Some Link Williams With Working Journalists
Armstrong Williams was out performing damage control today, explaining that while he was not a journalist, he was obligated to uphold journalistic values, and calling newspapers individually to urge them to keep running the syndicated column dropped Friday by Tribune Media Services.
Williams’ public relations company was discovered to have accepted $240,000 from the Education Department to promote the No Child Left Behind Act, and while he has made it clear that he is not a journalist, many journalists have nevertheless called him one.
“I’m a pundit and commentator. A pundit or commentator are one in the same,” Williams said today in an online chat on washingtonpost.com. “They are not expected to be objective. They’re not expected to represent both sides of a story. They’re not even expected to be balanced.”
In a Los Angeles Times story Saturday headlined, “Case Shines Harsh Light on ‘Pundit Industry’,” Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, said that problems such as the Williams affair had been spawned by the desire of 24-hour television news programs to fill their broadcasts with experts and commentators.
“The pundit industry has exploded with people setting themselves up as authorities and cloaking themselves in the values of journalism, where in fact all they are doing is promoting a brand, which is themselves,” Kaplan was quoted as saying.
But Williams was called a journalist in the very first USA Today story.
“We struggled with that word in the editing process,” Greg Toppo, who broke the USA Today story, told Journal-isms. “The reason we decided to go with it was that to the average viewer or reader, the guy’s a journalist,” even though “he doesn’t have the standards, as we do.” But when asked whether he would want to be placed in the same category as Williams, Toppo said putting it that way made him think differently.
The Associated Press, too, initially called Williams a journalist. But, “We realized midstream that was not the appropriate description, and we changed it,” Mike Silverman, AP’s vice president and managing editor, told Journal-isms. “We reflected on his role and his own descriptions of himself and decided ‘commentator’ fit much better.”
Douglas C. Lyons, an editorial writer and columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, compared Williams with disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair in a column Saturday. “My bad!” Lyons told Journal-isms today. “I shouldn’t have called him a journalist, even though he plays one on TV, and that’s part of my answer. To most people in the public, Armstrong’s a black journalist. He walks like a journalist and squawks like a journalist and fits in with those other D.C.-based talking heads that range from Howard Fineman to Newt Gingrich. In my view though, Williams can’t get off with a mere technicality. If he laces up his shoes to play ball, he better know how to play the game.
“Yes, Armstrong is really a flak for hire, but he chose to enter a journalistic environment to further his standing; he’s got to abide by the rules.”
The debate is similar to one that surrounded talk-show host Tavis Smiley, who accepted a Chrysler car from a sponsor and has campaigned for political candidates.
Meanwhile, Williams told Journal-isms his office was calling his newspaper clients to keep his column running and said he had not lost any television contracts. But Editor & Publisher found that a number of papers planned to drop him anyway. San Francisco gadfly Michael Petrelis located records of political contributions Williams made to campaigns in 1991 (Bush-Quayle), 1998 (Dylan Glenn, Georgia congressional candidate) and 1999 (Steve Forbes), but Williams said he had stopped making such contributions in 2000, and that none was to George W. Bush.
Still, his actions were near-universally condemned, though Williams acknowledged his mistake.
Reese Schoenfeld, the founding president of CNN, said to David Folkenflik on National Public Radio:
“A whore is a whore, and when you’re paid to put out an opinion without announcing to the world that you’ve been paid out to do it, that’s not only whoring, but it’s pretending to virtue while you’re doing it.”
- Editorial, Chicago Defender: Armstrong Williams must be put out to pasture
- Editorial, Citizen-Times, Asheville, N.C.: Fake news coupled with deception is a disgraceful use of taxpayers’ money
- Editorial, San Francisco Chronicle: “Leave no ethics behind”
- Editorial News-Leader, Springfield, Mo.: Journalists should never be on the government payroll
- “Meet the Press” discussion
- David Person, BlackAmericaWeb.com: Williams? Payola Follows George Will?s Path, With Different Results
“Who Dropped a Dime on Armstrong Williams?”
After the initial reactions to the USA Today story Friday about Armstrong Williams’ contract with the Education Department, one of the first questions from some black journalists was, “Who dropped a dime on Armstrong?”
Greg Toppo, the USA Today reporter who broke the story, would not say exactly who it was, but he did allow that the person was not a “political enemy,” but “somebody who didn’t like what they saw going on.” He also said he felt “really bad” for Williams. Losing his syndication contract “must be a terrible blow for anybody. . . . He must feel just awful,” Toppo told Journal-isms.
Toppo, 41, is a former high school and fourth-grade teacher who covers education for the Life section of USA Today.
As such papers as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Washington Post reported at the time, the Associated Press, citing documents obtained by the civil liberties group People for the American Way, disclosed in October that the Education Department paid $700,000 to the Ketchum public relations firm. Ketchum rated the media coverage of “No Chld Left Behind” and produced a video on it that resembled a news story.
The firm set up a 100-point system to rank stories and education reporters, and Toppo was ranked second-lowest.
