season of the NBA expansion Bobcats,” the Associated Press reported.
“Sports, in my opinion, is inherently local,” Johnson said in the AP report. “This Carolina Sports Entertainment Television is a major step in binding this region together for sports and entertainment.”
“Johnson began working on his own network once he was awarded the expansion NBA team. He toyed with the idea of selling the Bobcats’ television rights before determining there was a demand for a regional sports and entertainment network in the Carolinas.
“Creating C-SET also helps him follow through on promises of doing more for the Carolinas than simply fielding professional basketball teams. Johnson has heavily donated to local causes and recently announced he would bring an annual equestrian event to Charlotte.”
Outspoken Utrice Leid Surfaces in Florida
Utrice Leid, an editor of the legendary but defunct City Sun in Brooklyn, N.Y., has been named editor-in-chief of The Broward Times, a black-focused weekly newspaper in Broward County, Fla., Natalie P. McNeal reports in the Miami Herald.
Leid, who the story said “prides herself on never working in the mainstream media during her 34 years of journalism,” moved to Florida about a year and a half ago to be with family members after her brother died, McNeal wrote.
Leid said her mission for paper is, “We want to make it hard to throw away.” The native of Trinidad and Tobago plans to include more issues affecting Caribbean immigrants.
The paper is more than doubling its reporting staff from three to seven. It is looking to expand beyond its customary 10 pages, possibly adding special sections that focus on health and women’s issues, McNeal wrote. The paper has a circulation of 24,000.
At the City Sun, which she helped found with the late Andrew W. Cooper in 1984, Leid oversaw coverage of national news such as the story of Yusef Hawkins, the 16-year-old who was shot to death when he ventured into the Bensonhurst area of Brooklyn and was attacked by a gang of young white men.
“It was under Ms. Leid’s stewardship that the newspaper published its most hard-hitting issues, close readers say,” the New York Times wrote in 1996, the year the paper folded. “After she left in 1992 over a falling out with Mr. Cooper, the weekly seemed to lose its edge and stopped being the must-read for a wide cross-section of blacks that it had been in the 1980’s.”
Reid went to work for New York’s WBAI-FM, part of the alternative Pacifica chain, becoming general manager of the station in 2000 and Pacifica’s director of national programming in 2001 during a time of internecine conflict at the network.
George Curry Begins Radio Commentaries
George E. Curry, editor of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, is now offering a weekly radio commentary.
“The Curry Report” began March 3 and is being offered through American Urban Radio Networks, which have 243 affiliate stations, Bob Ellison, senior vice president of Walls Communications, told Journal-isms. The Capitol Radio News Service, a subsidary of Walls Communications of Silver Spring, Md., is syndicating the program. Ellison said it was not known how many affiliates have picked it up.
“‘The Curry Report’ will be like Curry — direct and uncompromising when it comes to issues important to African Americans,” said Lon Walls, president and CEO of Walls Communications, in a statement.
Curry was editor of Emerge: Black America’s Newsmagazine from 1993 to 2000. His newspaper column is syndicated to more than 200 black newspapers.
Marilyn Yarbrough, Ex-Pulitzer Board Member, Dies
Marilyn Yarbrough, a law school professor who was one of the few African Americans to serve on the Pulitzer Prize board, died Wednesday at 58. She had battled diabetes, although it wasn’t clear whether that chronic illness contributed to her death, North Carolina’s Durham Herald-Sun reported.
“When she spoke, we would listen because she always had a very, very cogent point to make,” John L. Dotson, a Maynard Institute board member who served with Yarbrough on the Pulitzer board, told Journal-isms today.
Yarbrough was on the board from 1990 to 1999.
“She wasn’t always on the winning side, but you really had to respect what she had to say about the books and about the journalism. Being one of the few minority members on that board, it was so great to have another person like her. It just made me proud,” said Dotson, retired publisher of the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio.
A former dean of the University of Tennessee School of Law, Yarbrough joined the University of North Carolina law faculty in 1993. “She was a nationally recognized scholar in the areas of race and gender discrimination and had a number of professional involvements,” the Herald-Sun said.
“She was a leader in legal education, and her interest in issues of justice for blacks and women informed much of her scholarship,” Charles Daye, a law professor at that school, told the Raleigh News & Observer. “She was one of the early black pioneers teaching in mostly white law schools,” he said.
Yarbrough was on the Pulitzer board as a representative of academics. “There are those who say they don’t have the background to judge journalism,” Dotson said. “She never made that excuse.”
Valerie K. Landon, Ex-Radio Anchor, Dies at 39
Valerie K. Landon, a former news director for Chicago’s WVON radio and then a morning news anchor with Chicago’s WGCI-FM, died of a stroke Saturday at age 39, Barbara Sherlock reports in the Chicago Tribune.
“About two years ago, she switched careers and became information coordinator and press secretary to Chicago City Clerk James J. Laski,” the obituary continues.
“She began her radio career in 1988 as news director and anchor for WVON-AM 1450. She also produced the station’s ‘On Target’ talk show and helped out as a traffic announcer.
“‘She was full of life, very vibrant with a great personality and sense of humor,’ said Melody Spann-Cooper, president of the station. ‘She was always direct, saying what she believed.'”
Raleigh Television Photographer Ron Pittman, 45
Television photographer Ron Pittman, who worked 17 years at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C., died Tuesday, just short of his 46th birthday, WRAL reported.
Assignment editor Steve Abbott told Journal-isms today that autopsy results were inconclusive but that no foul play was suspected. Pittman leaves a 20-year-old son, Ronald Jr., and a 13-year-old daughter, Shanel, the station reported.
Columbia J-School Honoring Four Alumni
Four graduates of the Columbia University School of Journalism have been chosen by the school’s alumni association to receive alumni awards, Wayne Dawkins reports in his Black Alumni News newsletter.
They are:
- Kenneth Best, class of 1967, founder and editor-in-chief of West Africa’s first independent newspaper, the Daily Observer, in Monrovia, Liberia. He was arrested five times under the regime of Samuel Doe and the Daily Observer office was burned down.
- Michele Montas-Dominique, class of 1969, formerly news director and co-anchor of Radio Haiti, Haiti’s leading radio station. After the assassination of her husband, Jean Dominique, in 2000, she came to the United States and is now spokeswoman for the president of the U.N. General Assembly.
- Rita Henley Jensen, class of 1977, founder and editor-in-chief of Women’s eNews, a news service that uses new technology to disseminate stories of critical interest to women.
- Lewis Simons, class of 1964, a contributor to National Geographic magazine and winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and the 1985 George Polk Award for International Reporting.
Dawkins, class of 1980, is to receive the Columbia University Alumni Federation Medal for Conspicuous Alumni Service. He is founding editor of the Black Alumni Network newsletter for Columbia journalism alumni and a member of the Journalism Alumni executive committee.
Correction on Donations to Stephen Hill Fund
Michael Hill, brother of Stephen Hill, the Cincinnati television reporter indicted on charges of sexual abuse, corrects his statement in the March 8 Journal-isms about the defense fund he has created:
“Donations to Steve’s Defense Fund are NOT tax deductible, as originally thought.
“We have contacted the IRS for a 2nd consultation and found that this fund is not eligible for charitable deductions, as originally thought.
“Please forgive the mistake. Again, donations are NOT TAX DEDUCTIBLE. If you have sent a donation and would like a refund please email me and request it and the fund will immediately return your donation.”