Members Achieve Long-Sought Recognition
The National Association of Black Journalists approved the creation of a Lesbian and Gay Task Force over the weekend, a milestone in efforts by black gay journalists to gain acceptance within the organization. NABJ becomes the first journalist of color organization to recognize an internal gay group.
The board voted 13-5 to authorize the task force, NABJ secretary Sarah J. Glover said.
“This task force, which grew organically from its gay and lesbian members, will work to strengthen black journalists — including the scores of gay journalists who felt NABJ did little to pay attention to their individual/collective needs,” co-chair Frankie Edozien, a reporter at the New York Post, told Journal-isms. “Many for YEARS have been afraid to congregate openly within NABJ. . . . It is a further affirmation that NABJ is a big tent umbrella organization for ALL black journalists, including its hitherto silent gay members.”
NABJ veterans might recall the organization’s convention in Houston in 1993, when, as Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Betty Baye later wrote:
“Former NABJ President and Chicago Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett was speaking for many black people when he said he deeply resents gay activists, whether they’re black or white, appropriating the language of the civil rights movement to make the case that homosexuals are as oppressed as black people are. He was heckled and booed, but Vernon didn’t hold his tongue. Many others did.
“Indeed, it was more than ironic that black journalists, many of whom are outspoken on practically everything on NABJ’s agenda, feared expressing an honest opinion lest we be perceived ignorant or, worse than that, homophobic. In the same way, white people often approach matters of race, fearing the brand of racist,” Baye continued.
While NABJ had its first gay president in 1989 with the election of Thomas Morgan, it has opposed admitting the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association as a full partner in Unity: Journalists of Color, saying members of the predominantly white group face a different set of problems. Still, some called the stance homophobic.
The new task force, which has 46 members and is co-chaired by Marcus Mabry, chief of correspondents at Newsweek, made a 15-minute presentation and took questions for an hour and a half as the NABJ board met in Queens, N.Y., Edozien related.
“There was thoughtful discussion by every board member in the room,” Glover said.
The five voting against West Coast representative Jerry McCormick‘s motion to create the task force were Melanie Burney, Neal Scarbrough, Stephanie R. Jones, Vickie Newton and V. W. Vaughan. Most were traveling today and could not be reached for comment, but Burney, NABJ’s parliamentarian, said tonight she voted against approving the task force because the request had not followed established procedures.
Edozien called the action historic.
“In the last year, one of the biggest stories in the nation has revolved around marriages for gays and lesbians. Another has been black sexual identity in America — the diversity of the Black LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered] community and the increase in HIV/AIDS in our community. NABJ should lead or play a vital role in how these issues are covered,” he said.
“Now the organization has a formal organized structure to deal with these issues.”
Among the other Unity partners, members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists might well have attempted to start a caucus, spokesman Joseph Torres said, but the Native American Journalists Association has not, said executive director Ron Walters. The Asian American Journalists Association has some interaction with lesbian and gay journalists, said executive director Rene Astudillo.
“We don’t have caucuses per se in our organization,” he told Journal-isms. “However, at our annual conventions, we usually have meetings or networking events/receptions held by some of our partner organizations like SAJA, KAJA and NLGJA,” references to the South Asian Journalists Association, the Korean American Journalists Association and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. “Some AAJA members, including myself, are also NLGJA members,” said Astudillo.
Barbara Reynolds Recalls Her Bad Old Days
Veteran-journalist-turned-minister Barbara A. Reynolds was in the news business long enough to have been a pioneer—an unwanted pioneer, she writes in a new autobiography, “Healing from the Inside Out: Out of Hell and Living Well.”
The Rev. Dr. Reynolds, a veteran of the Chicago Tribune and USA Today, writes, for example, about arriving in Washington in 1977 as the first African American journalist in the Tribune’s Washington bureau. “For that bit of historical distinction, I was excoriated daily,” she wrote. “I was the only black journalist among 12 white men, all of whom treated me with disdain for even thinking I should sit in the same office with them.
“. . . One co-worker from the West Coast used to tuck his thumbs in his belt buckle with his belly protruding over his pants and his cowboy boots dragging across the carpet and berate me while I was trying to write a story. ‘I have never known blacks to have any taste or intelligence that transcended anything but their narrow interest,’ he told me once. ‘Why blacks want to be where they are not wanted is beyond me.’ My answer to him: ‘You are not wanted in my space, yet you insist upon showing up everyday. You are such a credit to your race,’ I sneered.”
“On another day, when I asked to do a story about the move to get a holiday bill passed for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the bureau chief shouted at me, ‘You blacks are always looking for an easy way out. You don’t need a day to loaf. You blacks need to learn to work,'” Reynolds wrote.
Ray Coffey, who was Washington bureau chief at the time, told Journal-isms, “I never said anything like that—ever. I think she’s making all this stuff up. If she’s talking about me, I don’t see it. I didn’t have any beef with her.” Coffey, 75, retired in 1999 after moving on to the Chicago Sun-Times. He said his main recollection of working with Reynolds was taking her to task for “using stamps and telephones for your other operations.”
