Pundit Accused of Payola Gets N.Y. Radio Show
“Armstrong Williams, the conservative commentator embroiled in controversy after being paid to promote Bush administration policies, has signed a contract to be a co-host of a daily radio talk show in New York,” Anne E. Kornblut and Ben Sisario wrote Thursday in the New York Times.
“The three-hour show, ‘Drive Time Dialogue,’ will begin on March 15 on WWRL, 1600 AM. Broadcasting from a studio installed in his Capitol Hill offices, Mr. Williams will present the conservative point of view. He will be countered by Sam Greenfield, as the liberal voice, from New York.
“Adriane Gaines, the general manager of WWRL, said Mr. Williams was hired as part of an effort to ‘bring a new, interested audience to increase our ratings.’
“Three investigations are under way into the $240,000 contracts between the Department of Education; Ketchum Public Relations, which hired Mr. Williams on the department’s behalf; and Mr. Williams, a prominent black conservative commentator who wrote a weekly column and made frequent national television appearances until earlier this year,” the story continued.
“. . . Ms. Gaines, the station manager, said she did not believe Mr. Williams had been compromised as a political commentator. ‘We feel it’s something that unfortunately happened but we can all move on,’ she said.”
Williams declined to discuss the subject with Journal-isms.
Also in New York, as reported in January, Williams’ column will remain in the Amsterdam News, an African American weekly with a circulation of 40,000, according to owner Wilbert A. Tatum. “I have no problem with his taking money from the Education Department,” Tatum said then. “If they investigate and find that it’s illegal, we’ll reconsider.”
And while Williams’ column was dropped by Tribune Media Services and he was pulled from the syndicated television show “America’s Black Forum,” but Williams reverted to self-syndicating the column, newspaper by newspaper.
Johnathan Rodgers, CEO of the cable network TV One, Williams’ remaining African American television outlet, said in January the network was reviewing tapes of Williams’ “On Point” show to see whether he mentioned the “No Child Left Behind Act” he was paid to promote, but has announced no decision.
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Pulitzer Jurors Meet and the Speculation Begins
Jurors making nominations for the Pulitzer Prizes met this week at Columbia University in New York, igniting speculation about this year’s awards.
Editor & Publisher magazine published a list today of what “we believe is a credible list of most of the journalism-category nominees.”
On it are Dele Olojede, Newsday’s former foreign editor who returned to reporting from Africa, listed in the international category for his Rwanda coverage; and in the explanatory journalism category, a series by a number of Newsday writers, “30 Years of Hip-Hop,” which has been packaged online.
E&P said that for now, it did not have the nominations in the criticism, cartoonist and photography categories.
Jurors’ recommendations go to the 19-member Pulitzer board, which can change the categories in which entries are considered or otherwise do what it wishes. Among its members are Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. DuBois professor of humanities, Harvard University; Jay T. Harris, director, Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California; and Gregory L. Moore, editor, Denver Post.
The names of the Pulitzer jurors are not released until the winners are announced in April.
However, these journalists of color were spotted at a luncheon for the jurors: Dorothy M. Bland, Fort Collins Coloradoan; Milton Coleman, Washington Post; Don Flores, El Paso Times; Simon KC Li, Los Angeles Times; Wanda Lloyd, Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser; Sandra Long, Philadelphia Inquirer; Sherrie Marshall, Macon (Ga.) Telegraph; Addie Rimmer, Columbia University; Rick Rodriguez, Sacramento Bee; Debra Adams Simmons, Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal; Mark Trahant, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (and Maynard Institute board chair); and Keith M. Woods, Poynter Institute.
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Bill Cosby Pays Back National Enquirer
“Bill Cosby has finally broken his silence about drugging and groping allegations levied against him by a former Temple University employee,” Nicole Weisensee Egan reported Thursday in the Philadelphia Daily News.
“And he did it an exclusive interview with the National Enquirer, offering a vague, sort-of apology to the 31-year-old Canadian woman.
“‘Looking back on it, I realize that words and actions can be misinterpreted by another person, and unless you’re a supreme being, you can’t predict what another individual will do,’ Cosby said in an interview with Enquirer Editor Barry Levine, in the March 14 issue, which hits newsstands tomorrow.”
The Associated Press reported that, “Cosby’s spokesman said he agreed to the interview with the Enquirer partly out of gratitude.
“The paper offered a $100,000 reward that led to the arrest of the suspect in the 1997 death of Cosby’s son, Ennis.”
Stuart Zakim, an Enquirer spokesman, said in the Daily News that Cosby’s interview vindicates his publication.
