Bush Declines Offer to Be Interviewed on BET
President Bush has turned down an offer to be interviewed on Black Entertainment Television, and BET founder Robert L. Johnson, who extended the invitation, apparently is taking it personally. “After more than a month of waiting, BET finally got an answer from President George W. Bush to a formal invitation to address African-American voters in his own primetime BET NIGHTLY NEWS interview on the network. The answer is no,” begins a BET news release.
The rebuff also led the BET.com Web site.
The news release continued, “BET Founder and CEO Robert Johnson first issued invitations to both President Bush and Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) on September 14. He asked each of them to appear on the network to discuss issues of relevance to BET viewers during this crucial stretch of the 2004 Presidential Election campaign. Senator Kerry accepted, and his half-hour interview was televised on October 7. But according to representatives of the White House, President Bush’s current schedule will not allow time for him to appear on BET, and they asked that the network approach him again, ‘after the election.’
“In response to the Bush decline, Mr. Johnson has sent an open letter to top African Americans in the Bush Administration which includes Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Education Rod Paige, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson; along with former Oklahoma Republican Congressman J. C. Watts, who is leading a grassroots group of African-American Republicans supporting the Bush re-election effort.”
One clue to why Johnson might be taken aback can be seen in this story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Ernest Holsendolph from 2001:
“President Bush has a new friend, Robert L. Johnson, well-known as the founder and president of Black Entertainment Television but never prominent before in Republican politics,” it began.
“Remembered mostly in the past for putting together back in 1979 the first cable channel devoted to the African-American market, Johnson has also been a prominent contributor to Democratic political causes and was a close friend of President Clinton.
“But this year, when Bush ran into trouble with his campaign to roll back the estate tax, Johnson came to the rescue — in a way that showed a lot more imagination than can be seen on BET, his primary channel.”
“. . . Johnson, a billionaire in his own right, rallied a group of fellow African-American business leaders in an all-out campaign, arguing that support of the estate tax was an attack on black people by ‘very wealthy white people.'”
Bush also appointed Johnson to a commission on Social Security, and the BET founder provided time on his network when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was in hot water after praising the Dixiecrat-era Sen. Strom Thurmond.
For this cozying up, Johnson was the subject of some scathing commentary, including from BlackCommentator.com, which wrote that Johnson “has used his high profile status as one-half of all African American billionaires (the determinedly non-partisan Oprah Winfrey is the other half) to advance the most politically perilous item on the GOP agenda: privatization of Social Security.
“In his unseemly eagerness to ingratiate himself with the Bush crowd, Johnson has embraced a far-right cause so hot, the National Republican Congressional Committee has instructed its own candidates to avoid the issue at all costs.”
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was asked about Johnson’s “nice cordial relationship” with Bush at a White House briefing on Dec. 16, 2002:
“QUESTION: . . . Bob Johnson of BET is one of the persons that Trent Lott is supposed to be talking with to help make amends to the African American community. Did the president have anything to do with Bob Johnson himself, because Bob Johnson is a part of the Bush administration’s Social Security commission and he and President Bush, I understand, have a pleasant . . .
“FLEISCHER: I’m not sure I understand. Did the president have anything to do with Bob Johnson?
“QUESTION: Did he talk to Trent Lott, saying, you know, ‘Bob Johnson would be a good person for you to talk to. You know, he has . . .
“FLEISCHER: Yes. I have no idea.
“QUESTION: Well, what are the president’s thoughts about Bob Johnson, because they apparently have a nice cordial relationship, according to . . .
“FLEISCHER: The president thought he was a very able commissioner on the Social Security Commission and welcomed his support in working on ways to help younger workers have opportunities in Social Security in the future.”
Meanwhile, Dow Jones reports that both Bush and Kerry “have accepted the Fox Network’s offer of free airtime, consisting of ten 60-second spots for each candidate to give uninterrupted statements answering questions on key issues.”
Publishers Say Parties Stood Up Latino Media
“At the Omni Colonnade Hotel, with the microphones set, the cameras rolling and an audience of over fifty people, including many Hispanic Media Journalists, waiting at the set of the ‘Political Forum with the National Latino Media’ on October 12, the missing components were the two Political Parties’ representatives, including the invited vice presidential candidates,” the National Association of Hispanic Publishers says in a news release datelined Coral Gables, Fla.
“. . . American citizens of Hispanic descent, the least-informed, fastest-growing and most undecided segment of voters, will play for certain a deciding role in next month’s Presidential Election, but, very paradoxically, neither political party has actively reached out to Latinos.
