Journalist Published “Morris Memo” Newsletter
Carl Morris, who helped build the National Association of Black Journalists as an early, longtime executive director, a founder of the National Association of Minority Media Executives and publisher of an industry newsletter on diversity, “The Morris Memo,” died Friday at age 73.
He had not been ill but was recovering from open-heart surgery, his wife, Kelda, told Journal-isms today.
As the Reston, Va.-based Carl Morris Associates, Morris published “The Morris Memo,” a newsletter on people of color and the media that would include such lists as “Most Diversity-Balanced Dailies,” until his retirement in 1995. As NABJ executive director, he insisted on recording in NABJ material the accomplishments of black journalists, such as winning Pulitzer Prizes and becoming news executives. And he was a sometimes impatient advocate.
In 1984, after Morris had become the first minority affairs director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, hired after a national search, the Associated Press wrote:
“Carl Morris, a former copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was hired by the ASNE to help the industry achieve its integration target. He says that when they hire minority people newspapers often have higher standards than when they hire whites.
“‘We’re all not superstars,’ Morris says. ‘There are a lot of good, average reporters out there. You ought to hire them like you hire white reporters — some on their skills and some on their potential.'”
“Carl was more than a former executive director of NABJ and founder of NAMME, he was my friend,” Sidmel Estes-Sumpter of WAGA-TV Atlanta, a former NABJ president, wrote to the NABJ listserve today.
“He was the one who always inspired me to ‘keep up the pressure’ even when others told me to back off. Some people had issues with his tactics, but I loved him for his no-nonsense (and I’m cleaning up the words Carl would have used) attitude and his deep dedication to NABJ. He may not have received the credit, but at many points, Carl along with Renee [Tross] and Elke [Milton] kept the doors of NABJ open. They don’t make the kind of dedicated workers like Carl.”
“He was a mentor to many folks, and I include myself in that,” said Toni Laws, executive director of NAMME, of which Morris was founding executive director in 1990. “He held the industry and individuals to the highest standards, and if the industry or the individual didn’t meet those standards, he called you on it.”
“He was a great storyteller and could hold court with the best of them,” added Jackie Jones of Penn State University, another former NABJ board member. “He also could be charming, cranky, smooth, cantankerous and, sometimes, all of the above in one sitting. What I appreciated most about Carl, though, was he took the time to measure things. He knew how many Black city editors, managing editors, assignment editors, producers, etc., there were at any point in time. He knew whether we were in large markets or small and he kept us all apprised of that, whether it was in the Morris Memo or via a telephone call. He kept tabs on our presence in the news industry when no one else did.”
Neil Foote, another former NABJ board member who now works with radio host Tom Joyner’s Reach Media, said, “I worked across the hallway from Carl during those early days of the NABJ office. I also followed in the footsteps of Carl as director of minority affairs at ASNE — He always told it like it was supposed to be told and challenged us as black journalists and the industy to do better — whether you agreed with him or not!!!”
Rod Doss, editor and publisher of the New Pittsburgh Courier, said he and Morris both started at the historic black newspaper in 1967, with Doss in advertising and Morris as a reporter. “You could say he was a mentor,” Doss told Journal-isms. “We worked closely in terms of doing a lot of things to leverage the paper. Most people knew him as having the beard and the cigar, trademark images. Carl was passionate about the black press, certainly about lifting the African American community. He wrote the kind of editorial that challenged people. He was a strong writer. He loved life. He enjoyed football and the social aspects of the African American community. He was high energy, punctual. We talked on many different levels. I learned a great many things from him.”
Morris, a Pittsburgh native, had worked at the St. Louis Argus before his Courier service. He left the Courier, where he rose to general manager and editor, in 1978 to join the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In 1982, he was a student in the Maynard Institute’s Editing Program for Minority Journalists. The next year, he left Pittsburgh to join ASNE, and after that, Morris went to NABJ, which had been founded only in 1975.
In addition to his annual directory of people of color in the media, Morris also compiled and edited ?Black Gold: The Complete Book of African American Olympic Medalists.?
Services are scheduled for Friday at the Adams-Green Funeral Home in Herndon, Va.
Bush’s Diversity Claim at Unity Found Wanting
An enterprising Newsday reporter, Tom Brune, has followed up on the diversity claims that President Bush made in his speech at the Unity convention and found them wanting.