Reynolds uses the book to chronicle her transformation from sinner journalist to cleric, discussing abortions she has had, abuse she suffered and the virtues of perseverance.
She also details her 1996 firing from USA Today as columnist and editorial writer. Under editorial page editor Karen Jurgensen, “I was warned to shut up, to be silent, to just fall in line and collect my pay check. But I couldn’t. When I wrote about the need for poor children to have health insurance and how cruel budget cuts were destroying school lunch programs, I was told to stop ‘whining,'” she writes. “When I raised the issue of black men being demonized in the press, while white men like the Unabomber were portrayed sympathetically as a ‘mixed up Harvardite gone astray’ I was warned to lay off the media. When I wrote positively about Hillary Clinton, I was ridiculed.”
Jurgensen, who went on to become editor of the paper and resigned last year in the wake of the scandal involving fabrications by reporter Jack Kelley, did not respond to a request for comment.
Since the bad old days, as Reynolds said to Journal-isms, her life has been “miraculously transformed through a spiritual makeover” and she has gone on to graduate from two seminaries. “Currently she is mentoring students in religion and journalism at the Howard University School of Communication and hosts a national radio talk show on XM Satellite Radio. Recently she was appointed the religion columnist for the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which has an estimated readership of 10 million.”
The book can be ordered through www.Reynoldsnews.com.
Howard Stern Backs Weatherman After Playing Tape
Syndicated shock jock Howard Stern played the tape Friday of the weathercast that got Las Vegas broadcaster Rob Blair fired, in which Blair was said to have uttered, “Martin Luther Coon King Day.”
“At the time, Howard agreed that the guy should be fired for this, but after learning more about the situation he has changed his mind,” Stern’s Web site reported. “After reviewing the audio from the broadcast on the air, Howard said that it sounded more like the guy had made a mistake and was not trying to make a smart aleck racist joke. Howard wasn’t even sure he actually said ‘Coon.’ It sounded more like ‘Coo’ to him. Fred thought it sounded like he may have combined ‘King’ and ‘Junior’ and ended up with something that sounded like Coon. Howard noted that, as a broadcaster, he fumbles words like that from time to time.”
However, Stern agreed that since the segment was taped, ” there were at least 2 or 3 others who should have at least caught the remark and done something about it. Howard said that in his opinion, if the guy was really a racist and let a racist remark slip out he would have demanded a retake. But he probably didn’t think about it because he’s probably not a racist.”
Meanwhile, Linton Johnson, an African American spokesman for a Bay Area transit agency, has been defending Blair, as the San Mateo County Times reported Saturday.
“He is one of my dearest friends in the entire world,” Johnson said of Blair, who he said was also a person of color, a Cherokee.
AP Newswoman Leads South Asian Journalists
Deepti Hajela, an Associated Press newswoman, was elected president of the South Asian Journalists Association as the board met over the weekend.
She had been vice president for two years. Vikas Bajaj, a business and government writer at the Dallas Morning News, was named vice president and convention chair. Monika Mathur, a news researcher at Associated Press, was named secretary. John Laxmi, a New Jersey-based freelance writer, continues as treasurer and Sreenath Sreenivasan, a Columbia University journalism professor and technology reporter at WABC-TV in New York, continues as the group’s administrator, SAJA announced.
Cunningham Joins Freedom Forum in Nashville
No sooner had we mentioned last month that Dwight Cunningham‘s lengthening resume now includes being science editor at the Denver Post, a position he assumed last February, than the Freedom Forum in Nashville reports that Cunningham has become instructor/training editor for its Diversity Institute.
The announcement was tucked toward the end of a news release Friday announcing the institute’s seventh class of journalism fellows. The 12-week training program at Vanderbilt University is designed for people of color who want to become journalists but have had little or no formal journalism training.
Other people notes:
- Ed Bradley, correspondent with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” is to receive the Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association on March 10.
- Dwight M. Ellis, who retired as vice president of the department of human resource development at the National Association of Broadcasters, has joined the Kiplinger Advisory Board and the new Diversity Advisory Board of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
- Gene Farris is leaving Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal to become international sports editor at USA Today, overseeing production of the paper’s European and Asian editions.
- Al Fitzpatrick, retired editor at the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio, won the National Press Foundation’s Chairman’s Citation for Overall Excellence in Journalism. It is to be presented Feb. 17.
- Joe Garcia, senior editor at the Tucson Citizen, has been named editor of The Daily Times in Farmington, N.M., Gannett Co. announced.
- Jacobo Goldstein, CNN en Español Radio’s Washington correspondent, was scheduled to retire Friday after almost 12 years at CNN en Español. Goldstein, 70, will continue as contributor to the network, a CNN spokeswoman said.
- Jemele Hill, a sportswriter at the Detroit Free Press, is becoming a sports columnist at the Orlando Sentinel.
- Juleyka Lantigua has been named managing editor of XXL magazine. She was managing editor of Honey and writes syndicated columns for the Progressive Media Project.
- Karen E. Quinones Miller, a onetime reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award for her fourth novel, “Ida B.,” in the “Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction” category.
