Consolidation Debate Heads for High Court
“The Tribune Co. and three television networks plan to appeal to the Supreme Court a ruling that blocked media companies from acquiring more local TV stations and newspapers,” Neil Roland and Michael McKee reported today for Bloomberg News. So does the National Association of Broadcasters, Paul Heine and Tony Sanders reported for Billboard Radio Monitor.
“News Corp.’s Fox, Viacom Inc.’s CBS and General Electric Co.’s NBC also will ask the high court to review the case, Tribune spokesman Shaun Sheehan said Thursday. They won’t be joined by the Bush administration, which earlier in the day decided not to appeal, Justice Department spokesman John Nowacki said,” the Bloomberg report continued.
“The media companies’ decision to try to revive the ownership rules may keep alive departing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell‘s two-year campaign to loosen the restrictions. Powell, who is stepping down in March, also has tried to ease limits on cable and telephone companies,” it said.
“But without the clout of the solicitor general behind them, analysts said, the companies face relatively long odds that the case will even be heard,” Jube Shiver Jr. wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
The drive toward media consolidation under Powell’s chairmanship attracted the attention of journalism organizations, who are not always sensitive to the connection between corporate media moves and the jobs of their members. In 2002, Juan Gonzalez, then president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and Joseph Torres, deputy director for policies and programs, argued that “this was the single most important issue facing journalists in our country today, that existing consolidation had already had a negative impact on both minority ownership and journalistic standards,” as the two wrote last year in a white paper, “How Long Must we Wait: The Fight for Racial and Ethnic Equality in the American News Media.”
NAHJ, the National Association of Black Journalists, Unity: Journalists of Color, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and the Society of Professional Journalists later asked the FCC, without success, to study the potential impact of the regulations before proceeding. The rules, which were revised in 2003, then ended up in the courts.
Yesterday, “The two Democrats on the five-member FCC, both of whom opposed Powell on media ownership, called on the agency to schedule public hearings and begin a new review,” Shiver reported.
“If we do credible studies and do our homework, we can come up with better rules,” one of the Democrats, Commissioner Michael J. Copps, was quoted as saying.
Gordon’s NPR Show to Debut With Chideya in Calif.
“News & Notes With Ed Gordon” debuts Monday on National Public Radio, with Gordon based in New York and broadcast, Web and print journalist Farai Chideya in NPR’s Culver City, Calif., studios, where the show will be produced, NPR announced today.
Tony Cox, who had replaced Tavis Smiley in that time slot until Gordon’s show was ready, told Journal-isms he was offered a job as a free-lance reporter on the new show but declined it as “been-there, done-that. I enjoyed my time with them. I would hope to find something that works for me as well as for them,” he said of NPR. He said he would now take time to “decompress.”
Scheduled for the Gordon show’s debut is a discussion with Jesse Jackson and former TransAfrica director Randall Robinson about Iraq, NPR said, as well as a commentary by Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page on Iraq and an interview with musician Brian McKnight.
“A daily feature will be the ‘Roundtable’ whose participants will include well-known and respected professionals in diverse fields including reporters, columnists, commentators, authors, business leaders, actors, and activists,” the announcement said.
“. . . Other features include: ‘Point-Counterpoint’ which offers two contrasting perspectives on the same subject, aired back-to-back. ‘Where are they Now’ locates individuals once touched by fame, whether by chance or intentionally, revealing where life has taken them. ‘Another Life’ invites guests to imagine a different career or life path. ‘Inside Washington with Juan Williams‘ provides an African-American perspective on the current events shaping our lives. And, the ‘Poetry Corner’ exposes listeners to new poets who read their work and discuss how the poem relates to life and events today.”
As reported last month, NPR announced the Gordon show less than a week after Smiley appeared for the last time on the show bearing his name. He had sharply criticized NPR for its lack of promotion and questioned its commitment to a multicultural audience. NPR, in turn, called Smiley’s demands unrealistic. Gordon’s show was picked up by nearly all those that carried Smiley’s.