“The proof is that, unfortunately, neither side showed up in Miami to the scheduled Political Forum, which had to be cancelled by NAHP at the last minute as a result of the absence of the candidates and/or their surrogates.”
Asian Journalists Group Passes NAHJ in Membership
The Asian American Journalists Association has surpassed the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in membership, according to new figures announced by AAJA.
AAJA “reported a record number of members in 2004, posting a 16 percent increase from last year. As of September 30 — the end of the annual census year –2,320 joined or renewed their membership with AAJA,” the Asian American journalists announced.
NAHJ has held steady at about 2,200 members, executive director Ivan Roman told Journal-isms.
Despite participation in their respective associations, there are more Hispanic journalists than Asian American ones, according to most surveys. In April, for example, the American Society of Newspaper Editors census reported 2,258 Latinos and 1,507 Asians in newspaper newsrooms.
“NAHJ has had a lot of people who come and go,” Roman said. NAHJ plans to “be more diligent about retaining people. We’re putting a bunch of things in place.” NAHJ has set a goal of 4,000 members in a year and a half, and last February approved a system of local chapters, which should boost membership.
The National Association of Black Journalists remains the largest group of journalists of color, with 4,265 members, spokeswoman Lisa Goodnight said today. In August, Dan Lewerenz, new president of the Native American Journalists Association, said its membership was 566.
AAJA said it was the second year in a row that its total membership number significantly increased. In 2003 it was 1,999, a 19 percent increase from the 2002 figure of 1,669, the news release said.
“AAJA chapters have been actively reaching out to new members and lapsed members, letting them know about the many benefits AAJA offers,” said Sonya Crawford, chair of the national board’s membership development committee, in the release.
Journos Called Unhappy With Campaign Coverage
“A new survey of members of a national journalism organization finds that nearly three quarters of journalists give the press a C, D or F grade for its campaign coverage so far,” reports the Committee of Concerned Journalists.
“In the survey, conducted by the Committee of Concerned Journalists of its members, only 3% give the press an A grade, while another 27% give the news media a B. At the same time, 42% give the coverage a C and 27% say D or F.
“The poll surveyed 499 CCJ members between October 8 and October 15th. The Committee is a national consortium of journalists and journalism educators in various media.”
Gay Writers Have Say in Mary Cheney Debate
Sen. John Kerry’s reference to Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, as a lesbian, prompted cries from Republicans and negative sentiments from voters who responded to pollsters that Kerry’s comment was inappropriate. But gay journalists and commentators don’t necessarily agree.
“In the Oct. 14 Washington Post tracking poll, 64 percent of likely voters said no, it was ‘inappropriate,’ and you get the feeling that something like this makes most Americans feel kinda ooky. People don’t like to say the word lesbian, especially some mothers and fathers of lesbians. The word summons up some outdated, maternal plea — Couldn’t you wear a skirt just this once? Your father is running for office,” wrote Hank Stuever in a Washington Post essay.
“. . . ‘How incredibly sad for Mary Cheney, the lesbian in question. And not for the reasons that her parents and the pundits have been screaming about,’ journalist Dave Cullen wrote on Salon.com, deftly describing his own offense at the latest chapter in the quiet saga of Mary. ‘It is not an insult to call a proudly public lesbian a lesbian. It’s an insult to gasp when someone calls her a lesbian. . . . You’re embarrassed for us. And it’s infuriating.’
” . . . Andrew Sullivan, the gay conservative pundit and obsessive blogger, takes a stab at the elusive Meaning of Mary:
“‘The Cheneys didn’t respond to . . . [Republican senatorial candidate] Alan Keyes’ direct insult of their own daughter in Illinois. They have not voiced objections to a single right-wing piece of homophobia in this campaign,’ Sullivan posted Saturday.
“‘But they are outraged that Kerry mentioned the simple fact of their daughter’s openly gay identity. What complete b.s. . . . The GOP is run, in part, by gay men and women, its families are full of gay people, and yet it is institutionally opposed to even the most basic protections for gay couples. You can keep up a policy based on rank hypocrisy for only so long. And then it tumbles like a house of cards. Kerry just pulled one card from out of the bottom of the heap. Watch the edifice of double standards slowly implode. Gay people and their supporters will no longer acquiesce in this charade. Why on earth should we?'”
Prize Winner: Students Taking Housing From Poor
A Des Moines Register story on how college students were living in low-income housing won the first-place First Amendment: Investigative Reporting award in the Gannett Co.’s second-quarter internal Well Done Contest.