“It just validates the credibility of our reporting,” he said. “People make jokes about the Enquirer all the time, but this positions it as a credible source of news.”
K.C. Star Says It’s Equal-Opportunity Investigator
It’s not unusual for an alternative paper in town to go after the metro daily. True to the playbook, Kansas City’s The Pitch took on the Kansas City Star this week.
The issue was the Star’s decision last fall not to report that congressional candidate Emanuel Cleaver had contracted with a firm owned by a reporter for the black weekly the Kansas City Call, even as the reporter was writing about Cleaver’s campaign.
“One staffer at the Star laughed when we mentioned that his paper had taken so long to do the piece,” read one part of the story by the Pitch’s Tony Ortega. “Every day is Groundhog Day down here as far as people of color are concerned,” Ortega quoted the anonymous staffer as saying. “The paper is terrified to see its own shadow and offend minority readers.”
“That’s what we figured,” Ortega added.
It’s an allegation the paper denies. “That’s just not true,” Star Managing Editor Steve Shirk told Journal-isms today. “The Star has a long tradition of taking a long hard, look at all people, as far as watchdog journalism for our readers. We just do.” As an example, he cited February articles by the Star’s Michael Mansur and Lynn Horsley of an audit that found nearly $1.1 million spent or billed for restoring two urban-core homes—about twice as much as originally estimated. The agency was run by African Americans.
The paper also ran stories about a white local telephone executive who was tied to mobsters on the East Coast, Shirk said.
The Pitch reported that, “Since last summer, Cleaver has paid [Call reporter Eric] Wesson $2,500 for work, including writing scripts for Cleaver’s phone canvassers in the runup to last year’s election. Wesson continued to write about Cleaver for the Call, often in glowing terms, without revealing to readers that he was on the candidate’s payroll.”
The story did not appear in the Star until after Howard Kurtz reported it in February in the Washington Post, although the Pitch mentioned the issue last fall.
“We debated it quite a bit,” Shirk told Journal-isms. “We contacted the publisher of the Call and decided it was an ethical issue for the Call to resolve and not so much a campaign issue, because of the already-existing advocacy by the Call for Cleaver’s campaign. It was more a Wesson issue than a Cleaver issue. In addition, it was private money, not public money.”
The Star ran a story in February not because of the Kurtz piece, Shirk said, but because by then Cleaver had been elected, and “at that point the issue became a new congressman’s actions, and we did want to explore the potential of taxpayers’ money being used—which we found was not.”
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Conservative Pundit Joseph Perkins Quits Suddenly
“Conservative columnist Joseph Perkins abruptly left The San Diego Union-Tribune and his syndicate last week,” Dave Astor reported Thursday in Editor & Publisher.
“‘He resigned on his own volition,’ said Robert A. Kittle, the Union-Tribune’s editorial-page editor, when contacted today. ‘It came as a complete surprise to us.’
“Kittle added that Perkins, who could not be reached for comment, didn’t tell the newspaper why he was leaving. Perkins’ Feb. 25 farewell column—which ran just three days after he submitted his letter of resignation—was also vague on the departure.
“Some of my friends wonder aloud if I am suffering some sort of ‘midlife crisis,'” Perkins wrote. “They cannot fathom, for the life of them, why I would retire, in my mid-40s, from my writing job at The San Diego Union-Tribune; why I would forfeit my nationally syndicated column. Well, after nearly 15 years of daily deadlines, writing three to four editorials a week, in addition to a column, this seems as good a time as any to walk away from the grind.”
He added, “I have tried to follow the example of Booker T. Washington, who was a black conservative long before being black and conservative was cool. ‘I will permit no man,’ he said, ‘to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.'”
Marianne Goldstein, editorial director of United Media, told Journal-isms today that her company sent out Perkins’ columns along with others to about 600 clients and that about half used them regularly “or with some regularity.” Of Perkins’ sudden ending of the column, she said, “We were very sorry, but it sounds like he’s got a lifestyle change.” As for a replacement, “we’re working on something and we’ll have an announcement in the next week or so,” she said.
Perkins worked with Vice President Dan Quayle in the George H.W. Bush administration and, while still a columnist, helped cover the 1996 Republican National Convention for the Republican National Committee’s own network, GOP-TV.
He became syndicated at a time when mainstream black columnists complained that they were being shunted aside in favor of blacks more in tune with the mid-1990s “Republican Revolution” led by Newt Gingrich.
USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham said at a 1995 National Association of Black Journalists convention panel: “There are 17 black conservatives in America — and they’re trying to hire them all as columnists.”