“At the national UNITY convention of minority journalists early this month, President George W. Bush repeatedly embraced diversity and proclaimed, ‘If you look at my administration, it’s diverse, and I’m proud of that,'” Brune writes in today’s Newsday.
“To illustrate his point, Bush painted a picture of being flanked in his office by Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell as he dealt with terrorism and the war in Iraq, an image even Democrats concede is impressive and powerful.
“But the Bush administration is not nearly as diverse as it appears in that picture, particularly when it comes to blacks and women, according to an analysis by Newsday of personnel records that created a snapshot of political appointees.
“And Bush’s overall record of diversity pales when compared to the standard set by his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, for filling the roughly 2,800 political posts that form a presidential administration.
“Blacks held 7 percent of administration jobs under Bush, less than half of the 16 percent they held under Clinton, the snapshot shows. Women won 36 percent of Bush’s appointments, noticeably fewer than the 44 percent of Clinton’s.”
Meanwhile, in a news analysis in the Detroit Free Press, Ruby L. Bailey writes that the high-profile African American appointments in the Bush administration are likely to gain little traction with blacks, because, “many African Americans feel [that] race is secondary to policy.”
More on Unity:
- Donald V. Adderton, Biloxi Sun-Herald: Bush, Kerry tailor their words to the audience
- Karen Brown Dunlap, St. Petersburg Times: In hospital, Peggy Peterman was excited to hear about Unity.
- George Joe: Navajo-Hopi Observer: Navajo Nation public information officer, Observer contributor, wins seven state and national awards
Deggans Move Leaves Void Among Black TV Critics
Eric Deggans leaves his post as television critic at the St. Petersburg Times today, trading it for a seat on the paper’s editorial board.
His departure leaves no more than a handful of African Americans evaluating what was famously called the vast wasteland: Suzanne Ryan of the Boston Globe; Melanie McFarland of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Kevin Thompson of Florida’s Palm Beach Post and Ken Parish-Perkins of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram came to mind when Journal-isms asked Deggins.
Deggins’ perspective did make a difference, as he mentioned in a farewell column today:
“Like any good journalist, I judge my success by the quality of my enemies,” he wrote. “So it’s a point of pride that I’ve joined the esteemed list of media writers that Fox News Channel officials often won’t speak to (being called a ‘pinhead’ by FNC gasbag Bill O’Reilly on air remains a personal best).
“My stories about the Clear Channel Radio show The Monsters and its on-air racial slurs drew an avalanche of protests from the show’s fans, who accused me of political correctness and worse.
“But I was certain this talented Orlando-based morning crew could make listeners laugh without regurgitating horrible stereotypes in words such as ‘jigaboo’ and ‘nigra.’ After a week off-air in sensitivity training and some tentative slur-free shows, they’ve started to prove me right.
“It’s particularly poignant for me that I’ll be moving to the editorial board so soon after the Aug. 19 death of the Times’ most influential journalist of color, columnist and editorial board member Peggy Peterman.”
Arizona Republic in Flap Over Wedding Photo
The placement of a June wedding photo has bruised some feelings at the Arizona Republic, more than two months after the picture ran.
“On June 11, The Arizona Republic ran an A1 story about how more weddings are being held on weekdays,” Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig, a former features reporter at the paper who is president of the Arizona Association of Black Journalists, noted last week in a letter to management. “It led with a young couple who was about to become man and wife. The cover photo showed the young African-American woman in her dress with her godmother in the background. The story jumps to A2 where another photo is found, however, this one is even more compelling.
“It shows the young bride in her husband¹s arms as they both stand under her veil looking to the sky.
“We understand that the second picture was scheduled to run on A1, which it should have since it is a great photo. Unfortunately, the photo was moved to A2 because certain top-level editors were allegedly concerned about how readers would view it. You see, the young woman¹s new husband is White.
“Considering the multicultural image of Gannett, we are confused and disappointed by this decision. Especially in the 21st century.”
Ward Bushee, editor of the Phoenix paper, told Journal-isms today that “the letter is very misguided and inaccurate. It’s just not true,” he said. He said the decision to run the photo was his. “I decided that the image of the bride alone told the story better.”
Bushee said the flap resulted in newsroom discussions about larger issues, such as “how do we handle diversity.” He said his Gannett paper had “one of the most diverse newsrooms in the country” and had sent 25 people to the Unity convention. He added that “in the last year, 60 percent of the new hires have been journalists of color. It’s disappointing that this still has life,” he said.
