Diversity, Attention to Critics Found Lacking
The Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt, a former editor at the New York Times Book Review, left the Catholic Church at age 10, and joined the Unitarian Universalist Church as an adult, in 1985.
Now a minister with the Fourth Universalist Society in New York, McNatt said she sees one issue missing in coverage of events since Saturday’s death of Pope John Paul II: “respectful conversations” with those critical of his papacy, including those who believe that he “completely cut off the issue of what to do with women in the church.
“I grew up in the era of Pope John XXIII,” she told Journal-isms. “When Pope John XXIII died, I felt I had lost something. I wonder what the world might be like if we had a more catholic Catholic Church. I don’t have that feeling” of sorrow as with the earlier pope, McNatt said.
McNatt was one of several journalists of color who have joined the clergy or become divinity students who were asked by Journal-isms what they wanted to see in the papal coverage.
“I’m watching right now,” said the Rev. Dr. Ruth Allen Ollison, a former news reporter and news manager at television stations in Texas and Washington, D.C., now pastor of Houston’s Beulah Land Community Church. “It would be nice to see some diversity. What has been extremely rare is any commentary, any pictures, any video of people of color from throughout the world.
“That’s not to say that this is not an important time for the world, but I think what it reflects is a lack of diversity in the broadcast industry,” said Ollison, a one-time candidate for president of the National Association of Black Journalists who also owns King Country Radio (“Radio for God’s Country”) in Daingerfield, Texas. “You don’t see anyone making these decisions who understands the necessity of broadening the images that we see and the sounds that we hear regarding this very important world event.”
“Worldwide, the Catholic Church is more brown/black than white. I would like to see that reflected in the coverage,” said M. Dion Thompson, a former Baltimore Sun reporter now pursuing a master’s in divinity at the General Theological Seminary in New York.
Thompson said he would like to see interviews with the head of Atlanta’s archdiocese, Archbishop Wilton Gregory, “the black bishop who headed the American Catholic Church during the past few years of sex scandals, etc.”; breakaway Afrocentric Washington, D.C., priest George Augustus Stallings Jr., or the Oblate Sisters, the black order of nuns. Gregory “might even talk about being a black man at the top of American Catholicism and may have insights on the African cardinal said to be in the running for pope.” Stallings could comment on “what might be necessary to make the Catholic Church more culturally relevant.”
“I’m hoping they’ll explore the lack of African American leadership in the Catholic Church,” said the Rev. Angelo B. Henderson, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1999 while at the Wall Street Journal, who a year ago became associate pastor of worship, vision and emerging ministries at Detroit’s Hope United Methodist Church.
“Once you’re in the clergy, you see the power of the church. You see that the Catholic Church is big business. We’re missing in the board rooms. You see that the Catholic Church has the power to pick selected battles: right to life, child molestation. Why can’t people of color be in that room?”
Ira Hadnot reported on religion for almost four years at the Dallas Morning News and before that, edited religion stories for the Milwaukee Journal for about four more. “We expect to be saturated with coverage of the Pope, even when there are more Muslims in the world and it is the fastest-growing religion,” Hadnot said in an e-mail. “There are attempts to make the Pope an ‘every man’ figure when he is not.”
“He is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. He is admired widely because in his lifetime he made apologies for the way Catholics ignored the murder of Jews by Hitler and he visited the slave deportation location in West Africa and spoke about that evil. He was known as the people’s pope because of his own struggles growing in Poland.
“But:
“Did he deal harshly enough with the American Church and its bishops over the priest sexual abuse issues?
“Did he know about Terri Schiavo? As a conservative that would have been a strong way for him to remind The Church about its position on the holiness of life.
“Did he endorse the cardinal from Nigeria as his successor, which would make him, if elected only the second African pope in the history of the Catholic Church? Since he appointed most of the cardinals, such an endorsement would carry strong weight after his death.
“I am sure, as a holy man, the Pope accepted his own mortality. Why then are not believers celebrating?”
As a new divinity school student who retired last year as an assistant metro editor at the Washington Times, Marlene L. Johnson said she wanted more on the basics: “more information about what makes the conclave select one priest over another. Does he have special personal, spiritual attributes, and if so, what are they?
“How do priests come to the attention of the conclave as good candidates for Pope? Is the position more spiritual or political and how do politics play into the final selection? Also, what is the role of lay [C]atholics, if any, in deciding who becomes pope. What would happen if a Pope decided he didn’t like the job? Could he resign and return to being a priest?” asked Johnson, now studying at Howard University Divinity School.
