Latino Program Altered After Ex-Reaganites’ Heat
The E.W. Scripps Co. and the Denver Rocky Mountain News changed the purpose of a program designed “to help early-career Hispanic journalists develop the skills they need to succeed in daily newspaper careers” after getting a call from the general counsel of Linda Chavez’s anti-affirmative action organization, the counsel, Roger Clegg, confirmed today.
News Editor and Publisher John Temple wrote in a column March 6 that, “Upon reflection I realized that the way we had cast the program didn’t comport with the philosophical principles of the newspaper that I run.
“So, with the help of the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity and our local Hispanic community advisory committee, we’ve restructured the program,” he said, referring to the center headed by Chavez, a columnist who was staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the Reagan administration.
The Denver program, which had been called the “Scripps Academy for Hispanic Journalists” will now be called the “Scripps Academy for Hispanic Journalism, a training program at the Rocky Mountain News,” Temple wrote. “Admission will be made without regard to an applicant’s race, color, national origin, religion, etc.”
Clegg, who was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, told Journal-isms today that he had read the Rocky’s story about the Academy for Hispanic Journalists and concluded that it was a “racially exclusive program.” He said he wrote a letter to Temple saying, “look, there are laws . . .” and that he had “problems with doing it the way you’re doing it.”
Temple then called Chavez and explained that the program’s purpose was to redress a shortage of journalists who can cover Hispanic issues in his area, according to Clegg. Chavez agreed that was a worthy goal but said there should be “no reason why only a journalist with a Hispanic surname or whatever should be able to cover those issues,” Clegg said.
They quickly agreed to restructure the program, Clegg continued.
When Journal-isms mentioned that the purpose of such programs was not just to cover Hispanic issues, but to redress discrimination against Hispanic would-be journalists, Clegg replied, “the fact that Hispanics have been discriminated against in the past does not justify preferences for them now,” citing Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, sex, national origin, or religion.
“I would hope that other organizations — newspapers and so forth, would approach the issue the same way,” Clegg said.
The episode shows how times have changed. A mere four years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson’s Kerner Commission, appointed to investigate the causes of the urban riots of the late 1960s, was not shy about approaching the issue in terms of people, not merely coverage, stating that “the journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training and promoting Negroes.”
Its prescriptions were race-specific: “News organizations must employ enough Negroes in positions of significant responsibility to establish an effective link to Negro actions and ideas and to meet legitimate employment expectations.”
Chicago Anchor Suspended After Refusing Story
“WMAQ-Ch. 5’s new weekday anchor Don Lemon didn’t do his young career in Chicago any favors after deciding to sit in the TV truck Friday night rather than cover the stabbing of a teenager in Maine Township,” Chicago Tribune columnist Jim Kirk reports.
“It was unclear why Lemon, who was hired as a weekday anchor and reporter, refused management’s request to do the story. But his decision infuriated news boss Frank Whittaker, sources said.
“Now, Lemon, who was brought in from NBC News in August, is doing a lot of unexpected sitting — off the air. Three days’ worth of sitting, in fact.
“His suspension meant that he was off the air Tuesday night for the all-important coverage of the Illinois primary, a high-profile event where station management likes to showcase new talent.
“Lemon was widely seen as heir apparent to current 10 p.m. co-anchor Warner Saunders,” Kirk wrote.
Sales Weak for Jayson Blair Book in First Full Week
The publicity bandwagon might be in full swing, but Jayson Blair’s book “Burning Down My Masters’ House” sold only 960 copies nationwide in its first full week in bookstores, reports Susan Pavliscak of Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales at such retail outlets as Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Costco, Borders, Musicland and Amazon.com, though not Wal-Mart.
On Amazon.com today, the book ranked 4,051.
As reported last week, Nielsen Soundscan reported only 422 copies sold the previous week, a figure that included pre-orders and sales on the March 6 publication date. That brings the total to 1,382 copies sold so far.
The book has a small publisher, which might be part of the problem, according to one college student interning in Baltimore who wrote to Journal-isms. “I went to stores in D.C., Maryland, Virginia and Delaware before I finally found a copy of the book in a book store in Georgetown [D.C.]. Clerks at the chain book stores I went to were confused at where the book was or couldn’t find the shipment. In three different stores, clerks said their computer showed they had more than 20 copies, but the shipments were lost, had not arrived, or were not unpacked.”
