Execs Meet with NABJ Leaders in New York
NBC News committed “to future participation in our NABJ Media Institute” and to “continued dialogue about hiring and retaining black journalists” after a two-hour meeting with leaders of the National Association of Black Journalists, NABJ announced Sunday.
The language in the statement could be understated. “It was groundbreaking for NABJ,” said one of the participants, Sidmel Estes-Sumpter, NABJ president from 1991 to 1993 and executive producer at WAGA-TV in Atlanta. “I cannot remember having such a frank and freewheeling discussion with someone so high up in the network as Shapiro,” a reference to NBC News president Neal Shapiro.
“Topics at the meeting ranged from making NABJ student members more aware of internship opportunities at the network to fortifying the pipeline for diverse candidates to an increased role for NBC executives in the Media Institute and at the association?s annual conventions,” an NABJ statement said of the Saturday meeting at NBC headquarters in New York.
But, Estes-Sumpter told Journal-isms, “There was a lot more that was accomplished than what the statement [said] . . . . I challenged NBC to be a leader, to show what can be done and to challenge the other networks.”
Much of the training NABJ wanted was in bridging the cultures between local and network news. “What does it take to make that leap?” Estes-Sumpter said.
Programs of the NABJ Media Institute are held at venues across the country. The institute is described as seeking “to provide professional development, technical training, historical documentation and entrepreneurial guidance for black journalists and students aiming to work in newsrooms.”
“We are confident that from Neal Shapiro to Brian Williams on down that having a diverse newsroom is a priority at NBC,” NABJ President Herbert Lowe said in the release. “With Neal?s commitment to future participation in our NABJ Media Institute and a continued dialogue about hiring and retaining black journalists, I look forward to working with him.”
For his part, Shapiro said in the statement, “I am passionate about the need for diversity in our nation’s newsrooms and particularly here at the network level. I continue to be committed to having more black journalists and other journalists of color at the highest levels in our newsroom.”
The meeting also included Sheila Stainback, former NABJ vice president/broadcast and a journalism faculty member at New York University; Lisa Hsia, NBC News vice president; Paula Madison, president and general manager, KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, and Michael Jack, president and general manager of WRC-TV in Washington and vice president of diversity at NBC.
NABJ’s two vice presidents, Barbara Ciara for broadcast and Bryan Monroe for print, participated via telephone.
As a further benefit from the exchange, Estes-Sumpter said, “We’ve got one of the Big Three [anchors] to recognize how central his role is in terms of shaping the debate on diversity,” a reference to Williams, new “NBC Nightly News” anchor.
Saturday’s meeting was arranged after Williams created controversy with a statement to an in-flight magazine. He was asked, “There are few women and people of color in top jobs at news organizations. How do we address this lack of diversity?”
“We have bigger problems,” Williams’ answer began.
Williams issued two clarifications. “I believe that the lack of diversity is a serious challenge not only in newsrooms across America, but across the upper echelons of our society as well. In no way have I ever diminished the problem that exists in our newsrooms,” he said in the most recent one.
Nevertheless, the flap made the New York Post’s Page Six column, the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, and was discussed Friday on “the Tavis Smiley Show” on National Public Radio.
On the Smiley show’s “Reporters’ Roundtable,” with host Tony Cox, Laura Washington, Chicago Sun-Times columnist and Ida B. Wells Barnett professor at DePaul University. said of Williams’ statement:
“Not an auspicious beginning for someone who is going to be, you know, one of the icons of American journalism for the foreseeable future. I think — what it says to me is out how of touch a lot of these high-level journalists are with what the real issues in the media are. It is a very important issue, and all he had to do was just pay lip service. All he had to do was say, `Yes, I’m very concerned about diversity. That’s something that I’m going to be looking at,’ blah, blah, blah. And he wasn’t even sensitive enough to do that.
“I think what it also suggests is that we need to do a better job as journalists of color of making the case as to why it is important for us to have diversity in the media. And it’s not simply to have high-paid faces on the news but to put folks there who are going to have those kinds of sensitivities, who are going to ask the tough questions, who are going to look for disparities in terms of coverage and in terms of misrepresentation of people of color. And that’s the real issue here.”