- Rosa Maria Santana, a veteran journalist and former board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, has been named associate director of NAHJ’s Parity Project.
- Chandra Thomas, an assistant editor and writer for Atlanta magazine, was the subject of a Sunday story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for coordinating TalkBlack Atlanta, a discussion group designed to provide an intellectual and social outlet for black professionals.
- Joseph P. Williams Jr., assistant managing editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, is returning to the Boston Globe as news editor in the Washington bureau.
- Ken Yamada, who has worked at the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Wall Street Journal and Red Herring magazine, was installed Sunday as a Buddhist priest. He is full-time chief resident minister of Berkeley Higashi Honganji in California, making him the first American-born minister to hold such a position in the United States.
2 Sentenced in Attempt to Blackmail Anchor
“Two men have been sentenced to prison for trying to blackmail WLS-Ch. 7 anchor Hosea Sanders,” the Chicago Tribune reported Saturday.
“Joseph Cantrell, 25, of Harvey, was sentenced to 4 years in prison, including 3 years for a prior gun charge. James Brown, 22, of the 4900 block of West Congress Parkway, was sentenced to 30 months’ probation on intimidation charges, said Marcy Jensen, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. Brown also pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted theft, Jensen said.
“Authorities have said the men tried to blackmail Sanders in exchange for their silence about allegations of drug use and other behavior but were arrested in a police sting.”
Paper Finds Scores of Felons Voted Illegally
“Scores of convicted felons voted illegally in the state’s 2004 general election, and officials never noticed because of serious flaws in the system for tracking them, The Seattle Times has found,” the Washington paper reported Sunday.
“The Times, reviewing felony convictions as far back as 1997, identified 129 felons in King and Pierce counties who were recorded as having voted in the Nov. 2 election. Another 23 likely voted. Several methods were used to confirm the findings.
“Either the counties failed to flag or purge felons on the voter rolls as required by state law, or they allowed them to register without checking their status. Some were even mailed absentee ballots and returned them unchallenged.
“The findings are almost certain to add to an already contentious debate over whether Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire‘s victory was legitimate.
“After three vote counts in the race for governor, Gregoire was declared the winner by a record-close 129 votes over Republican Dino Rossi, fueling more than two months of controversy about how well—or poorly—the election was managed.”
Detroit Angle on King: Inspiration to Arab Americans
As journalists strained for new angles on the Martin Luther King holiday, the Detroit News tried this: King as inspiration to Arab Americans.
“In Metro Detroit, Arab-Americans and Chaldeans also are keenly aware that King’s legacy lives and that his approach to unity, to asserting rights, to nonviolent activism is something they must carry as a torch, to light their way forward in American society,” began the story by Gregg Krupa.
“Some African-Americans say it is with a mixture of pride and concern that they perceive the vitality of King’s legacy. The Rev. Horace Sheffield of the National Action Network acknowledged that there are some who feel the continuing struggle of African-Americans is somehow discounted when other groups invoke King’s name.
“But he said he believes there is little reason to fear King’s message is somehow being co-opted.”
“Killer Journalist” Rideau Responds to His Critics
Not everyone is celebrating the release of prison journalist Wilbert Rideau.
In England, the Birmingham Post headlined, “KILLER JOURNALIST FREE DESPITE GUILTY VERDICT.”
Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran letters headlined, “Glory for a Killer”, one complaining that a lengthy piece by writer Wil Haygood “glorifies and makes a martyr of Wilbert Rideau. All Rideau did was rob a bank, kidnap three people, hold them hostage, shoot all three and finally stab one to death. Where is the compassion for the victims and their families?”
Rideau, who remains in an undisclosed location, responded to such sentiments on ABC-TV’s “Nightline” Friday.
“All I can say is that, you know—and I said, when I was released from jail, the only comment I made it—I made, was addressed to the victims, to their relatives and to the community, the white community who — many of them who felt that way,” reads a transcript. “And that’s the only thing I commented because I know the nature of the news media business. Don’t give ’em a choice and they have to broadcast or print just what you say. So that’s the only comment I made. I extended my apologies to the victims and to anyone in the community, everyone in the community who had been somehow adversely affected by my actions back then,” Rideau said.
“Ted, I learned something from that,” Rideau continued, addressing host Ted Koppel, ” . . . good people can do very, very bad things. I am a basically good person. That is the only violent act in my life, it’s the — it’s the worst thing I’ve done in my life. It’ll forever be that. The rest of my life, it — I know it defines my life publicly but — and it changed my life, because ever since then, my entire life and the way I’ve lived it and what I’ve done has all been, more or less, a response to that. It flowed from that.”
Asked what he planned to do with the rest of his life, Rideau replied:
“To the extent that I can, to do very much the same thing I’ve been trying to do. And that is to share what I know, what I’ve learned, with the American public. Because there’s another way to deal with this. You know, you don’t — there’s a lot that I’ve learned and I don’t intend for 44 years’ prison experience just to be wasted. There’s a lot that I learned that you need to know.”
Freed Journalist’s Partner Still in Prison (Associated Press)