Meanwhile, three more writers described Blair’s appearance last weekend at Harlem’s Hue-Man bookstore.
On a Web site called drugwar.com, Daniel Forbes said he asked Blair about his statement that he had traded sex for drugs. “By the way, the sex for drugs was with men. Or — saying he was revealing details he’d told no one else — so Jayson Blair told me Friday night, the two of us alone on a Harlem sidewalk following his first public reading. The drugs were primarily cocaine, sometimes crack and ‘a little heroin’ to come down on,” Forbes wrote.
On Africana.com, John Lee wrote that, “Blair?s handlers deduced correctly that this forum would ensure he eluded castigation. No one wanted to face the wrath of the sixty-something March-On-Washington matriarchs who dominated the audience. The older black women gathered there, who keep Harlem?s cultural centers alive, seemed to pity Blair, and with each selfless comment he made about his sacrifice, he seemed to endear himself to their collective bosom. He began to play to them after being asked if he were religious. He declared that he wanted to be a minister when growing up and compared himself to Al Sharpton, solidifying in my mind that Blair was attention-crazed and that running for office wouldn?t be farfetched for him. He began to slip into a faux preacher voice to make his points. All he needed now was a good perm.”
The appearance now has Blair “weighing an appearance at this year’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, which tonight’s reading has somehow made him come to believe will not end in tar and feathers,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Village Voice.
Blair told Tom Scocca in the New York Observer that he e-mailed a seven-point rebuttal to the New York Times Book Review over its piece that ran Sunday.
“The whole suggestion that I?m not contrite is just bullshit,” Scocca quoted Blair as saying.
U.S. Senate Candidate: Call Me African American
The landslide Democratic primary victory yesterday of Barack Obama in his quest to become U.S. senator from Illinois has challenged some reporters’ racial vocabularies.
Obama, who could become the third black senator since Reconstruction, is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas.
The Washington Post’s David S. Broder, often called the dean of political reporters, described Obama today as “the mixed-race son of an immigrant father. His father, a Kenyan by birth, and his mother, who was from Kansas, separated when he was 2,” without saying which parent was which race (assuming we wouldn’t imagine a white Kenyan and a black Kansan).
In Chicago, a television reporter reportedly described Obama as a man who considers himself “African American even though his mother is white.”
Pam Smith, press secretary for the Obama campaign, told Journal-isms today that her candidate “considers himself African American.” As for “mixed-race”? “He never says that.”
Jackson State J-Program May Lose Accreditation
The journalism department at Mississippi’s historically black Jackson State University could lose its accreditation next month, Melissa M. Scallan reports today in the Biloxi Sun-Herald.
“The Accrediting Committee on Journalism Education recommended at a meeting this past weekend that the school’s six-year accreditation not be renewed because of problems in several areas,” she wrote.
“We found (JSU) not in compliance in the public service component,” Steve Geimann, a member of the accrediting team, said in the story, adding that universities should be involved in such programs as high school career days.
“Faculty members are doing things (individually), but not the department as a whole,” he said. “When I visited Jackson State in late January, I concluded that in public service they had made little progress to sustain the program for the next six years.”
Tribune’s Martinez Praised for Story on Deserter
“As Chicago Tribune national correspondent Michael Martinez pursued his exclusive story about the Florida National Guard staff sergeant accused of desertion who emerged from five months of hiding to publicly challenge U.S. conduct of the Iraq war, he found he was not simply portraying one discontented soldier — but opening a window on the conflicted feelings of many troops on the one-year anniversary of the conflict,” Mark Fitzgerald writes in Editor & Publisher.
“At the end of two months of reporting that culminated with the March 15 front-page story about Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, Martinez interviewed officers and GIs on the day the soldier’s unit — C Company of the Florida National Guard’s 1st Battalion of the 124th Regiment — returned home to Ft. Stewart, Ga.
“‘These year-long deployments, my gosh, they have taken a real toll on these guys, a real emotional and physical toll,’ Martinez said by phone from Spain, where he has been covering the Madrid train bombing and the national election.
“The Tribune story broke the news about Mejia, who served as a squad leader during fighting in Ramadi, Iraq. A native of Nicaragua, Mejia went into hiding after being granted leave last October to return temporarily to the United States to renew his permanent resident card. The day the Tribune story ran, he emerged publicly at the gate of Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, where he told a press conference organized by anti-war activists that he would seek conscientious objector status.”