The students displaced the low-income residents “thanks in part to federal eligibility rules that did not take into consideration parental income and financial aid, including scholarships.
“The result: Low-income families were increasingly displaced by students, including many scholarship athletes who already received subsidies for housing,” said an introduction to a q-and-a on how the Register uncovered the story.
And what races were the students, and the low-income residents?
“Unfortunately, HUD does not keep stats on the college students living alone in Section 8,” Investigations Editor Lee Rood told Journal-isms. “At the Iowa City complex, the manager also refused to release details about student tenants. However, I can tell you from canvassing the complex that the students living there were from all walks — rich, poor, middle class — and a number of races. Some students were international students.
“Some of the student athletes probably would have qualified regardless of the loophole; others had no business being there.
“As for those who could get in: The wait for the city’s own subsidized housing stock remains around the longest it’s been in years — about 2,200. Roughly 600 of those waiting were poor, mostly minority families from the Chicago area.”
Vietnamese American Show Out After 2 Episodes
In June, we reported that a magazine-style television show featuring Vietnamese Americans and targeting a teenage-through-30 demographic was being assembled in Fountain View, Calif.
This week, the producers of “VAX TV” (for “Vietnamese American Xposure”) report that the show has been pulled after only two episodes.
“On Saturday, October 9th, VAX aired on Episode 2 a segment about a documentary that focused on the events surrounding the 1999 anti-communist protest in Westminster, CA — that of a local video store owner’s support of Ho Chi Minh and the Communist party of Vietnam,” its announcement says. “The VAX segment was not meant to elicit support for or against communism, but rather to expose and inform our audience about the ‘Saigon USA’ documentary.
“However, shortly after the episode was aired, protestors gathered outside of Saigon TV (VAX’s broadcasting partner) demanding that the VAX TV Show be taken off the air. They argued 1) that the image of Ho Chi Minh and of the Vietnam communist flag was an indirect support of communism, 2) that VAX is not a respected or proper media outlet to discuss such a serious! topic, and 3) anything related to the 1999 Little Saigon protest should not have been discussed period because the Vietnamese community wants to forget about it.
“While we at VAX understand the strong emotions that were expressed by people who might have felt we were insensitive to the atrocities that occurred in Vietnam, we feel that only by talking about that history can we learn what happened and ensure that atrocities such as these never happen again.
“We regret to inform our fans and viewers that, despite our efforts and objections, Saigon TV has elected to pull VAX off the air permanently.”
Marcano Leaving Sacramento Bee for Sun-Sentinel
Tony Marcano, who left the New York Times a year ago to become ombudsman at the Sacramento Bee, has announced to the staff that he has taken a job with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale.
“You’re all going to think I’m absolutely insane — not that you didn’t think that already — but after all of the time and expense that I spent last year hauling myself across the country, I’m hauling myself back,” he wrote.
“Denice and I have both accepted jobs at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. [Denice Rios is an assistant city editor at The Bee.] Pending the results of our pee-in-a-bottle tests (no, we don’t anticipate any problems), I’ll be signed on as Sunday/enterprise editor, and Denice will be brought on board as an assistant city editor. I’ll be running the Sunday paper and overseeing enterprise projects from all departments; Denice’s specific duties are still to be determined, but for now it looks like she’ll be in the main office in Fort Lauderdale.
“I won’t bore you with all of the details about why we decided to do this, other than to say that it’s a chance for me to get back into a newsroom (where I belong) in a senior editor role, and for Denice to get on a better career track after 6 years in Sacramento. This time around, we plan on staying put for a while.”
Marcano was a 1985 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists and program manager for Maynard’s 1993 Los Angeles Total Community Coverage program, and he took part in both the 1994 Total Community Coverage program in Atlanta and the 2000 program in Oakland, Calif.
Explaining the personal side of his original move to Sacramento, Marcano told Journal-isms:
“Denice . . . and I actually met about 12 years ago, when I was a reporter at the LA Times and she was a reporter at the Orange County Register. We rekindled our relationship last year. I moved to Sacramento after we decided to get married.”
Air America Proves Successful on New York’s WLIB
“According to Arbitron ratings released yesterday, New York?s WLIB, which gets much of its programming from the liberal Air America network, finished ahead of talk radio rival WOR comfortably and was close to the city?s current talk champ WABC among listeners 25-54,” Media Life reported Tuesday.
This is no doubt good news for Pierre Sutton, chairman of Inner City Broadcasting, which became the object of protests over Sutton’s decision to replace Caribbean programming and lease most of the station’s time to Air America.
