No Way for a Paper to Win Respect
When the black press met for its annual mid-winter conference in February in St. Maarten, Netherlands Antilles, its association president, Sonny Messiah-Jiles, told members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association that “We are looking for mutual respect in the newspaper industry and among our peers.
“But more so,” she continued, according to the NNPA’s own account, “we dream of a day when our news holes will be judged for the character of its content, and not by the color of its publishers or its leaders.”
The Chicago Defender, one of the oldest African American newspapers, is making that job more difficult. Last year, its sister paper, the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, was reported by the East Bay Express to have plagiarized a story from that Bay Area publication.
Then, writing of the Tri-State Defender, the Memphis Flyer noted that “for several years, the weekly newspaper that calls itself ?The Mid-South’s Best Alternative Newspaper? on its editorial-page masthead has been ripping off other weekly newspapers’ stories, changing the datelines and place-names, and running them as its own ?lead story? under the byline of Larry Reeves,? whose byline had appeared at least 140 times. The paper apologized to readers in an April 19 editorial.
Now, the Chicago Reader reports, the flagship Defender, the one in Chicago, has lifted an entire editorial from another paper in town and presented it as its own.
“In fact the Defender was reprinting word for word, right down to the headline, an editorial that had run in the Lakefront Outlook a week earlier,” wrote the author of the Reader’s Hot Type column.
“On April 1 the Defender carried a correction. The editorial ‘was mistakenly used in place of our regular editorial,’ it said. ‘The article actually appeared in another newspaper. We regret the error and apologize for any confusion that resulted from the oversight.’
“Oversight? The Outlook — a free weekly launched in 1999 by the owners of the Hyde Park Herald to cover Bronzeville — doesn’t even have its own Web site. For this oversight to have occurred, someone had to retype the editorial. An unusual sin of omission.
“Was it the same sort of oversight that in recent years allowed a sister paper, the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, to run a dozen or more stories by a mysterious ‘Larry Reeves’ that had been lifted virtually word for word from alternative papers in other cities?
“I reached Defender editor-publisher David Milliner on vacation, and he called his paper to try to find out how it happened to print an Outlook editorial. The best he could come up with was that this ‘unfortunate occurrence’ appeared to have been an ‘honest error.’ He said he couldn’t pin down the specifics.”
Lakefront Outlook Editor Caitlin Devitt told Journal-isms today that she hadn’t heard from the Defender.
Messiah-Jiles, who is publisher of the Houston Defender, said she believed these to be isolated cases and asked that the black press not be judged by these examples.
“If you put us up against our white colleagues, you would find equal amounts of plagiarism,” she told Journal-isms. This is about “individual newspapers and their publishers and how they plan to run their businesses.”
Milliner, the Defender’s publisher, could not be reached for comment.
Black Columnists Assess Rice Testimony
- Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe:
“Rice, the national security adviser to President Bush, was there for one purpose: to avoid telling us when, where, who, why, and how the White House was blindsided by or simply blind to 9/11.” - Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
“Still single, Rice is probably one of the world’s most eligible bachelorettes; occasionally, my mind wanders back to the pristine time when she could possibly have been mine.
“Maybe it would have worked if she hadn’t been so conservative.
“And so hawkish on defense.
“And, of course, so smart and so successful, which I’ve discovered can be a deal-breaker if one partner isn’t secure enough in his or her career. (OK; his career.)
“I can dream, can’t I?”
- Sheryl McCarthy Newsday:
“Rice is a former college professor, and what we got was a lecture, delivered not just in complete sentences, but in whole paragraphs and pages about the steps Bush took to keep the country safe.
“I’ve now seen at least three people try to crack her veneer of absolute certainty.
“. . . This was a lecture on Bush 101: The Terrorism Fighter. Which made it a little scary.”
- Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune:
“Will Rice sway many black votes over to the Bush team? Probably not. Such transformations take time and a lot more outreach efforts than Republicans have shown in recent years. But Rice has shown the world that there is more than one way to be a strong black woman in politics. That takes admirable courage. You go, girlfriend.” - E.R. Shipp, New York Daily News:
“It’s her hair. It’s not a typical perm or afro or locks or even some combination. She is June Cleaver, a time long gone — but a time when black folks were not at the table at which she sits. They were, at best, awaiting orders for cutlery or a glass of iced tea or mint juleps.
“Girlfriend is out there on her own. The hairdo and her devotion to President Bush say it all.”