After the AP report, Toppo received a tip that Williams was paid to do work for the Education Department. Efforts to obtain the contracts and the videos were unsuccessful, so the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request, “as not quite a last resort,” Toppo said.
The rest, as they say, made the front page.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault Leaving CNN to Freelance
Veteran journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who last October told a National Association of Black Journalists audience that only two of any 20 stories she files from Africa make it to CNN broadcasts in the United States, is leaving the network in March to freelance, she told Journal-isms.
Hunter-Gault, Johannesburg bureau chief since 1999 and a journalism pioneer, said she planned “to concentrate on getting more Africa news into the U.S. market, where there is a crying need.”
Eason Jordan, CNN’s chief news executive, said in an internal statement Saturday:
“During Charlayne’s six years with us, her reporting did much to dispel erroneous perceptions, to report Africa’s inspiring stories as well as its horror stories, and to introduce our viewers to the amazing people of a remarkably diverse continent.
“Both on and off the sceen she has been an ambassador in that region for everything CNN stands for.”
At the October NABJ awards ceremony in Washington, Hunter-Gault broke the rule that forbade acceptance speeches and pleaded with black journalists to “change the face of international journalism” by getting American media to present a more balanced picture of Africa.
The next month, Princell Hair, the first African American executive vice president and general manager of CNN/U.S., was replaced at CNN by Jonathan Klein.
During a conference call then with television reporters, Journal-isms asked Klein about Hunter-Gault’s comments and about a BBC survey of Africans that showed that residents of that continent have largely positive attitudes about their lives, contrary to the impression given by the Western news media.
“A great story is a great story. I’m always on the lookout for a powerful story,” Klein replied. As an example, he cited one about “the prince” going off to Africa to work with children who have AIDS, presumably a reference to a visit by Britain’s Prince Harry to Lesotho.
Advised that Hunter-Gault’s point was that there was more to Africa than disease, famine and war, Klein said he had worked with CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour while at CBS and that she was good at telling human stories.
Hunter-Gault made civil rights history when she and Hamilton Holmes Jr. integrated the University of Georgia in 1961. She went on to do pioneering work for the New Yorker magazine, WRC-TV in Washington, the New York Times and “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” on PBS, among other employers. In 1986, she was named the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year.
CNN spokeswoman Alison Rudnick did not respond to a request to identify how many black news executives were at the network. She said the reassignment of Hair did not affect the number.
NABJ’s “Idol” Winner Seriously Hurt in Crash
Richard Koonce, a weekend reporter for Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal on leave from teaching journalism and advising the student paper at Virginia’s Norfolk State University, “is hospitalized in serious condition after a car crash on his way home from work early Sunday morning at a tollbooth on the Ohio Turnpike,” Craig Webb reported in the paper.
Sgt. Antonio Matos of the Ohio Highway Patrol said Koonce “had stopped at a tollbooth near Interstate 480 to pick up his toll ticket when his car was struck from behind around 2 a.m. Sunday,” Webb’s story continued.
“Matos said the other driver ran from the scene but was apprehended about two hours later after North Ridgeville Police discovered him sitting in a yard along a residential street.
Marion Martin, Koonce’s girlfriend, said Koonce had no memory of the accident. “Thank God he’s alive,” she said. She told Journal-isms that “he’s doing really good” and is ready to come home. Bleeding on his brain has stopped, swelling has gone down, and he is wearing a neck collar, she said.
Koonce, 45, has worked as a part-time reporter at the Beacon Journal since June, the story said. He is on leave from historically black Norfolk State while he pursues a doctorate at Bowling Green State University.
Debra Adams Simmons, the paper’s editor, recalled for Journal-isms that Koonce won the “NABJ Idol” contest at the Unity convention last summer and had worked part-time at the Virginian Pilot in Norfolk, and also at the Grand Rapids Press and Lansing State Journal, both in Michigan.
Cards may be sent to 1703 Pierce St., Sandusky, Ohio 44870.
Cynthia Tucker Disputes Bill O’Reilly Rant
Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly claims that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution dropped his column “after I confronted its editorial page editor yesterday for cheap-shotting me in one of her columns. It was awful. . . . Cynthia Tucker really dislikes me even though I’ve never even met her,” he wrote.
But Tucker told Journal-isms today that the sequence of events doesn’t back O’Reilly. “I notified his syndicate in late December that we would be dropping his column. They have a letter from us dated December 27. The column about which he complained appeared on Jan. 2,” she said.
The column in question, “Now on Fox! Immoral values,” condemned the new Fox show, “Who’s Your Daddy?” Its premiere episode pitted “a woman who was adopted as an infant against eight men, each of whom tries to persuade her that he is the biological father she has never met,” as Tucker wrote.
Tucker mentioned O’Reilly only in her opening paragraph: “As we all know by now, Fox television is the home of traditional family values, unimpeachable morality and conservative politics. We know that because we’ve been told often enough by Fox’s on-camera personalities, including accused sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly.”
Cartooning Discussions Lack Voices of Color
Black or Latino cartoonists are rarities on editorial pages. By coincidence, two professional publications devoted considerable space to cartooning in their winter issues — but neither addressed the subject of the missing cartoonists of color.