The liberal talk-radio network had also landed in second place in the New York talk market in the spring Arbitron report.
Elsewhere in the New York ratings, David Hinckley reports in the New York Daily News that, “Replacing the popular syndicated Tom Joyner show with the local [Jamie] Foxx show now looks like ‘a perfect move,’ says WRKS programming consultant Tony Gray. Foxx is No. 5 in the city in that highly competitive time slot. “‘The morning show is the engine,’ says Gray. ‘It gives the whole station a big handoff.’
In February 2003, a dismayed Joyner alerted his fans that his syndicated show was being booted from the nation’s top radio market. “We decided the station needed to go local,” WRKS marketing director Frank Iemetti said then.
Nevertheless, Joyner hasn’t been slowed down. This month, he picked up the Marconi Award for Network/Syndicated Personality of the Year by the National Association of Broadcasters, as his BlackAmericaWeb reported. Previous recipients include Paul Harvey, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Charles Osgood and Larry King.
Univision Radio a Ratings Winner in Chicago
In the latest Chicago Arbitron ratings, “Univision Radio’s WOJO posted its highest share ever,” Robert Feder reports in the Chicago Sun-Times.
“Most notably, the station finished first in both mornings and middays among listeners between the ages of 25 and 54 — the group most coveted by advertisers.”
AAJA-Inspired San Diego Film Festival in 5th Year
“The San Diego Asian Film Festival comes back for four days starting Thursday. Founding director Lee Ann Kim is confident that it’s here to stay, even if its main venue has entered a period of suspense,” writes movie critic David Elliott in the San Diego Union Tribune.
“Kim, a TV journalist (Channel 10-KGTV) who has made the fest a perennial, says, ‘It’s our fifth anniversary, and we thought, “We’ve made it for five years and we’ll just breeze on through.” It never works out that way.” As George Bush would say, it’s hard work.
“After the usual scouting of festivals and tips from the diaspora of previous SDAFF entrants (some returning), Kim and her programmers put together 20 features and a bulging cluster of 16 shorts programs. Panels and workshops will also sprout.
“The fest [was] begun in 2000 as a fund-raiser for the local Asian American Journalists Association.”
Department Head Was Working at 2nd School
“Officials at Fort Valley State University said Tuesday they are making plans to get the mass communications department back on track following the recent dismissal of the head of the department,” reports Ayanna McPhail in Georgia’s Macon Telegraph, writing about the historically black institution.
“Shafiqur Rahman was fired last week for simultaneously working at Alcorn State University in Mississippi.
“. . . Some people wonder how Rahman, who was hired in August at a salary of $80,000 a year, was able to stay gone so long without being noticed.”
Sinclair Fight Only Latest for FCC’s Copps
“When Michael Copps learned of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s plan for many of its 62 TV stations to air a documentary slamming John Kerry little more than a week from the presidential election, he wasn’t too surprised. For this FCC commissioner, it’s just another abuse by Big Media,” writes Frazier Moore for the Associated Press.
“Copps called the plan by Sinclair — known for pushing a conservative agenda while its top executives gave thousands to President Bush and other Republicans — ‘proof positive of media consolidation run amok, when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology, whether liberal or conservative.’
“It’s a familiar plea from Copps, the populist maverick of the Federal Communications Commission,” continues Moore’s profile. “There, in defiance of Chairman Michael Powell, he has mounted a crusade to warn of Powell’s efforts to let media owners grow even bigger and more powerful.”
Sinclair announced Tuesday its television stations won’t run the film, “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” in its entirety, and said that reports that it had planned to do so were incorrect, as CNN reports.
The Film: Accusations and flaws, all serious (New York Times)
Group Honors Black Media for AIDS Coverage
The Black AIDS Institute awarded its “1st Annual Max Robinson Excellence in Coverage Media Awards” to “these “pioneering Black media organizations and professionals for their coverage of and commitment to eradicating the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Black communities”:
Black Entertainment Television, for excellence in television; American Urban Radio Networks, excellence in radio; Essence magazine, excellence in print (magazine); Vibe magazine, excellence in print (magazine); Rolling Out Urban Style Weekly, excellence in print (newspaper); Dallas Weekly Examiner, excellence in print (newspaper). George Curry of the National Newspaper Publishers Association won its 2004 National Award.
Robinson, one of the founders of the National Association of Black Journalists, was, on ABC, the first black anchor of a major U.S. network weeknight newscast. He died of AIDS in 1988 at age 49.