- Elmer Smith, Philadelphia Daily News:
“They pre-empted Regis for this? I don’t know about you. But the world did not turn for me.” - Wendi C. Thomas, Memphis Commercial-Appeal:
“I have no more answers now than I did before enduring three hours of the commission members’ diatribes thinly disguised as questions and Rice’s monologs lousy with acronyms.
“I’m tired of the quest to figure out what the Bush administration knew and when they knew it.”
. . . and Two White Women Say She Made Them Proud
- Laura Berman, Detroit News:
“For women around the area, the surprising tug of Rice?s testimony went largely unspoken and unreported ? but you could watch it, see it, feel it.
“Women especially wanted to see how a woman ? and in particular, this very powerful one ? would hold up to a barrage of carefully honed questions and international scrutiny.
“. . . We should be beyond this sort of discussion, yes. But we aren?t.
- Cathy Gillentine Texas City Sun, Galveston:
“Condoleezza Rice was worthy of her calling and I don?t see how every woman in America can?t be proud of her, because she is who she is, but especially because she is a woman.”
Deborah Mathis, Gregory Kane Split on Kerry
Two of the five African American columnists who met last week with Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, split on their impressions.
Gregory Kane of the Baltimore Sun, who described himself as “the token black conservative,” wrote a column headlined, “On race issues, Kerry needs more thought, less liberalism.” He scolded Kerry for his “almost obligatory genuflection to affirmative action.”
“Conservatives support affirmative action, the kind that President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 said should be done without regard to race, color, creed or ethnic origin. What liberals support — and have been misnaming affirmative action for years — are blatantly discriminatory racial preferences,” Kane wrote.
Syndicated columnist Deborah Mathis, writing on Black America Web, was impressed:
“John Kerry does not have the semi-soulfulness of Bill Clinton. He may, for all I know, still clap on the upbeat when the music starts. But he seems completely comfortable in his own skin and, it should be noted, with ours, which is another sort of real. The only real real, I would argue. A man whose convictions have such horsepower that he doesn?t have to shift gears from one group to the next,” she wrote.
Newspapers Had Sounded Alarm on Rwanda
Commemorations were held in Rwanda and around the world last week for the 800,000 people who were murdered in the Rwandan genocide 10 years ago. Western nations, following the lead of President Bill Clinton, declined to intervene at the outset, despite pleas for help. Clinton later apologized.
A look at newspaper headlines from April 1994 reveal some of the horror, and indicate that the news media were among those sounding the alarm:
- New York Times, April 21, page 3: “The Massacres in Rwanda: Hope Is Also a Victim,” by Donatella Lorch, filed from Nairobi, Kenya.
- Chicago Tribune, April 26, page 1; “500 Bodies Found at Rwanda Church.” (a brief)
- Chicago Tribune, April 25: page 3, “170 Slain at Rwanda Hospital, Group Says” (wire services)
- Los Angeles Times, April 30, page A13: News analysis — “Rwanda Violence Stumps World Leaders; Africa: Though Clinton and [U.N. Secretary General] Boutros Boutros-Ghali Have Made Guarded Threats, Calls for Action Have Been Eeerily Absent,” by Paul Richter, from Washington.
- Los Angeles Times, April 20, page 14; “Rwanda Offers No Sanctuary from Chaos; Central Africa: Missionaries Reporting Bloodletting Are Stunned That Holy Places Aren’t Safe,” by William D. Montalbano, from Rome.
- Los Angeles Times, April 17, Opinion section: “When Blood Red Was Not the Color of Rwanda’s Soil, by Basil Davidson,” author of numerous books on Africa.
- Washington Post, April 26, Metro section, “Now, the Reign of Terror; Impoverished King Watches Rwandan Bloodbath From Exile in Takoma Park,” by Stephen Buckley.
- Washington Post, April 24, Opinion section: “Fade to Blood; Why the International Answer to the Rwandan Atrocities Is Indifference,” by Jennifer Parmelee, from Kigali, Rwanda.
- Washington Post, April 24, Editorial: “‘So That the World Does Not Forget Rwanda'”
- USA Today, April 29, page 8A, “Harrowing Escapes for Americans Caught in Rwandan Carnage,” by John Ritter.
- USA Today, April 12, page 4A, “Bloodshed Escalates in Rwanda / U.N.-Led Peace Effort Fails Again,” by Jack Kelley.
Meximerica Planning U.S. Tabloids
“The scramble to capture Spanish-speaking newspaper readers in the United States is about to get another combatant, led by two experienced foreign correspondents who worked most recently at The Wall Street Journal,” Jacques Steinberg reports today in the New York Times.