Perkins responded in an Editor & Publisher story then that Wickham “is unwilling to accept the fact that there is a diversity of opinion in the black community, and that a writer like me might represent a legitimate body of thought—and the numbers are far greater than he’s willing to acknowledge.”
However, in a 2002 discussion on the listserve of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, one member offered another reason why Perkins and other black conservatives were picked up by so many newspapers:
“I almost hate to do this, but the fact is from my 42 years in journalism, the majority readers want newspapers to feature `conservative’ commentary from other races in order to justify their own `conservative’ feelings, or vice-versa. My white readers have, for instance, insisted that I buy conservative black columnists who, to those readers, appear to agree with them. I usually bought on the basis of quality writing, but I admit that I also occasionally bought on the basis of `equality’ of philosophy.”
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Satellite Channel Targets South Asians in U.S.
“They are young, well-off, a touch disaffected and searching for something.
“If it sounds like the script for a new TV drama, consider American-Desi,” Hugh R. Morley wrote last week in the Record of Bergen County, N.J. “Desi” is a colloquial name for South Asians, as the stylebook of the South Asian Journalists Association explains.
“Launched in January, the Iselin [N.J.]-based 24-hour satellite channel aims to tap the rapidly growing community of upwardly mobile South Asians living in America,” Morley’s story continued.
“The channel, said company President Vimal Verma, was created for immigrant or U.S.-born South Asians who are assimilated into American life but hanker to see their own people and issues on TV.
“. . . In December, South Asia World—a 24-hour English language news and entertainment channel—began broadcasting on satellite in the United States. And MTV has announced a channel to go on the air in the next few months aimed at young U.S.-based South Asians, called MTV Desi.
“At American-Desi . . . a one-on-one interview show features Sreenath Sreenivasan—the ‘tech guru’ on ABC’s Good Morning America — probing newsmakers of interest to the South Asian community.
“His recent shows have featured an ethnic South Asian developer of New York real estate, a high-profile Indian-American ACLU attorney and a part-Indian, part Japanese comic.
“‘There is BET, Black Entertainment Television, there is Univision for Hispanics,’ Sreenivasan said. ‘There is still a cultural affinity, even though we are all Americans.'”
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Chicago’s WLS-TV Adds Captioning in Spanish
“Coming off another victory in the February ratings sweeps, WLS-Channel 7 has become the first station in the market to offer closed captioning for all of its newscasts in Spanish,” Robert Feder reported Thursday in the Chicago Sun-Times.
“While continuing to provide closed captioning in English for the hearing impaired, the Disney/ABC-owned station has initiated real-time Spanish captioning via TranslateTV.
Calling it further evidence of Latinos’ growing clout, Feder cited “Nielsen Media Research, which saw a 43 percent rise in prime-time viewership of Chicago’s three Spanish-language television stations over the past year.”
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School Opens Tavis Smiley Center; Is NAACP Next?
“Texas Southern University’s KTSU-FM, which launched its first, 10-watt broadcasts from a tiny studio nearly 32 years ago, strode into the 21st century’s digital future last week with the opening of the 18,000-square-foot, $4.5 million Tavis Smiley Center for Professional Media Studies,” Allan Turner reported Wednesday in the Houston Chronicle.
“Named for noted broadcaster Smiley, who contributed $1 million to underwrite a journalism faculty position and scholarships, the center provides a state-of-the-art digital announcers studio, three production rooms, a talk studio and newsrooms.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s “Reliable Source” gossip column reported that,”The NAACP has approached PBS chat-show host Tavis Smiley in its search for a successor to Kweisi Mfume. While Smiley tells us he will meet with the civil rights group’s search committee—which is considering more than 200 applicants for the top job—we also hear that he’s locked into contract commitments.
”President and CEO of the NAACP is perhaps the most prestigious position in all of black America,’ he said in a statement yesterday. ‘It is flattering to be asked to consider such a vaunted opportunity for leadership and I have agreed to meet with them to hear more about their plans for the future.’
“Regarding the search, John White, the group’s spokesman, told us: ‘I have not heard any favorite mentioned at the NAACP. . . . And I haven’t heard Tavis Smiley say he wants to be president.”
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Democrats Say Globe’s Bray Not Punished Enough
“Democrats heaped criticism on The Boston Globe yesterday for failing to more aggressively punish technology reporter Hiawatha Bray, who criticized Sen. John F. Kerry‘s campaign in Internet postings as he covered the race,” David R. Guarino reported today in the rival Boston Herald.