Then, Terry M. Neal, chief political correspondent for washingtonpost.com, said:
“Well, you know, every now and then, someone in a high position is asked a question where they have the opportunity to give the PR answer and they let slip and actually tell you the truth about what they think. I think that Brian Williams told the truth about what he thinks, what NBC thinks, what all the networks think, what all the major newspapers think. They don’t really care about diversity. They say that they do. They bring in, you know, a small number of minorities on lower-level positions and rarely do anything much more than that.
“I suppose he’s correct in the sense that, you know, people are getting — you know, there are more important things going on in the world. There are people getting, you know — there’s genocide going on in Sudan and we’re in a war that we don’t seem to know how to get out of, but this is, to me, a serious issue. I mean, this is a diverse nation. The media’s supposed to represent a — be sort of a mirror of the community, and it can’t be a mirror of a community if you only have people who all look and basically think the same who are making all the news decisions and interpreting, you know, what happens in the world.
“So I was angry about what he said and disappointed, but I also realize that he was just being honest. He’s just reflecting what NBC feels.”
Anchor Format Chained to Past (Joanne Ostrow, Denver Post)
Beverly Kees, Newspaper Diversity Advocate, Dies
“Beverly Kees, a celebrated San Francisco State University journalism teacher and well-respected newspaper editor, was struck and killed by an 18-wheel truck while crossing a San Francisco street with a friend’s dog Friday. She was 63,” Jessica Portner reports in California’s San Jose Mercury News.
“The Minnesota native was known as much for her wild rice soup and berry jams as for her fierce advocacy of journalistic ethics and diversity in newsrooms.”
Kees’ work on diversity issues included editing a “best practices” book for the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications to help colleges comply with its diversity standards. The council had received a $100,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to put such a book together.
“Bev was an early and avid advocate of Fault Lines, incorporating it into much of her training,” said Dori J. Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. “Her firm grasp of its underlying philosophy helped promote a journalistic framework we believe is essential for this time.”
In the early 1990s, Kees headed the Minorities Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “She was very passionate and really wanted to make a difference. She had a great deal to face — a mainly white male industry — but she stayed focused on wanting to make a difference!” Neil Foote, who was ASNE’s minority affairs director at the time, wrote to Journal-isms.
The minutes of the ASNE board meeting from Oct. 16-17, 1992 note that she “proposed a plan to establish new priorities and expand ASNE programs to improve the racial diversity of the nation’s newsrooms and recommended that the board also reaffirm its commitment to the year 2000 goal.
“. . . Among the new projects proposed is the Newsroom Multicultural Initiative. Newspapers that participate in this program will conduct a self-study of how employees of different racial, gender and ethnic backgrounds communicate in their newsrooms, and how newsrooms resolve sensitive diversity issues.
“NMI’s objectives are to improve retention and stimulate better coverage of diversity. A part of this plan will be an audit of newspaper content to gauge how well the newspaper covers the diversity of its community. Another proposal involves a joint effort with other newspaper groups to develop seminars at local and regional conferences to help editors use new concepts on managing diversity.”
Foote recalled that two workbooks were produced: “One dealing with how you create a multicultural staff (including guidance on developing a diversity mission statement and lots of examples of companies) and the second that dealt with doing a ‘content audit’ of your newspaper so that editors could analyze the content they were publishing and also gather data on how diverse their community was.”
Steve Rubenstein wrote in his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle that: “Ms. Kees was a native of Minneapolis and a longtime reporter at the Minneapolis Star and Minneapolis Tribune. She edited newspapers in Grand Forks, N.D., and Gary, Ind., before serving as executive editor of the [Fresno] Bee from 1988 to 1993.
“During the 1990s, she was senior projects manager for the Freedom Forum, a national foundation that promotes journalism education and development. She was also an editor and program director at the Freedom Forum Pacific Coast Center, until the center closed in 2000.”
Gary Webb, Who Linked CIA to Crack, Found Dead
Gary Webb, an investigative reporter who wrote a widely criticized series linking the CIA to the explosion of crack cocaine in Los Angeles, was found dead in his Sacramento-area home Friday. He apparently killed himself, authorities said,” Nita Lelyveld and Steve Hymon report in the Los Angeles Times.
