Right Wing to Black Nationalists, They Can’t Resist
More than two weeks after Bill Cosby spoke in Washington about old-time values and “the lower economic people” in the black community, the comments continue to spark commentary. On the National Association of Black Journalists listserve, Prof. Kim Pearson of the College of New Jersey said that Cosby’s words harked back to W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Philadelphia Negro,” published in 1899, in which DuBois wrote, “The Negro must learn the lesson that other nations learned so laboriously and imperfectly, that his better classes have their chief excuse for being in the work they may do toward lifting the rabble.”
In a radio commentary, Glen Ford, co-publisher of the Black Commentator.com, wrote that, “we don?t think the opinions of entertainers should be considered newsworthy, outside of the entertainment media.” Then he ran in print a lengthy commentary taking issue with Cosby, which is linked to below.
The National Review’s Web site ran an essay by freelance writer Matt Rosenberg that attempted to account for how so many came to write about the remarks, saying that, “The slow but now-steady spread of the Cosby story illustrates one more way bloggers serve an invaluable function: not just by rebutting or correcting the news; but by watering and ‘sunshining’ stories that are dying on the vine because they disrupt the pre-conceived liberal agendas of media elites.”
The Boston Globe said the discussion is about more than African Americans, concluding in an editorial with: “More than an African-American problem, weak public schools are a problem for even the strongest students who go off to college and discover that their academic best lags far behind the skills of students in better public and private schools.” Previously, Joe Rodriguez in the San Jose Mercury-News and Dorreen Yellow Bird in the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald related the comments to the Latino and Native communities, respectively.
And the Dallas Morning News’ Viewpoints page featured a roundup of opinion including John McWhorter, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Sheron C. Patterson, senior pastor of St. Paul United Methodist Church in downtown Dallas; Bishop T.D. Jakes, author and pastor of the Potter’s House in Dallas, one of the biggest churches in the country; Franklyn Jenifer, departing president of the University of Texas at Dallas; and DeDe McGuire, co-host for “The Doug Banks Morning Show” on WJKS radio in Wilmington, Del.
More from African American columnists:
- Betty Bayé, Louisville Courier-Journal: What’s the fuss? Bill Cosby said nothing new nor shocking to African Americans
- Black Commentator editors: Bill Cosby’s Confused Notions of “Responsibility”
- Tammy L. Carter, Orlando Sentinel: The Cos cause — he speaks the plain truth
- Christopher John Farley, Time magazine: What Bill Cosby Should Be Talking About
- Earl Ofari Hutchinson, syndicated columnist: Stereotypes Not Cosby Are the Real Problem
- Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Cosby gave it to us straight — and it’s a valuable lesson
- James Ragland, Dallas Morning News: Thinking of Cosby, reparations effort
- Edward Rhymes, educator: New Bedford (Mass.) Standard-Times: Dr. Bill Cosby, I respectfully disagree
- Linda S. Wallace, Houston Chronicle: Going on the offense, without criticism, more effective
Who’s Liberal? Conservative on What?
“If you’d like to check out an endangered species, don’t bother with a trip to the zoo,” reads a story by Randy Dotinga in the Christian Science Monitor. “Just drop by the newsroom of your favorite newspaper or TV station and ask to see the conservatives.
“According to a new survey, only 12 percent of local reporters, editors, and media executives are self-described conservatives, while twice as many call themselves liberal. At national news organizations, the gap is even wider — 7 percent conservative vs. 34 percent liberal.”
The Pew Research Center survey, part of “State of the News Media 2004,” from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said:
“In terms of their overall ideological outlook, majorities of national (54%) and local journalists (61%) continue to describe themselves as moderates. The percentage identifying themselves as liberal has increased from 1995: 34% of national journalists describe themselves as liberals, compared with 22% nine years ago. The trend among local journalists has been similar — 23% say they are liberals, up from 14% in 1995. More striking is the relatively small minority of journalists who think of themselves as politically conservative (7% national, 12% local). As was the case a decade ago, the journalists as a group are much less conservative than the general public (33% conservative).”
The Monitor story continues:
“What to do? Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggests that news organizations reach out to Christian colleges and woo people from other walks of life, like the military. ‘Just look around,’ he says.
“Editors can also try to recruit reporters from different parts of the country and from a variety of backgrounds, says Peter Bhatia, executive editor of The [Portland] Oregonian. [David] Yarnold, the San Jose [Mercury News] opinion editor, adds that job interview questions can draw out whether applicants are ideologues or critical thinkers.
His story continues, “It may help that the news industry isn’t a stranger to diversity campaigns. Through internships and other outreach programs, media outlets routinely make special efforts to hire minorities. The diversity efforts have had mixed success, however. According to a new survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, minorities hold only 13 percent of newsroom jobs at American newspapers surveyed, up from just 4 percent in 1978.”
An avenue for further inquiry might involve definitions. The news media’s difficulty in raising the numbers of journalists of color could mean that perhaps the organizations aren’t perceived as being as “liberal” (some might say, “as ‘progressive'”) as many think — at least on race.