Ibargüen Leaving Herald for Knight Foundation
Alberto Ibargüen, publisher and chairman of the Miami Herald, has been elected by the trustees of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to succeed Hodding Carter III as president and CEO, the foundation announced today.
The foundation “makes grants of more than $90 million annually to promote excellence in journalism worldwide and invest in the vitality of 26 U.S. communities where the Knight brothers operated newspapers,” the announcement said. The foundation has assets of $1.9 billion. The Maynard Institute is among Knight grantees.
Ibargüen, who is half-Puerto Rican and half-Cuban, was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in the New York area.
He “took over as Herald publisher in August 1998, after being publisher of the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald,” a Miami Herald offshoot, as the Herald reported today on its Web site.
“Ibargüen, a lawyer and longtime newspaper business executive, is the first publisher of Hispanic origin in The Herald’s history,” the story added. He also chairs of the board of the Public Broadcasting Service and is a director of the Inter American Press Association.
During Carter’s eight-year tenure, Knight “worked actively with every grantee and prospective grantee and had conversations with them about their diversity goals in their staffing and their leadership,” Larry Meyer, the foundation’s vice president of communications, told Journal-isms. “In the foundation’s own staffing, we are pleased to look like America, pretty closely like Miami.”
Attention, Moonlighting Journalist-Musicians
From time to time, we hear about journalists who pursue parallel lives as musicians after hours. The Dallas Morning News has found a way to combine the two. This week it came up with a “singing editorial” endorsing the creation of a music museum.
The lyrics, by Rodger Jones, ran as an editorial in the paper; online readers could click on a link to the editorial sung by the author. The News believes it has presented the first multi-media singing editorial.
Black Leaders, but Not “The” Black Leaders
“Bush and black leaders try for fresh start in his new term” was the Associated Press headline on the Tuesday story.
The lead to the AP dispatch was, “President Bush told black leaders yesterday that his plan to add private accounts to Social Security would benefit blacks because they tend to have shorter lives than some other Americans and end up paying in more than they get out.”
The meeting, as the second paragraph stated, was actually with “14 clergy and 10 leaders from business and nonprofit groups.”
By contrast, Michael A. Fletcher, who has become the first black journalist to cover the White House for the Washington Post in 20 years, began his story this way:
“President Bush met yesterday with a group of black business, religious and community leaders, using the opportunity to talk up his plan to allow workers to divert a portion of their Social Security taxes to private accounts.
“. . . Bush’s meeting with the right-leaning black leaders came one day before a session with the 43-member Congressional Black Caucus, which, like much of the nation’s black civil rights and political leadership, had a difficult relationship with the president during his first term.”
Bush tells CBC he’s ‘unfamiliar’ with Voting Rights Act (BlackAmericaToday.com)
Third Commentator Paid by Bush Administration
“One day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a third embarrassing hire has emerged,” Eric Boehlert wrote yesterday on Salon.com.
“Salon has confirmed that Michael McManus, a marriage advocate whose syndicated column, ‘Ethics & Religion,’ appears in 50 newspapers, was hired as a subcontractor by the Department of Health and Human Services to foster a Bush-approved marriage initiative. McManus championed the plan in his columns without disclosing to readers he was being paid to help it succeed.”
Meanwhile, Suzette Standring, president of the National Society of Newspapers Columnists, declared that,”You cannot serve two masters. Either you are an unflinchingly independent journalist, or you are a public-relations officer,” according to Dave Astor, writing Thursday in Editor & Publisher.
Standring was commenting on Universal Press Syndicate columnist Maggie Gallagher‘s receiving $21,500 from the Department of Health and Human Services for marriage-themed writing projects.
Also on Salon.com, Eric Boehlert wrote yesterday that, “conservative commentators are calling on the White House to come clean and detail any other controversial agreements.”
Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp contacted newspaper columnists for reaction to the payment revelations, and “many said they’d accepted money from the government, many acknowledged they’d been paid to talk to trade groups, issue-oriented organizations, and at universities, and they defended that practice.”
Among those quoted were Ruben Navarrette Jr., Clarence Page and William Raspberry, all of whom are syndicated.