“The new venture, Meximerica Media, is expected to announce in the next few weeks that it intends to create Spanish-language, tabloid-size newspapers in several Texas cities, according to several people briefed on the plans. Among the cities under strong consideration are Austin, Houston and San Antonio, to be followed by others in the West and Southwest where Mexican-American readers are thought to be underserved.
“. . . Meximerica is led by Edward Schumacher, a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Americas and a former correspondent in Madrid and Buenos Aires for The New York Times; and Jonathan Friedland, who, until recently, was the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Journal and a former correspondent in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.
How Leonard Pitts Won His Pulitzer
The Poynter Institute’s Keith M. Woods was a juror in Pulitzer Prize’s commentary category, won by syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald. The Pulitzer board makes the final decision, not the jurors, but Woods explains what impressed the jurors and what didn’t.
What worked: “A strong voice. A distinct point of view. Clarity of thought. Fairness to subjects. An airing of opposing points of view. Columns that informed and enlightened. A clear arc to the column.”
“Boondocks” Creator Not the Perfect Dinner Guest
The New Yorker has made available on its Web site a 7,119-word piece by Ben McGrath on “Boondocks” creator Aaron McGruder that begins with an anecdote about McGruder’s appearance at The Nation magazine’s dinner celebration of its 138th birthday, where actress Uma Thurman was one of the guests:
“What McGruder saw when he looked around at his approving audience was this: a lot of old, white faces. What followed was not quite a coronation. McGruder, who rarely prepares notes or speeches for events like this, began by thanking Thurman, ?the most ass-kicking woman in America.? Then he lowered the boom. He was a twenty-nine-year-old black man, he said, who got invited to such functions all the time, so you could imagine how bored he was. He proceeded to ramble, at considerable length, and in a tone, as one listener put it, of ?militant cynicism,? with a recurring theme: that the folks in the room (‘courageous’? Please) were a sorry lot.
“He told the guests that he?d called Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, a mass murderer to her face; what had they ever done? (The Rice exchange occurred in 2002, at the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards, where McGruder was given the Chairman?s Award; Rice requested that he write her into his strip.) He recounted a lunch meeting with Fidel Castro. (He had been invited to Cuba by the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, who is one of the few politicians McGruder has praised in ‘The Boondocks.’) He said that noble failure was not acceptable. But the last straw came when he ‘dropped the N-word,’ as one amused observer recalled. He said ?- bragged, even ?- that he?d voted for Nader in 2000. At that point, according to Hamilton Fish, the host of the party, ‘it got interactive.’?
Thomas Fleming, at 96, Still Makes Deadlines
“At 96, Thomas Fleming still making deadlines and fighting racism,” reads a headline in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.
“Fleming himself is a landmark, like the Golden Gate. He will be 97 this fall; still writes the editorials and a weekly column for the newspaper, now called the Sun Reporter; and still meets a deadline — “Every week,” he is sure to say, proud of the distinction that marks a professional. The paper counts on him for 1,000 words a week, and he produces,” reads the piece by Carl Nolte.
Earl Caldwell, Arthur Fennell Out Speechifying
Veteran journalist Earl Caldwell and broadcaster Arthur Fennell are among those who have been out of the office speechifying. Caldwell, who holds a chair at Hampton University in Virginia, said at the University of Kentucky that he believes that public trust in journalism is being eroded by a drive for profits that is harming content, as Jenny Robertson of Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
Caldwell was also subject of a profile in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot focusing on the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “For decades, he has crusaded to prove his theory that it wasn?t a lone prison escapee, James Earl Ray, who shot King on April 4, 1968,” reporter Candace Johnson wrote.
Fennell, who graduated from then-South Carolina State College in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree in dramatic arts, returned to now-South Carolina State University as keynote speaker at the annual Spring Honors and Awards Convocation.
Fennell is lead television anchor and managing editor for the 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts on CN8 News on the Comcast Network, based in Philadelphia. He was president of the National Association of Black Journalists from 1995 to 1997.
“You are here because of the blood, the sweat, the heartache and many, many prayerful nights of your parents,” Fennell told the honors students. “Your parents didn’t send you here to party all day and all night,” he said, according to the story.
Another former NABJ president, Sidmel Estes-Sumpter, was also honored last week.
The 1977 Medill School of Journalism graduate was presented with an Alumni Service Award from Northwestern University.
