Democrat Has Session With Black Journalists
John Kerry reached out to black journalists today, meeting with five African American columnists in a “getting-to-know-you” session in which he emphasized his domestic issues, such as jobs, health care and “environmental justice.”
The ground rules were originally that the session would be off the record, but the columnists — Gregory Kane of the Baltimore Sun, George Curry of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, Deborah Mathis, columnist with Tribune Media Services, Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune and Journal-isms — successfully argued that the session should be quotable.
After the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee summarized his stump speech, which did not focus specifically on race, the hour-long meeting at Kerry’s Washington campaign headquarters was driven by the journalists’ questions. “You are the agenda setters; I’m the pinata,” he said at one point, seemingly taller and leaner in person.
An initial list of statistics Kerry rattled off about “the disparity in communities of color” — among them that African Americans have 2 1/2 the mortality rate, nine times the HIV/AIDS rate, and in New York, a nearly 50 percent unemployment rate among black men 16 to 64 — could serve as a starting point for journalists evaluating the candidates’ campaign positions.
However, Kerry said he viewed these as American problems, not simply those of one segment. And while the journalists decided not to focus on foreign policy, believing that other reporters were doing that, Kerry made a connection: “$200 billion for Iraq? What would that mean for cities across this country? That’s four times the entire educational system across the country. Think of what that could have done for kids,” he said.
The junior senator from Massachusetts spent much of the time detailing his plans for health care and job creation, and how he planned to finance them. But he also was asked which people in the black community he listened to, expressed his strong support for affirmative action, and said he saw racism first hand during his time in Vietnam.
After giving it some thought, Kerry said that if he had it to do all over again, he probably would have “found a way” to get to Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer, while he was at Yale. “I think I missed something,” he said, though he said he went to Georgia and South Carolina while on spring break, the first time he’d seen “whites only” signs.
Kerry also claimed the largest percentage of African Americans on his staff — 17 percent, he said — of any of the candidates.
The Democrat declined to evaluate his media coverage, saying he preferred to look forward, not backward. But at another point he allowed that “Washington and the pundits were behind the curve a little bit” in evaluating his chances during the primary season. When the NNPA’s Curry passed along complaints that Kerry had not done interviews with African American radio stations, the senator said he had appeared on two black radio shows just this morning.
Which African Americans had his ear? Kerry named Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, Christopher Edley, founding director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project; Cornel West of Princeton University; Boston ministers he termed “friends of mine” — the Revs. Eugene Rivers, Gregory Groover and Charles Stith; Ralph Cooper, executive director of the Veterans Benefits Clearinghouse, which assists Boston-area veterans and their families; Marcus Jadotte, his deputy campaign manager; Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s campaign; the Rev. Jesse Jackson; and Reps. Greg Meeks, D-N.Y.; James Clyburn, D-S.C.; and Harold Ford Jr., D-Tenn. “I try to cast as wide a net as I can,” he said.
“The first meeting I had when I secured the nomination was with the Congressional Black Caucus. I wanted to make it very clear, I want this race to be different. I know there is a sense in the black community that the politicians come and go, a feeling of being taken for granted. We’re aggressively reaching out.”
In Vietnam, he said, “most of the people I served with on the front lines were people of color, and I learned how the larger percentage of casualties was out of proportion. I also saw some of the racism.”
In answer to a question from Mathis about whether he would take his thoughts on race to white audiences, he said, “I want to try to do it in a way that’s not divisive. Martin Luther King’s ideas were American ideas. The most inspirational document I’ve ever read was ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail.'”
“I don’t try to separate it as a black agenda or Hispanic agenda. I think it’s an American agenda,” he said. “No way we’re going to live up to the democracy we hope to be if we don’t figure out these things. I talk about jobs, health care, environmental . . . I talk about it wherever I go, and then I’ll talk about racial profiling, but I don’t start there. I want this to be an American journey. These are singularly American challenges.”
To Page, who wrote a column on the subject, Kerry said his statement that “I wouldn’t be upset if I could earn the right to be the second” black president, after Bill Clinton, “was partly tongue-in-cheek, a compliment to Bill Clinton’s relationship to the African American community. What I need to do is earn the respect . . . I’m going to earn my spurs. We’re working hard on that now. It will be earned,” he said, and the public will see “the quality and diversity of the administration I put together.
Kerry’s policy prescriptions included creating 10 million new jobs, and “putting health care number one.” He wants to do something about “the separate and unequal school system,” and restore funds to the “No Children Left Behind” initiative.
He said he would create “environmental empowerment zones” to counter such disparities as the disproportionate asthma rate in communities of color; restore money for job training; create a federal health-care fund financed by a rollback of some of the tax cuts initiated by President Bush and a 5 percent cut in the tax rate, and have “every child in America” automatically enrolled in a health-care plan.
While these proposals are receiving a quick once-over here, they are outlined on Kerry’s campaign Web site and were a major part of Kerry’s pitch.
When it was over, Mathis, who had followed Clinton for 30 years, said Kerry struck her as “more earnest, more guileless, more at ease” than Clinton, who sometimes seemed more calculating in his statements. “I don’t think he works it like Clinton,” she said of Kerry. “I just have more trust in Kerry’s” comments, said Mathis, who is also an assistant professor with the Washington graduate program of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Condoleezza Rice Testimony to Be Televised
“The public testimony of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 Commission will be covered live and extensively by TV news organizations, starting at 9 a.m. (ET) Thursday morning,” TV Week reports.
“ABC News coverage will be anchored from Washington by Peter Jennings, who will have key capital talent on tap for analysis and highlights.
“Dan Rather plans to anchor CBS News coverage from New York. CNN also will cover Ms. Rice’s testimony from beginning to end. MSNBC will follow its live coverage with a special hour-long edition of “Hardball.” NBC News coverage will be anchored by Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert from New York.”
The hearings air on C-SPAN from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., according to a C-SPAN spokeswoman.
AAJA Boasts Two Pulitzer Winners
Two members of the Asian American Journalists Association, Cheryl Diaz Meyer and Evelyn Iritani, are among the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winners, AAJA announces.
As reported Monday, “Diaz Meyer and her Dallas Morning News colleague David Leeson won the award in the Breaking News Photography category “for their eloquent photographs depicting both the violence and poignancy of the war with Iraq,” according to the Pulitzer citation. She covered the war in Iraq as an embedded journalist attached to the Second Tank Battalion of the First Marine Division out of Camp Lejeune, N.C. and returned to cover the aftermath in Baghdad.”
“Reporter Evelyn Iritani was part of the Los Angeles Times team that won in the National Reporting category for ‘its engrossing examination of the tactics that have made Wal-Mart the largest company in the world with cascading effects across American towns and developing countries,’ Pulitzer cited. The primary editor for the Wal-Mart series was John Corrigan.”
Nielsen Delays “People Meters” in New York
“Faced with community opposition, Nielsen Media Research is delaying the implementation of its “local people meter” TV-rating system by two months and creating a task force to make sure minority viewers are counted accurately,” Crain’s New York Business reports.
“The computerized meters — which would replace Nielsen’s diary system of recording viewing habits and give New York the kind of daily demographic data that Nielsen provides nationally — were slated to debut on April 8. However, African-American and Hispanic groups have protested the new system, saying that it does not remedy Nielsen’s historic problem of undercounting minorities. That results in fewer shows being aimed at blacks and Latinos, say minority-group advocates.”