“The amounts of money paid for these speeches can be staggering and should spark questions of how influential outside fees can be on columnists, Ruben Navar[r]ette Jr. pointed out,” Strupp wrote.
“. . . For Clarence Page, all speaking-fee arrangements require approval from his Chicago Tribune editor. . . . Cal Thomas said it’s a standard provision in his syndicate contract that writers ‘are forbidden from receiving anything of monetary value in exchange for promoting a product or policy in your column.’ William Raspberry works under similar restraints.
“. . . One thing nearly all of the columnists seemed to agree on: Much of the current ethics mess arises from the fact that so many columnists today were never trained as journalist[s],” Strupp continued.
Dismantle Bush’s ‘testocracy’ (Lewis W. Diuguid, Kansas City Star)
The Best Coverage Money Can Buy (Editorial, New York Times)
AJR Documents Underplaying of Darfur Genocide
The 60th anniversary commemorations of the liberation of thousands of people from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp are drawing media coverage this week, with their reminders to “never forget.” And coincidentally, the American Journalism Review writes that, “In an eerie echo of the past, the American news media have drastically underplayed genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region just as they did a similar catastrophe in Rwanda a decade ago.”
“But some individual journalists have done outstanding work,” the piece continues.
Senior writer Sherry Ricchiardi names Emily Wax of the Washington Post, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Knight Ridder’s Sudarsan Raghavan and New York Times reporter Somini Sengupta as having produced outstanding work. Her story also mentions that the Boston Globe has run several pieces from Darfur by freelancer Raymond Thibodeaux, Wax’s husband. The few broadcast highlights in Darfur coverage include two “60 Minutes” segments on CBS and two on ABC’s “Nightline,” she wrote.
Ricchiardi interviews several editors about the lack of coverage.
“Ann Hellmuth, associate managing editor for national/foreign news at the Orlando Sentinel, has not dispatched a correspondent to Sudan. She says the United States, unlike her native Great Britain, doesn’t have a deep connection to Africa. ‘I don’t think the African continent, for a lot of American people, is a prime area of concern,’ she says. ‘We’re very interested in Latin America, so we cover that for our readership. We don’t have large numbers of Sudanese living here.'”
At the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “‘Our feeling is in times of stressed resources that our mission in life is to be a strong regional newspaper,’ says Editor Douglas C. Clifton, who feels there are ‘acceptable options’ for Sudan coverage from the wires. ‘The issues [like Sudan] that are intractable and ongoing and appear never to have a resolution are the ones that tend, in time, to get smaller and smaller coverage,’ he adds. When news of the mass killings first surfaced, the story ‘broke page one repeatedly and then moved inside.'”
Romesh Ratnesar, world editor of Time magazine, which put Sudan on its cover, said in the piece, “The fact is you’re dealing with black people suffering, and to some extent that, for whatever reason, tends to be ignored by the mainstream media.”
UN marks liberation of Jews, reflects on Sudan (Newsday)
Myths About African American Muslims Explored
The story of African American Muslims is largely untold or misrepresented, but Carol Eisenberg of Newsday has written a 1,600-word piece that punctures some of the myths.
In a story that ran Dec. 29 in Newsday and was picked up last Saturday in the Seattle Times, Eisenberg discusses “the mistaken notion that most African-American Muslims were followers of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. In fact, only a few thousand of the estimated 2 million African-American Muslims in America today belong to the racial-separatist Nation. Then, there is the stereotype that since some African-American men encounter Islam in prison that all black Muslims are criminals,” she wrote.
The piece also explores the tensions between immigrant Muslims and those who are African American. “While Islam itself is colorblind, the divide between African-American Muslims—a third of all American Muslims—and immigrants from South Asia and the Arab world has been significant,” her piece says.
Gay Group Accused of Ignoring Black Journalists
The founder of the Black AIDS Institute, which calls itself the only black HIV/AIDS think tank in the United States, has blasted a leading gay-rights group, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, for ignoring the work of black journalists in its Media Awards nominations.
