Forbes Writer Describes a “Walking Contradiction”
Brett Pulley, a senior editor at Forbes magazine, says that “black businesses are not used to being scrutinized like this,” and that it is “extremely tough to do these tough stories on African American businesses.”
He is in the midst of a book tour supporting “The Billion-Dollar BET: Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of Black Entertainment Television” (Wiley, $24.95), and his comments came last week before about 150 college-educated, successful black people at DC Coast, a downtown Washington restaurant where Pulley read from his book in a woodsy room framed by wine closets, pictures of maritime scenes, and a camera from C-SPAN.
“To a certain extent, he is a race man, a walking contradiction,” Pulley said of black America’s most successful male media mogul.
That could be an understatement. While Johnson has made millionaires of a loyal cadre that has stuck with him, Pulley’s book also shows, according to its publicity material, that:
- “The company has been successful despite three separate scandals involving executives who served as BET’s top financial officers. One of them went to prison, and another has accused Johnson of improperly avoiding taxes.”
- “After a small group of founding executives became millionaires as a result of BET’s growth, Johnson forced most of them to resign.”
- Johnson fired his own wife, Sheila Johnson, from BET.
- Johnson engaged “in personal relationships with top female executives at his company. His now ex-wife, Sheila Johnson learned of one affair when she was subpoenaed to testify in a lawsuit against the company. Another executive who he had an affair with, Debra Lee, is now the president and chief executive officer of BET.”
- “Johnson’s own sister, who was one of the company’s first employees, sued him and settled for more than $1 million.”
Pulley, 44, also writes that Johnson originally envisioned high-minded programming, but succumbed to the lucre made available by devoting more and more time to music videos supplied for free by the record companies. It is consistent with Johnson’s philosophy of money first and social responsibility . . . whenever.
For journalists who have followed BET over the years, some of the disclosures should come as no surprise, even though we might not have known the specifics.
For example, a chapter on Ed Gordon’s 1996 post-criminal trial interview with O.J. Simpson tells us that BET trumped NBC for the “get” once Johnson promised Simpson and his lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, that BET would run paid advertisements during the show for a $30 video that Simpson had produced giving his version of what happened at the Brentwood murder scene.
Only after Gordon repeatedly argued that such a compromise of the line between news and advertising would “impugn my integrity” were the ads placed instead at the beginning and end of the program.
Although Johnson did not cooperate with the author, who developed this, his first book, after a 2001 cover story on the entrepreneur, some passages seem to place Johnson in the best possible light. The book’s biggest hurdle could be, as Pulley said, that “people have strong passions about BET and about Bob.” Thus, anything at variance with those opinions will be greeted skeptically.
For example, a favorable passage about BET’s support of the 1995 Million Man March says that BET covered the event. That’s true if cutting in from time to time among the day’s routine showing of music videos is considered coverage. If viewers wanted to see the event without interruption, they had to — and did — tune elsewhere.
And on Gordon, Pulley states, “Before the O.J. interview, Gordon’s fundamental competency as a journalist had been questioned. Afterward, the only question that the major networks were asking was, ‘Why didn’t we hire this guy a long time ago?'” Yet once Gordon left BET for NBC, he didn’t last long, a situation the book doesn’t explore. For whatever reason, he has found success only at BET.
By Forbes magazine’s calculations, Johnson was America’s first black billionaire, and for some, that is cause for celebration. Yet it is telling that of the four blurbs on the back of the book jacket, three are from journalists praising the book. It is only the blurb from the non-journalist — NBA Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas — that praises Johnson himself. To Thomas, Johnson is “one of the most inspiring men of our time.”
With “Uncut” Show, BET Gets Racier
“Given all the barely clad women that are booty-shaking, grinding and gyrating on BET during the day, it’s hard to believe things could get any wilder after dark,” writes Nekesa Mumbi Moody of the Associated Press.
“Rapper Snoop Dogg appears on the set of Playboy’s Buckwild show, while filming a music video, March 29, in Los Angeles.
“But as the rap group Whodini once rhymed, ‘the freaks come out at night.’ And on BET — already criticized for showing videos with a high T&A quotient — the videos become even more graphic during the wee morning hours on BET Uncut.
“While outright nudity is blurred out, the clips still contain enough sexual content to make R. Kelly blush. There’s Ludacris’ Booty Poppin’ video, featuring close-ups of jiggling posteriors as women take it all off in a strip club. And in Nelly’s Tip Drill video, women shake so wildly that bikini bottoms pop off, and a posse of leering men grab various body parts. Later, the women simulate sex acts with themselves.”
BET Must Get Back to Educating (Pius Kamau column, Denver Post)
Spelman Students Draw the Line (Editorial, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
“Down Low” Book Sales Prove Oprah’s Power
“On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of ‘Straight’ Black Men Who Sleep With Men” by HIV/STD prevention activist J.L. King would normally be an unlikely candidate for third-best-selling title on the amazon.com book list, as it was on Sunday.