Or it could be that people are “liberal” or “conservative” depending on the issue.
As Ernest R. Sotomayor, president of Unity: Journalists of Color, tells Journal-isms:
“When speaking of making our newsrooms ‘diverse,’ we’re obligated to talk about the widest possible definition, and that means going far beyond just race and ethnicity. It means seeking out people who will provide a very wide diversity of thought, ideology, politics, religion, socio-economic background, age, gender, sexual orientation and any other backgrounds that help provide an accurate view into our communities. And that means finding people of color who are not all in lockstep, whether liberal or conservative, in their thinking.
“I’d agree that while in my own experience that overall the people in newsrooms would probably identify with being liberals, I have witnessed enormous efforts by people who are true professionals working at legitimate news organizations to make their stories as fair as possible.
“And, we tend to use these labels — conservative and liberal — and force people to be classified as either one, when in fact they are sometimes something of both depending on the issue.”
Ricardo Pimentel to Lead Milwaukee Opinion Pages
Ricardo Pimentel, op-ed columnist for The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, has been named editorial page editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rick Romell reports in the Wisconsin newspaper.
“Pimentel has been a columnist at The Arizona Republic since December 1999. Tribune Media Services syndicates his work.
“Pimentel, 51, is the U.S.-born son of Mexican immigrants. His father, a tailor, taught himself English with books from the San Bernardino, Calif., public library and provided the inspiration for Pimentel’s career as a writer.
“He has held reporting and editing posts at newspapers in California and Arizona, been a Washington correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers and served a four-month stint as a Navy journalist at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
“In addition to his journalistic work, Pimentel has written two books of fiction, ‘House with Two Doors’ and ‘Voices From the River.’ He will join the Journal Sentinel June 23.”
Dalton Tanonaka Running for Congress
Dalton Tanonaka a former Hong Kong-based anchor of CNN International’s “Biz Asia,” former host of CNN’s “Talk Asia,” and at one time the only Asian American male television news anchor in the United States, is running for Congress from Hawaii.
“Tanonaka, 49, will run as a Republican and oppose incumbent Democrat Rep. Neil Abercrombie for the 1st Congressional District (Urban O’ahu),” the Honolulu Advertiser reports.
“Tanonaka, who was born in Kohala on the Big Island, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 2002.”
He was the subject of an interview with the News Watch Project at San Francisco State University.
Anchor Michael Hill Quits at Dallas Station
Michael Hill, early morning and noon anchor at Dallas’ KTVT-TV, left the station May 26 “to take some time off and tend to my health, family and house,” he told Journal-isms. “We had a drunk driver smash into our house in April and caused substantial damage. What a nightmare!”
He added, “I’m going to be a main anchor somewhere,” but said the deal wasn’t completed.
Hill was the subject of a piece on early-morning anchors last November by Ken Parish Perkins in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
“‘It’s tough,’ says Michael Hill, an experienced reporter who toils in the wee hours on KTVT/Channel 11’s morning shift,” Perkins wrote. “Hill, a former Channel 8 reporter who worked in New York City before returning to Texas three years ago, also hasn’t been able to climb out of the morning depths.
“‘At first, when you do this, you adjust your life to these kinds of odd hours,’ Hill says. ‘As time goes on . . . that schedule begins to dictate all other aspects of your life because it rules your body clock. You can’t get around it.'”
A KTVT-TV colleague, who didn’t want to be identified, said the station is witnessing “the bleaching of the newscasts.” On the 10 p.m. news, “unless there’s a perp walk, you won’t see any” African Americans.
News director Tom Doerr did not return telephone calls.
Stephen Hill Videotapes to Be Shown
Meanwhile, more bad news for Michael Hill’s twin brother, Stephen Hill:
“Videotapes that allegedly show a former Cincinnati TV reporter having sex with teenage boys will be allowed at the reporter’s trial, according to a judge’s ruling,” Cincinnati’s WLWT-TV reported.
“An attorney for Stephen Hill asked the court May 6 to throw out the tapes, which were found in Hill’s home in Avondale,” this story continued.
Debating Abu Grhaib and American Culture
A cartoon by Keith Knight linking Black Entertainment Television and the Iraq prison scandal became must-pass-along to many who laughed at it a couple of weeks ago.
But its premise isn’t far-fetched, according to people interviewed by Caryle Murphy in the Washington Post.
“‘There is a cultural ethos that some of these people brought with them when they . . . volunteered to go into the Army . . . [that] knows no bounds when it comes to propriety,’ said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank devoted to moral aspects of public policy,” reported Murphy in her religion page piece, “Grappling With the Morals On Display in Abu Ghraib.”
“Paul Vitz, a Catholic professor of psychology at New York University who studies the intersection of religion and psychology, said ‘there is nothing non-American’ about what the guards did.
“‘For a large number of young people today, particularly young men, the only moral framework they get is through the popular media,’ including computer games and Web sites bursting with violence and sex, Vitz added. ‘When people immerse themselves in the pornography and violence of American pop culture, it’s not surprising it has consequences. It’s a no-brainer.'”