“This past year was groundbreaking for gays in black journalism,” Phill Wilson wrote in a piece published Thursday. “From black churches supporting or opposing gay marriage to the alarming rise in HIV infection rates among black gay and bisexual men, black journalists tackled issues considered taboo by many and generated the beginning of an open and honest dialogue in a community that isn’t necessarily willing or ready to discuss the L, G or H word.
“That’s why the absence of any substantive recognition of blacks among this year’s Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Media Awards, which honors the media for fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered] community, is so shocking. Black journalism plays an important role in covering issues that are important to Americans of African Descent who happen to also be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”
Asked to reply, GLAAD Media Director Glennda Testone told Journal-isms, “I’m not entirely sure where this is coming from. Our journalism nominees—like our TV and film nominees—represent a diverse set of stories and voices that GLAAD is very proud to acknowledge.
“Among our nominees this year:
“Derrick Z. Jackson has been nominated for Outstanding Newspaper Columnist for his many excellent columns on same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.
“The Web site Africana.com and well-known African American author James Earl Hardy have been nominated for their piece on gay 70s music icon Sylvester.
“Salon.com’s article on the Down Low was nominated for Outstanding Digital Journalism Article.
“Homophobia of all Hues, an article in The Nation exploring the unique impact of homophobia in communities of color, was nominated for Outstanding Magazine Article.
“And you’ve got TV series like HBO’s The Wire, Six Feet Under, Showtime’s The L Word and American Candidate, MTV’s The Real World: Philadelphia, movies like Brother to Brother and lots of other nominees that are inclusive of African Americans and other people of color.”
The exchange is perhaps indicative of the different perspectives of black and white gay journalists.
Last weekend, when gay members of the National Association of Black Journalists successfully petitioned the NABJ board to sanction a Lesbian and Gay Task Force, co-chair Marcus Mabry of Newsweek said:
“The perspective and challenges before black gay and lesbian journalists are different from those of white gay and lesbian journalists. Whether it is the question of how one succeeds in the workplace, what survival skills one needs or how to speak out on an issue of poor or unfair coverage, black gay and lesbian journalists face different challenges and have a different perspective from whites.
“Moreover, we are members of NABJ. Not all of us are members of NLGJA,” referring to the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. “Not all of us seek to be members of NLGJA. Our home is the National Association of Black Journalists. The place where we seek fellowship is with our African American brothers and sisters, not with NLGJA. A white organization quite simply cannot meet the needs of black journalists. And NLGJA can no more do it than ASNE or ASME,” referring to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the American Society of Magazine Editors.
Press Club Board Had Naysayers on Gay Journalists
Like the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Press Club had to grapple with how much recognition to give gay and lesbian journalists. In the press club’s case, the issue was whether to co-sponsor a program with the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association on anti-gay marriage initiatives last fall.
The press club board voted to do so, 9-2 and then 5-2 in an emergency meeting, new president Richard S. Dunham of Business Week magazine told Journal-isms today. Those opposed thought the gay and lesbian journalists association was simply an advocacy organization apart from journalism, “and the majority thought otherwise,” Dunham said.
Dunham, White House correspondent and national political reporter for the magazine, took office Jan. 14. He said the gay-marriage discussion was “balanced,” and that diversity will be “one of my big issues” as president.
“Bias Test” Provides Grist for Commentary
“Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are. Assuming we accept the results, what can we do about it?” ran the blurb for the Washington Post Magazine’s cover story on Sunday.
The piece, by Post medical writer Shankar Vedantam, explored the work of Harvard researcher Mahzarin Banaji.
On Wednesday, Post Metro columnist Courtland Milloy announced that, “I took the race bias test that Shankar Vedantam wrote about in the Washington Post Magazine on Sunday. . . . So now it can be told:
“‘Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Black relative to White,’ the summary of my test results said.
“For some readers, no doubt, this is confirmation—if any was needed—that I am a ‘reverse racist.’ But the last thing I wanted was to end up in that group of African Americans who showed a pro-white, or anti-black, bias.”