“Webb had suffered a gunshot wound to the head, according to the Sacramento County coroner’s office. He was 49.
“His 1996 San Jose Mercury News series contended that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold tons of crack cocaine from Colombian cartels in Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods and then funneled millions in profits back to the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras.
“Three months after the series was published, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said it conducted an exhaustive investigation but found no evidence of a connection between the CIA and Southern California drug traffickers.”
As the NABJ Journal wrote in 1996, “The Mercury News series would open a schism in newsrooms around the country between those who dismissed it as bad journalism and those who believed there was enough evidence for more serious investigation. And not surprisingly, that schism was often defined by color. Many black journalists were on the side of further investigation, even as prominent white journalists and their own employers were debunking Webb’s allegations.”
Washington radio talk show host Joe Madison “and Dick Gregory, the civil rights activist, were arrested protesting outside CIA headquarters on Sept. 11 and put the story in front of many Americans for the first time.
“By the time the Congressional Black Caucus held its annual weekend parley in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 13-14, the ‘CIA-crack connection’ was the talk of black America,” the NABJ Journal story continued.
The series also made Internet history. The Mercury News put the series on its Web page, one of the first such pieces, if not the first, to be placed online for a global audience with supporting documents.
But as the L.A. Times reported, “Months later, the Mercury News . . . backed away from the series, publishing an open letter to its readers, admitting to flaws,” and it was removed from the Web site.
“Mr. Webb resigned a year and a half after the series appeared in the paper. He then published his book, ‘Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion,'” as Jessica Portner of the Mercury News reported in her obituary today.
“In the past few years, Mr. Webb worked in the California Assembly Speaker’s Office of Member Services and for the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. The committee investigated charges that Oracle received a no-bid contract from Gov. Gray Davis. After being laid off from his legislative post last year, Mr. Webb was hired by the Sacramento News and Review, a weekly publication.”
“Mr. Webb’s friends and colleagues described him as a devoted father and a funny, dogged reporter who was passionate about investigative journalism,” she wrote.
Hosea Sanders Returns to Air in Chicago
“WLS-Channel 7 morning news anchor Hosea Sanders, who took a monthlong leave of absence for substance abuse treatment, is back on the air,” Jim Ritter wrote last Monday in the Chicago Sun-Times.
“Sanders was scheduled today to co-anchor the top-rated ‘ABC 7 News This Morning’ alongside Judy Hsu.
“‘He got the help he needed,’ said station spokeswoman Jayme Nicholas. ‘The station supports him, and we’re very happy he’s back.'”
“. . . Sanders, 47, went on leave Nov. 3 after two men with a history of drug arrests were arrested for allegedly trying to blackmail him. Chicago Police said the men threatened to expose details about Sanders’ personal life and substance abuse unless he paid them $5,000.”
History of Sports Brawls Includes Racial Ones
“Sports have always been violent. And they’ve always been populated by considerable numbers of players and fans who can’t behave themselves,” Mike Hudson writes in today’s Roanoke (Va.) Times, recounting the history of sports brawls.
“All the elements of today’s crisis in sports are there, in the record of more than a century of American sports: Riots on and off the field … greed and commercialism and racism . . . swellheaded, selfish superstars . . . fans attacking players and players attacking fans . . . beanballs and intentional cheap shots . .. off-the-field misconduct by gun-wielding, wife-beating, law-breaking athletes . . . fans hurling beer bottles, chair slats, knives, batteries, billiard balls and other missiles at players.”
And he notes that race has played a role:
“The first football contest between black colleges in Tennessee was broken up by drunken whites. A race riot ensued. One black spectator died.
“Racism tinged much of the sport-related violence that came in the 20th century. In 1910, Jack Johnson became the first black man to win the heavyweight boxing title, an event so earth-shattering it sparked race riots around the country that produced 19 deaths, 251 injuries and more than 5,000 arrests.
“Many of Ty Cobb’s worst assaults sprung from his race hatred. He kicked a chambermaid in the stomach and pushed her down a flight of stairs after she objected to being called “n—–r.” He beat a black groundskeeper and choked the man’s wife when she tried to intervene.”