Nominee Includes Journalists in Unity Speech
Sen. John Kerry told 5,000 delegates to the Unity convention in Washington this morning that “I will expand opportunities for people of color in the media, by appointing FCC commissioners committed to enforcing equal employment and insuring that small and minority-owned broadcasters are not consolidated into extinction.”
The Democratic presidential nominee used his hour-long address to adapt his stump speech to include the concerns of journalists of color. “Let’s not forget the role that so many of your brothers and sisters have played in exposing historic wrongs, lifting up communities of color and building one America,” he said to the applause of those at the Washington Convention Center.
“Where would we be today if it were not for the stirring images of the civil rights movement captured for Life magazine by the camera of Gordon Parks; or the searing war-time photojournalism of Nick Ut?
“Where would we be without the pioneering word pictures painted by Ruben Salazar for the El Paso Herald Post and Los Angeles Times?
“Where would we be without Carole Simpson, Frank del Olmo, Bernard Shaw, Ed Bradley or Max Robinson? Where would we be without the famed Native American historian and journalist Arthur Caswell Parker, founder of American Indian Magazine, or Ignacio Lozno, founder of La Opinion?
“Where would we be today without Unity 2004 and all of you?” He also quoted the masthead of abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ paper the North Star, established in 1847: “Right is of no sex — Truth is of no color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.”
Representatives of each of the Unity constituent groups — the National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association and Native American Journalists Association — took turns posing questions in a 25-minute segment after the speech.
Brett Pulley, senior editor of Forbes magazine, representing NABJ, asked Kerry about Bill Cosby’s recent comments about the failures of some lower-class African Americans, asking who was most responsible for those problems, government or the people themselves.
“All of us are responsible,” Kerry replied, saying Cosby’s statements might be “excessively exclusive.” He used the question to talk about the inequality inherent in funding schools through property taxes and his own experience sponsoring the Youth Build program, which puts young African Americans to work rehabilitating buildings. When he sought more for the program, he said, he was told “we don’t have the money.
“Bill Cosby’s right,” Kerry concluded. “People in the community have to accept responsibility, but we need to empower those people. It’s all of us together.”
Catalina Camia, an editor at Gannett News Service who represented AAJA, asked whether Kerry would support the Filipino Veterans Equality Act, noting that some Filipino veterans had been denied benefits after fighting for the United States during World War II. (President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order on July 26, 1941, deploying soldiers from the Philippines, which at that time was a territory of the United States, according to California’s San Mateo County Times. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush granted the Filipino veterans citizenship, but they have been denied the same benefits received by the American soldiers they fought with because of a Rescission Act signed by Congress after World War II, the paper reported.)
Kerry replied that he did support the bill, and said that his efforts on behalf of Vietnam veterans included efforts to help all veterans. When he returned from Vietnam, “I talked about what was happening to minorities, the service people who had been drafted out of the barrios and inner cities. I talked about racism . . . This is a 35-year fight for me,” he said.
Lori Edmo-Suppah, longtime NAJA member, asked whether American Indian tribes should have to go through the states in order to get homeland security funds. As Indianz.com has reported, “Tribes were left out of the Homeland Security Act of 2003 despite efforts to include language that would have recognized the government-to-government relationship. As a result, tribes must go through state and local governments to obtain funding for bio-terrorism, emergency preparedness and other critical programs.”
Kerry replied that “some [funds] need to go directly to tribes,” and said of the Native community, the government should “trust it and provide the funding necessary.” Kerry promised during his speech to “appoint Native Americans to key positions in the White House and throughout my administration” and “restore respect for tribal sovereignty.”
When Carolyn Curiel of the New York Times editorial board, representing NAHJ, asked what Kerry would do if he were president and was reading to schoolchildren when he got word of a terrorist attack, as was President Bush, Kerry said, “I would have told those kids nicely that the president of the United States had something that he needed to attend to.”
In saying he opposed further media consolidation, Kerry pointed to the networks’ decisions last week to curtail their coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Boston. “I thought Barack Obama gave a brilliant speech,” he said, referring to the U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois. “America missed it.” Likewise, he said, for Ron Reagan’s talk about stem cell research and that of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.
“I will do my part to bring more diversity into the media,” he said in his speech. “Right now people of color make up 32 percent of the nation’s population but only 13 percent of daily newspaper staffs. And people of color represent only a tiny fraction of the number of editors, anchors, and executives at our nation’s premier news organizations. Right now only 4.2 percent of radio stations and 1.5 percent of TV stations are owned by minorities.
“I look around at all the talent in this room and say to the management of these organizations, we can do better.”
Powell Says North Korea, Iran Safe for Now
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told Unity delegates today that he sees no reason that the “Bush doctrine” — that the U.S. will act pre-emptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets, a principle used as one justification for the war in Iraq — will be extended to Iran and North Korea, the two other nations Bush had called part of the “axis of evil,” citing their nuclear programs.
“With those two, we’ve made progress with diplomacy and political action,” Powell said. “We are not running around the world looking for places” to act pre-emptively “because there are better tools for the president to use.” The secretary mentioned several examples of trouble spots where the administration was acting in concert with other nations, rather than unilaterally.
The question was one posed by Terry M. Neal of washingtonpost.com, one of four journalists who asked questions of Powell at the Washington Convention Center.
Powell also told the audience that newly freed nations must understand the importance of a free press, saying “you are doing important, vital work that shows what a vital democracy is all about”; that he is trying to make the State Department “look like America”; and expressed strong doubt that “huge stockpiles” of weapons of mass destruction will ever be found in Iraq. But he insisted that the war was justified because without U.S. intervention, “Saddam Hussein would have been free from international restraints and we would have faced those weapons at another time, another place.”
At another point, Angelo B. Henderson, associate editor at Real Times, parent company of the Chicago Defender, asked Powell, “how has being a person of color made a difference in the inner circle?”
Powell replied that “President Bush knows who I am,” and that “the fact that I am a black man made no difference inside our councils.” However, Powell has said, for example, that he thought “acceptable” the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program that Bush opposed, and has said publicly that he has benefited from affirmative action.
The secretary said he was happy that 30 percent of all those taking the foreign service test are now people of color, but he wanted the percentage to grow. “We want to see more and more minorities at every level,” he said, “I want my department to look like America.”
In introducing Powell, Herbert Lowe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, said Powell had told him after a private, off-the-record dinner that “it is rare that he sees any of us in his press pool,” an observation borne out by a survey Unity released Monday on the racial composition of Washington bureaus.