But King had appeared Friday on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and the Winfrey touch proved its power. “We welcome J.L. King to the show because you are one of the few people who has chosen to speak out about this. Even though The New York Times — I think back in August is the first time I even heard of it — did this huge cover story about it and I — I remember my — my girlfriend Gayle read it. She goes, ‘Oh, my God, I read this article and I’m scared,'” Winfrey said.
The front-page New York Times piece, “AIDS Fears Grow for Black Women,” ran April 5 and was written by Linda Villarosa, a senior editor-at-large at Essence magazine who is a contract writer for the Times, where she once worked. She has been writing about the issue at least since 1990.
“In government studies of 29 states, a black woman was 23 times more likely to be infected with AIDS than was a white woman, and black women accounted for 71.8 percent of new H.I.V. cases in women from 1999 to 2002. Though new cases of H.I.V. among black women have been stable in the past few years, the number of those who have been infected through heterosexual sex has risen,” Villarosa wrote in the Times.
Earl Graves Proselytizes for Prostate Tests
Black Enterprise magazine publisher Earl G. Graves is urging all men 40 and over to get tested for prostate cancer after undergoing “a revolutionary nerve-sparing” procedure to catch the disease, a news release says.
“The technique allows for prostate removal with the preservation of potency and continence.” However, Graves says, “I must take a PSA test every three months for the rest of my life so that the condition can be constantly monitored.”
“I didn’t want to get prostate cancer, no one does,” said Graves, 69, in the release. “But I am hopeful that coming forward with my story will convince those who are most vulnerable to take action.”
Graves’ personal story, detailed on the Publisher’s Page of the May issue, is followed by a prostate cancer resource guide to help direct men to local resources, including locations for PSA screenings in their areas. Black men in America are at least 50 percent percent more likely to develop prostate cancer than men of any other racial or ethnic group.
Graves adds of his March 3 surgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore:
“I’m sure it didn’t hurt that as I was going under the knife, employees of Black Enterprise had gathered in our company’s ampitheatre to pray for me before having their spirits uplifted by a live performance of the world-[renowed] Fisk University Jubilee Singers.”
St. Louis Paper’s Ron Harris Embedded in Iraq
Ron Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showed up on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” today, embedded with the Third Battalion, 7th Marines in Iraq.
Harris was one of the few African American journalists in the war zone when hostilities began last year, embedded with the same unit in Kuwait, and later in Iraq itself. He came back to the States, then returned about a month ago with photographer Andrew Cutraro to rejoin the unit. “He had trouble getting to them,” Post-Dispatch National/Foreign Editor Tim Poor, told Journal-isms. “They’re off the beaten path,” they’re in a treacherous part of the country, and “just getting to them was pretty hairy.” One of his stories was about how much more dangerous for the unit it is a year later.
Harris leaves Iraq Wednesday to return to Metro reporting, “and we’re glad,” Poor said.
His stories are carried by the Knight Ridder Tribune wire. One, dated April 2, was datelined ” ON THE ROAD FROM FALLUJAH TO RAMADI, IRAQ” and began:
“The convoy of American soldiers is silent and constantly on watch traveling from Fallujah to Ramadi. Other soldiers have died on this road. Enemies are everywhere, and death lies in wait.
“It’s a strange feeling to ride down a highway knowing that any minute you could be blown to bits.
“Just like the five U.S. soldiers killed Wednesday.
“We’re on a dangerous stretch of road like the one they were on, one where Marines and soldiers already have been killed.
“It’s our first time down this road, but not for Marine Capt. Jeff McCormack. McCormack, 28, of Chicago, has been here 10 times, and his convoy has been hit twice by IEDs, the military acronym for Improvised Explosive Devices — homemade bombs, usually placed along the roads traveled by U.S. convoys. It’s the Iraqi insurgents’ chief method these days for killing and maiming U.S. military. . . .”
Harris joined the Post-Dispatch in 1999 as an editorial writer, later serving as an assistant metro editor.
He began his career after graduating from Clark Atlanta University as a medical reporter at his hometown newspaper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar.
After a stint as associate editor for Ebony magazine in Chicago, Harris joined the Los Angeles Times. There he worked for 14 years as a metro reporter, assistant metro editor, recruiter, national correspondent, columnist and finally a foreign correspondent based in Rio de Janeiro, according to his bio.
Active in the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists, he is co-founder of a Post-Dispatch program in which four workshop graduates still in high school intern at the Post-Dispatch in the summer.
NAHJ Celebrates New Spanish-Language Stylebook
“Vocabularies from a myriad of Latin America are forced to come together in the U.S.,” explains the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, hence the need for a stylebook for those who work in the Spanish-language media.
About 100 people celebrated the release of “the Manual de Estilo” Wednesday at a nightclub on the Washington, D.C., waterfront, where it was salsa night. It followed other celebrations in El Paso, Texas, and in Phoenix.
The manual, edited by Alberto Gomez Font, sells for $14.95. It is described as “an expert guide on grammar, the proper use of titles and other style questions, common problems with intonation and pronunciation on the air, and the tricky craft of translating stock market terms and government jargon in a predominantly English U.S. environment.”
100 Picket at Details Magazine Over “Gay or Asian?”
“A Details magazine feature this month asks, ‘Gay or Asian?’ Friday, protesters supplied the answer: insulting and demeaning,” reports Monty Phan in Newsday.