The Masthead, the publication of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, carried a “symposium,” “Back to the Drawing Board: Cartoonists on the State of the Art.” One piece, by Henry Payne, was titled, “Lack of media diversity is strangling satire.” But the diversity Payne discussed was the lack of more conservatives.
“Our purpose in the winter Masthead symposium was not a comprehensive look at the issues facing editorial cartooning but rather to give voice to a handful of cartoonists who had something to say,” Frank Partsch, retired editorial page editor of the Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska, explained to Journal-isms. Partsch edited the Masthead issue.
“The symposium looked at such various topics as the tension between humor and message, the appeal of the Web as an outlet and the use of an expanded format for increasing the power of the printed cartoon.
“Ma[n]y other aspects of the world of cartooning, including, prominently, the lack of diversity, were admittedly not addressed. Perhaps they should have been. Certainly they would have been if we had attempted a comprehensive approach,” he said.
Nieman Reports, quarterly publication of the Nieman Foundation, which runs a journalism fellowship program at Harvard, devoted the bulk of its winter issue — 18 articles — to editorial cartooning.
“In our planning for this issue, we sent to the cartoonists who wrote for us a list of possible topics on editorial cartooning,” curator Bob Giles told Journal-isms. “First on that list was the topic of racial diversity and the absence of such voices on the editorial pages as cartoonists. None of the cartoonists chose to write about this issue, and we did not press them to,” Giles said. “One cartoonist, Signe Wilkerson of the Philadelphia Daily News, did write about women as editorial cartoonists.
“Our editors don’t ‘assign’ stories in the customary sense because our contributors are not paid to write for Nieman Reports. So it is difficult to ask people to cover all the aspects of an issue we are addressing in the magazine. What we do is ask them to write for us out of their own experiences, sharing lessons learned and observations they have on issues that have affected their work. This is an example of a topic none of the contributors wanted to tackle, even though we were encouraging it by mak[ing] diversity the first item on the list of possible story topics. Perhaps this was so because the issue of diversity was not something that resonated out of their own experience, and therefore would have required reporting and writing it from a more distanced perspective.”
The Nieman Reports issue is online in PDF format.
Essence Takes On Women’s Images in Hip-Hop
The opening of a year-long dialogue on women’s images in hip-hop has received a “phenomenal” response, Essence magazine’s fashion and beauty editor told Journal-isms.
The Essence.com Web site has had at least 1,300 hits on the subject, and “people walk up to me on the street” to talk about it, Michaela angela Davis said.
Davis, a founding journalist at Vibe magazine and former editor-in-chief of Honey, said she wouldn’t have her job were it not for hip-hop. Yet, “a lot of us didn’t think it would come to this.”
The introduction to the “Take Back the Music” campaign, in the January issue, defines part of the discussion:
“In videos we are bikini-clad sisters gyrating around fully clothed grinning brothers like Vegas strippers on meth. When we search for ourselves in music lyrics, mixtapes and DVDs and on the pages of hip-hop magazines, we only seem to find our bare breasts and butts. And when we finally get our five minutes at the mic, too many of us waste it on hypersexual braggadocio and profane one-upsmanship.”
“Our objective is to encourage people to think about it — and take whatever action they feel is appropriate for them,” Davis told Journal-isms. “We don’t want to tell them what to think, but we want them to think.”
Accompanying the January introduction are comments from rappers Nelly and Ludacris, singer Jill Scott; editors and writers Kevin Powell, Datwon Thomas, Danyel Smith and Toure; Debra Lee, president of BET Holdings, and others.
At last, women lash out at hip hop’s abuses (Stanley Crouch, New York Daily News)
Sexy Anchor Sharon Tay Departs for Show Biz
Los Angeles anchor Sharon Tay, who appeared in this column last year after she posed “in various stages of undress in the March issue of Razor magazine,” as the Los Angeles Times described it, has decided to go all the way — she’s leaving the news business for show business.
Tay, a member of the Asian American Journalists Association, announces on her Web site that, “After almost 12 years of being on the air at KTLA, I?m saying farewell. . . . I?ll be moving east to host two brand new weekend entertainment shows on MSNBC and invite you to join me there.”
Her last day was to have been last Friday.
“Tay joined KTLA in 1992 as a reporter and added ‘News @ Ten: Weekend’ co-anchor duties in 1993. She had been co-anchor of the morning news program since 1998,” Diane Haithman reported Friday in the Los Angeles Times.
Kristy Lee Returning to Boston From Seattle
“Three years after she arrived at KIRO/7,” in Seattle, “Kristy Lee is headed back to Boston,” the Post-Intelligencer reported Saturday.
“In a memo to newsroom staff yesterday, general manager John Woodin announced the 34-year-old anchor of KIRO’s 5, 6:30 and 11 p.m. newscasts is leaving to spend more time with family.
“No replacement has been named. Lee came to KIRO in 2002 from Boston’s WHDH-TV, replacing veteran anchor Susan Hutchison.
“The decision led Hutchison to bring an age and race discrimination suit against her former employers, which is scheduled to go to trial in March.”