Martinez, who is based in Los Angeles, has been at the Tribune since 1990. A 1983 Northwestern University graduate, he told Journal-isms he has also worked at the Kansas City Star and Kansas City Times (1984-1990) and Washington Post (1983-84).
Iraqi Exiles Fed False Information to News Media
“The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to leading newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia, report Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells of Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau.
“A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the INC’s Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.
“The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush’s claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons.
“Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq’s illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.
“In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, weren’t confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.
“. . . According to the letter, publications in which the articles appeared included The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, The Times of London, The Sunday Times of London, The Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, and two Knight Ridder newspapers, The Kansas City Star and The Philadelphia Daily News. The Associated Press and others also wrote stories based on INC-provided materials.”
Sun-Sentinel’s Sandra Hernandez Pulled from Haiti
“In the wake of the shooting of its staff photographer in Haiti, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel has pulled its sole staff reporter out of that country and has not decided when it will send staffers back to the Caribbean nation,” Harris Meyer reported Monday in South Florida’s Daily Business Review.
“The Sun-Sentinel brought staff writer Sandra Hernandez home last Tuesday, said Kevin Courtney, the newspaper?s communications director.
“The decision was made, he said, because Hernandez was part of a team with staff photographer Michael Laughlin, who was seriously wounded while covering a demonstration in Port-au-Prince on March 7. Laughlin is recovering at home from a bullet wound to the shoulder, and hopes to return to work in several weeks. ‘We decided not to leave Sandra there by herself,’ Courtney said,” Meyer reported.
Atlanta TV Photographer Assaulted on Assignment
“A WSB-TV/Channel 2 news photographer was assaulted early Tuesday in southwest Atlanta by a group of men who threatened to shoot him,” the station reports.
“Luis Argumedes told police he was in a marked station news van that was parked on Sylvan Circle when four men approached the vehicle around 1 a.m. One of the men pulled out a gun and ordered him out of the van, Argumedes said.
“The suspects struck him on the head with the weapon before Argumedes fled from the scene. He told police the men argued over who would shoot him.
“No suspects have been arrested in connection with the incident. Anyone with information was asked to call Atlanta police.”
Roberto Vizcón Moves from News Director to GM
Telemundo?s Roberto Vizcón resigned last week as news director at WSCV-51 in Miramar, Fla., and will become general manager at WTMO-TV in Orlando, Fla., a Telemundo affiliate, according to Pareja’s Media Match, quoting El Nuevo Herald. Vizcón starts April 12, his office told Journal-isms.
“Vizcón has worked a total of 12 years at the Telemundo station and was news director for Noticias 51 the past 8 years.
“‘It?s a smaller market, but the job is bigger. This is a dream job for all news directors: to one day become general manager [at a TV station],’ he told El Nuevo Herald?s Daniel Shoer.
“Noticias 51 managing editor Maria Lewis will be the interim news director.”
Islamic Group Files Complaint Over L.A. Radio Show
“A Islamic rights group has filed a federal complaint against a Los Angeles talk radio station and the nation’s largest radio chain over a skit that suggested Iraqis want to kill Jews, marry camels, avoid bathing, and meet Japanese schoolgirls in heaven,” Dan Whitcomb reports for Reuters.
“Meanwhile, an official for the Clear Channel Communications station, KFI-AM, said she would read an apology on the air for the March 10 broadcast by morning-show host Bill Handel, which triggered the Federal Communications Commission complaint.
“‘The Handel show was attempting to make a satirical point about the extremist Iraqis in Iraq,’ KFI Program Director Robin Bertolucci told Reuters.
“The skit featured Handel with an unnamed performer who put on a mock-Middle Eastern accent to pose as an ‘Islamic constitutional scholar’ and read from the ‘new Iraqi constitution.’
“According to the fake scholar one section of that document read simply: ‘death to the Jews, death to the Jews, death to the Jews.’
“Another part, he said, granted Iraqi men 72 virgins when they entered heaven, adding: ‘the virgins, however, will not be hairy Iraqi women but lovely Japanese schoolgirls.’
“The performer said Section 9 of the document read: ‘All homosexual marriages are expressly prohibited and are punishable by death. However consenting civil unions between Iraqis and loving camels and goats will be recognized,'” the story said.