“Carrying signs reading ‘Racism is a not a joke’ and chanting, “Stop the hate, don’t perpetuate,” about 100 to 150 protested Manhattan-based Fairchild Publications, a unit of Conde Nast Publications and the publisher of Details magazine, which in its April issue ran a one-page graphic called, ‘Gay or Asian?’, part of a regular feature the magazine says is ‘intended as a humorous swipe at social stereotypes.’
Not content with an earlier apology, “several Asian-American groups arranged Friday’s protest to demand an apology from the magazine, a retraction of the feature and sensitivity training for Details’ editors and writers,” Phan wrote.
“‘We want a full-page apology, just like the article was a full page,’ said Sarah Paiji, 19, a Harvard University sophomore who arranged for a busload of Boston-area college students to attend the protest. ‘We’re sick of the media telling us who we are. We’re taking a stand.’
“In a statement Friday, Details editor in chief Daniel Peres said he had received an ‘unprecedented number’ of letters regarding the feature and that the magazine would meet with Asian-American and gay community leaders next week,” Phan continued.
Reporter, Editor Turn Philly Inquirer Story into Play
“What happens to newspaper stories one day after they are read? They wrap fish, line birdcages and help light fireplaces,” begins a news release on the Web site of the Philadelphia chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association.
“Here’s one story that met a more fortunate end: In March 1999, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a front-page story about a paternity lawsuit. It described a Pennsylvania man who determined through a DNA test that the son for whom he had been paying child support was not his own. After the story appeared, Inquirer author Shankar Vedantam and Inquirer editor Donald Drake asked themselves if the issues in the story could be turned into a play. Can DNA technology really decide what it means to be a parent?
“After years of collaboration, Tom, Dick And Harriet won the 2nd Annual Brick Playhouse Award for Outstanding Writing. Now, The Brick Playhouse will present the world premiere April 7-25, 2004 at The 2nd Stage at the Adrienne at 2030 Sansom Street.”
However, the Philadelphia Weekly panned the play as “a humorless satire about an annoying threesome who are far more concerned with themselves than any discussion regarding genes and heredity.” Vedantam now works at the Washington Post.
Tim Giago Might Play Spoiler Role in Daschle Race
When last we reported on Tim Giago, founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association, he was seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, running against Democratic leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. Now he has decided to run for the seat as an independent.
“Giago running in November could alter the result,” Bill Richardson, political science professor at the University of South Dakota, is quoted as saying. “It could influence the race big-time,” he said. “The obvious possibility is that he will take away votes that possibly would have gone to Tom Daschle.”
“The situation is similar to Ralph Nader running on the Green Party ticket in the 2000 presidential race and as an independent in 2004,” Richardson said in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.
“The significance of Giago’s decision ‘can’t be overstated,’ said Dick Wadhams, [Republican John] Thune’s campaign manager.”
“It is of no concern to Giago if his candidacy hurts Daschle or Thune, he said. ‘That is the chance you take,’ Giago said.”
Robert Pierre to Seek Degree in Cape Town
Robert Pierre, Midwest correspondent for The Washington Post and a former board member of the National Association of Black Journalists, as well as president of its Washington chapter, is leaving the paper for a year to pursue a master’s degree in African Studies at the University of Cape Town. He had been Midwest correspondent for three years.
Blacks, Latinos Had Issues With “Alamo” Film
“Disney’s historical epic ‘The Alamo’ took another box office pounding over the weekend, barely limping into 10th place with an estimated $4.1 million,” as the Washington Post reports today. “Dismal reviews and dismissive headlines like ‘Forget ‘The Alamo’ subsequently helped crush the movie.”
Not to mention that both African Americans and Latinos had issues with the concept.
“The fact is that the defenders of the Alamo fought for white supremacy and slavery. This latest Hollywood edition of the Alamo story is not much different than the last half dozen or so Alamo movies, such as the 1937 Heroes of the Alamo. The most recent Alamo film saga was John Wayne’s lumbering effort in 1960, complete with a ponderous musical score and a cast of thousands,” writes Don Santina in Counterpunch, reprinted on blackcommentator.com.
In the New York Times, Simon Romero notes that “Disney marketed the film differently to Spanish-speaking audiences. Instead of the slogan, ‘The Movie Event You’ll Never Forget,’ the Spanish-language ads referred to ‘The Battle That Divided Mexico,’ reflecting the view of historians who consider the Alamo an episode in a civil war in what was once Mexico’s northeastern frontier.
“Disney’s marketing, however, appears to have performed poorly in two languages in the United States. The movie, which cost nearly $100 million to make, brought in just $12.3 million in its first week. And Disney’s attempts to cater to a Latino audience on a subject that serves as the center of Texas’s creation myth have surprised experts on marketing to Latinos.
“‘The Alamo is such an open wound among American Hispanics and comes at a time of growing resentment against immigrants that one has to wonder what they were thinking,’ said Isabel Vald鳊lt;/b>, a member of PepsiCo’s Latino advisory board and the author of several books on marketing to Latinos,” Romero’s story continues.