A reporter who did not want to be identified said, “the people who brought this up made their point, that we would hope that this wouldn’t be the case.”
More on “African American,” or “African-American”
Sunday’s New York Times carried an interesting front-page piece by Rachel L. Swarns about whether immigrants are covered by the term “African-American.”
A backstory perhaps of interest to copy editors and style mavens might be how some newspapers, including the Times, imposed their own style over that of the promoters of the term.
As originally proposed in 1984 by a group of black school superintendents called the National Association of Black School Educators, “African American” is unhyphenated:
“Ties to the motherland were obliterated so thoroughly that most African Americans cannot successfully trace their roots, as can other Americans, to a specific region, country, town or village in Africa. The separation was, and is, so complete that we cannot readily identify ourselves with the Continent,” wrote the president of the group, Patricia Ackerman, in 1989. “For these reasons, ‘African American’ should never be hyphenated. Omission of the hyphen symbolizes the historical separation and emphasizes the uniqueness of our identity as Americans.”
Hampton Prez Says He Doesn’t Want to Run J-School
Although the last two leaders of the journalism program at Hampton University left complaining about interference from an administration they termed authoritarian, President William R. Harvey says that won’t be the case under new dean Tony Brown, who started today.
“Harvey said this month that he has no desire to run the journalism school himself,” Kerrie Frisinger writes in the Daily Press of Newport News, Va.
“I want somebody to come in and provide strong executive leadership,” he said in the piece. “I wasn’t getting that.”
Late last week, university spokeswoman Yuri Rodgers Milligan said Brown, 71, wanted to wait to give media interviews until he’d been on the job for a few weeks, Frisinger’s story said.
EEOC Finds Merit to Charges From N.Y. Times Plant
“The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has found merit to racial and religious discrimination allegations filed by two longtime employees of The New York Times Co.,” Angela Delli Santi reports for the Associated Press from Trenton, N.J.
“The determination of probable cause means the EEOC found evidence of discrimination, supporting claims made by Leroy Hilton and Harvey Alpert, who work at the newspaper’s Edison printing plant.
“Hilton, 57, an assistant foreman from Plainfield, alleges that he was the victim of racial slurs starting when he was hired in 1978. Hilton, who is black, claims that three-quarters of the bias incidents were witnessed by management, who laughed or took no action. His subsequent complaints were ignored, he says in his EEOC filing.
“Alpert, 53, of Marlboro, who is Jewish, alleges that he works in a religiously hostile work environment. The 27-year employee says a he has been a victim of a co-worker who ‘spits on the floor as he sees me’ and religious slurs and threats, which he says were condoned by supervisors, according to the complaint.
“‘The situation there is what you’d expect to see in Alabama in the ’40s,’ said Jeffrey M. Bernbach, a New York lawyer representing both men. ‘This stuff is as crude and incredible and senseless as that was. It was blatant.’
“The Times denied the allegations in a statement released Thursday afternoon.
“At this stage it would be inappropriate to discuss these most preliminary of findings other than to say that The New York Times Company has a comprehensive anti-discrimination policy that includes provisions for employees to raise concerns, and we strictly enforce that policy,” the statement reads.
Site That Circumvents Pesky Registrations Is Back
Those who frequent Web sites like this, which link to newspaper sites that often require registration, can become frustrated by the hassle. Voila! A site called Bugmenot.com was born, which provides readers with instant passwords, the cyberkeys that unlock.
A couple of weeks ago, the site went down, however, feeding some people’s worst fears.
Now comes reassurance.
“Claims that media pressure spurred the shutdown of the controversial Bugmenot site are utterly false, according to a spokesman for Hostgator, the site’s former host,” reported Kevin Newcome last week on his clickz Web site.
“Bugmenot, an online service that allows users to bypass compulsory registration by providing shared username-password combinations for many popular content sites, was unavailable for most of last week, and the anonymous owner of the site has implied that media pressure was behind it.” In fact, it was too much traffic and the site now has a new hosting company.
“According to Bugmenot’s site, the motivation behind the service is a philosophical objection to what it believes is a breach of privacy. It calls registration ‘contrary to the fundamental spirit of the Net’, and says it is a pointless, annoying waste of time. Between 10,000 and 15,000 unique visitors per day agree . . . “
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Login (Wired.com)