“Former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, a close Kerry friend, said in a written statement, `As someone who has seen what the right wing can do to destroy people and how the media can be complicit, I just can’t get over the fact a reporter at a major newspaper was smearing John Kerry and he isn’t even held accountable. Why does he have a job?’
“Democratic National Committee spokesman Jano Cabrera said Bray’s conduct `merits more than a rebuke.”’
“. . . Bray again declined comment yesterday.”
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“Boondocks” Strip Dropped Over Implied “N” Word
“The Miami Herald will be among the newspapers dropping ‘The Boondocks’ tomorrow and Saturday because of the comic’s implied use of the ‘n’ word,” Dave Astor wrote yesterday in Editor & Publisher.
“‘It’s our view that the strips and the language in the strips would be offensive to at least a portion of our readership and perhaps a significant portion of our readership,’ Tom Fiedler, the Herald’s executive editor, told E&P today. One factor that entered into the decision, he added, is that some readers may not know that ‘The Boondocks’ creator Aaron McGruder is black. So, Fiedler said, some readers may think a white cartoonist is using the racially insensitive word.”
Meanwhile, in the Chicago Tribune, Geoff Brown, the associate managing editor for features/lifestyles, defended his decision to not publish the Monday and Tuesday strips.
“Brown said the problem was the same on both days: ‘The Boondocks’ creator Aaron McGruder had characters stating as fact things that were not,” wrote public editor Don Wycliff Thursday.
“One strip showed a character, Caesar, looking at a newspaper—some would say that was the real fiction—and relating to another character, Huey, the news that ‘[President] Bush got recorded admitting that he smoked weed.’
“To which Huey replied: ‘Maybe he smoked it to take the edge off the coke.’
“Funny, perhaps, but only if you ignore that Bush was not recorded admitting that he smoked marijuana. As Brown pointed out in a heads-up memo in advance of the strip’s publication date, ‘All reputable news sources reporting [on] the tapes were careful to draw INFERENCES, but no one can say Bush admitted to drug use.'”
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U.S. Press Said to Remain Active on Darfur
“International pressure on the United States to refer the murders and violence in Darfur, Sudan, to the International Criminal Court has produced little action so far. But the American press has remained active in its coverage of what some are calling genocide in Sudan,” Brian Orloff wrote Thursday in Editor & Publisher.
“The wires, especially Reuters, have continued to break news from the region on nearly a daily basis, but daily newspapers are also continuing to regularly cover Sudan, with many stories lately probing the genocide question.”
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Overlooked: Black U.S. Diplomat Beaten in Ukraine
The United States has its first black woman as secretary of state, and in recent elections in Ukraine the United States and Russia were accused of pulling strings on opposite sides, attesting to its strategic importance. In that election, the winning presidential candidate was poisoned, which became a front-page story.
So why so little coverage this week for the account of a black American diplomat saying he was attacked and severely beaten there by a group of skinheads?
“Robert Simmons, serving at the U.S. Agency for International Development in Uzbekistan, was attacked Saturday night by what he described as a well-organized group of more than a dozen skinheads wearing combat boots,” according to an Associated Press dispatch.
“”I was attacked because I am African American. They did not touch my friends who were there with me but were not black,’ Simmons said in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.
Even more alarming: “Such attacks are not common in Ukraine, but a November warning posted on the Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev warned Americans of ‘reports of racially motivated incidents against non-Caucasian foreigners.'”
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Short takes
- Twentieth Television has officially pulled the plug on the syndicated talk show “Good Day Live,” Twentieth spokesman Les Eisner acknowledged to Journal-isms, but Eisner would not confirm a report that co-host Arthel Neville has landed on his company’s “A Current Affair.” “She’s very talented, but at this time I can’t comment further on it,” he said.
- Jovita Moore, weekend early evening and late news anchor at Atlanta’s WSB-TV, will anchor the 5:30 to 6 p.m. portion of the station’s newscast, WSB has announced, and will join Monica Kaufman and John Pruitt at 5 p.m.
- Voice of America correspondent Aklilu Solomon has been released after almost 18 months in jail in Eritrea, the Committee to Protect Journalists says it has learned. “He was freed on December 31, 2004, and is said to be in poor health. . . . Sixteen journalists remain imprisoned, according to CPJ research.”
- During the retooling of the Black Family Channel’s news program, on hiatus since Dec. 23, news director Greg Morrison has been producing specials for the network. They include “Today’s History Makers,” on figures such as Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and a program on African American car designers such as Ed Welburn, chief designer for General Motors, Morrison told Journal-isms.
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