But Frank Rich, writing Sunday in the New York Times, called such notions nonsense.
“To blame every American transgression on the culture, whether the transgression is as grievous as Abu Ghraib or the shootings at Columbine or as trivial as lubricious teenage fashions, is to absolve Americans of any responsibility for anything. It used to be that liberals pinned all American sins on the military-industrial complex; now it’s conservatives who pin them all on the Viacom-Time Warner complex.
“The most popular images of sadomasochism in American pop culture this year have been those in ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ an R-rated ‘religious’ movie that many Americans took their children to see, at times with clerical blessings.”
CNN Files Suit for List of Florida’s Possible Felons
“Arguing the case involves ‘enormous public interest,’ Cable News Network has filed a lawsuit seeking to force Florida to release a list of 47,000 possible felons who could be barred from voting this fall,” Jim Saunders reports in Florida’s Daytona Beach News-Journal.
“The television network — which will be joined in the lawsuit by the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation – -challenges the constitutionality of part of a 2001 election-reform law that prevents the public and news media from getting copies of the list.
“The lawsuit argues, in part, the list should be available to help avoid a replay of the 2000 presidential election when some voters said they were mistakenly turned away from the polls.”
Tribune, CBS Line Up Against Nielsen on Meters
“Tribune Company Thursday broke its silence on the local people meter controversy and joined Univision Communications, Viacom’s CBS, and Fox Television in urging Nielsen Media Research to delay the rollout of the new service,” Katy Bachman reports in Media Week.
“For weeks, Nielsen Media Research has been pummeled publicly by a group dubbed the Don’t Count Us Out Coalition, which is made up primarily of Latino and African American advocacy organizations opposed to the TV rating firm’s plans to modernize how it measures viewing habits,” as Meg James and James Bates reported in the Los Angeles Times Thursday.
In his New York Daily News column yesterday, Juan Gonzalez, who is also president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, noted that Rupert Murdoch is behind the anti-Nielsen efforts.
“Black and Latino leaders are understandably frustrated because Nielsen and the industry have historically ignored their concerns to be better counted and better represented in the media,” Gonzalez wrote.
“But you don’t fix the media by jumping in bed with Darth Vader himself.”
Sharpton to Do Political Commentary for CNBC
“Democratic presidential candidate the Rev. Al Sharpton will serve as a commentator on CNBC’s political team during the Democratic and Republican national conventions this summer,” reports Michele Greppi in Television Week.
“He will appear regularly on weeknight shows “Capital Report” (Tuesday-Friday, 7-8 p.m. ET), “Dennis Miller” (Monday-Friday, 9-10 p.m. ET) and “McEnroe” (debuting Wednesday, July 7, at 10 p.m. ET and airing Monday-Friday, 10-11 p.m. ET), and may also appear on some CNBC weekend programming that develops.”
Why Columnist Stanley Crouch Uses “Negro”
For anyone who wondered why the curmudgeonly New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch still uses the word “Negro,” he devoted a piece to explaining it yesterday:
“Being called something other than Negro will not better the state of the people who now walk around challenging others to call them African-Americans. They think that to be proud and effective, people with dark skins of a certain pedigree need to know they are connected to the grandeur of Africa, the fountain of civilization. Hogwash.
“Clearly, knowing that they are Africans has done nothing special for Africans themselves, as we can see in the massacres in Rwanda during the 1990s, the many brutal African dictatorships and the abundance on the continent of backward ideas about women, slavery and a number of other things.
“People can call themselves whatever they want. But the challenges facing this nation and its darker ethnic group will not be solved by anything other than deep thinking and hard work. Pride comes from accomplishment. Cosmetic nonsense will not get it,” he wrote.
3 NEA Programs to Aid Arts Critics
The National Endowment for the Arts announced this week it is establishing three NEA Arts Journalism Institutes “that will focus on improving arts criticism in classical music, opera, theater and dance,” a news release announces.
“The institutes will be designed for journalists who cover the arts for print and broadcast outlets located outside the country’s largest media markets, where professional development opportunities are limited. Institutes for dance critics will be hosted by the American Dance Festival at Duke University; for classical music and opera critics at Columbia University; and theater critics at the University of Southern California.”
A Hindu Wedding and an Editor’s Note
The Washington Post noted this about S. Mitra Kalita, president of the South Asian Journalists Association:
“On May 8, Staff Writer S. Mitra Kalita and Nitin Mukul celebrated their Hindu wedding in New Jersey. . . . Mukul rode in on a bejeweled horse. Kalita was wearing a blue and gold mekhla chador, which is an Assamese-style sari, and had henna tattoos on her hands and feet. There were no elephant statues, but there was an elephant ice sculpture.”
The vehicle for this news was an editor’s note on a May 20 story by Kalita about an Indian wedding planner, “Marrying East and West; Hindu Wedding Traditions Call for Specialized Help.”
The note told readers that the wedding planner in the story was not the one Kalita used.