Shaker visitors lend voices to vigil (Sam Fulwood III, Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Past and future (Les Payne, Newsday)
Pope John Paul II Dead at 84 (Ed Wiley III and Stacy Anderson, BET.com)
Black, Beautiful and Holy (Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, NNPA News Service)
White Smoke for a Black Pope? (Pamela Schaeffer, National Catholic Reporter)
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Cochran en Español—”It Was an L.A. Thing”
In a remembrance of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who died last week at age 67, Los Angeles Times media writer Tim Rutten, who collaborated on Cochran’s memoir, “Journey to Justice,” related this anecdote in his Saturday column:
“It’s often forgotten that the largest of the many monetary awards he won in police misconduct cases was secured on behalf of a young Latina, Patty Diaz, who had been sexually assaulted by an on-duty LAPD officer.
“Cochran spoke fluent Spanish, and, as he later described it in an interview, that came back to him as he summed up Diaz’s case to a multiracial jury panel:
“‘As I brought my argument to a close,’ he said, ‘I experienced one of those moments of intuition that veteran trial lawyers learn to trust; I could feel the jury was with me. I need to hold them there, and I improvised. I turned away from them for a second, then quickly turned back, making eye contact with each of the four Latinos on the panel. Without preamble, I spoke to them in Spanish. “Solo quien mueve con el saco sabe que pesa,” I said.
“‘This is an old Spanish maxim that translates, ‘Only he who carries the sack knows the weight of the burden.’ The Latino jurors nodded their heads in agreement, and I knew they shortly would explain the sentiment to their colleagues in the jury room.’
“It was an L.A. thing.”
Cochran’s Legacy Lies in the Settles Case (Gregory Moore, blackathlete.net)
Cochran Helped Big and Little (Stan Simpson, Hartford Courant)
Justice links three unlikely allies (Byron Williams, Oakland Tribune)
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Gordon, Smiley—and Integration, Too
Looking at National Public Radio’s hiring of talk-show hosts Tavis Smiley and then Ed Gordon, columnist Eric Deggans wrote Sunday in the St. Petersburg Times that, “True diversity won’t come from propping Gordon or Smiley up in shows that stand as islands of black culture in a sea of white-focused programs. Public radio needs to stop transcending or targeting and integrate a little more.”
Deggans said of Adam Clayton Powell III, the first African American vice president of news and information programming at NPR, in the mid-1980s, “he hopes Smiley’s and Gordon’s shows will serve as incubators for new minority talent in public radio, developing young producers and correspondents who would eventually migrate to other shows.
“If Tavis’ and Ed’s shows work as they should—as institution builders—they should (help diversify) this next generation of public broadcasters,” Powell added in Deggans’ column.
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Docs, Accountants Beat Journalists on Diversity
“Minority attorneys make up just 9.64 percent of the total number of attorneys in the nation’s largest firms, according to The National Law Journal’s most recent survey of the nation’s 250 largest firms, which came out in November 2004,” Al Tompkins noted last week on the Poynter Institute Web site.
The law journal adds: “but minorities compose about 24.6 percent of physicians and surgeons, and 20.8 percent of accountants and auditors, according to a report released last month by the American Bar Association.”
How does the news business rank?
According to the most recent census by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, people of color account for 12.94 percent of the professionals in U.S. newspaper newsrooms.
The Radio-Television News Directors Foundation reported a minority workforce of 21.8 percent for television and 11.8 percent for radio.
But all the figures lag behind percentage of people of color in the U.S. population: about 32 percent.
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Column in H.S. Paper Prompts Latino-Asian Uproar
“A student’s bylined column in the Alhambra High School newspaper asserting that Latinos lag behind Asians academically because of a lack of parental support has led to an uproar on campus. Robin Zhou, the author of the column, has been threatened with bodily harm by other students, school authorities said,” Cindy Chang reported last week in California’s Pasadena Star-News.
“Teachers have held classroom discussions on the issue, sometimes expressing strong views themselves. One teacher reportedly scrawled ‘Racist’ on the article and pinned it on the chalkboard.”
“. . . Few of those who objected to the article disputed the existence of the achievement gap. What bothered them, they said, was the article’s uncompromising tone and its reference to ‘brown people.’
“. . . Journalism adviser Mark Padilla says it took a provocative column like Zhou’s to stimulate a long-overdue discussion. ‘It’s interesting how the district’s attempts at raising awareness of this achievement gap seems to have had a minimal effect on students, but one column can make a huge difference,’ Padilla said.”
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Plea-Bargaining, Profiling Stories Win IRE Awards
Manny Garcia of the Miami Herald was among the winners in the Investigative Reporting and Editing awards, and a team from The Joongang Ilbo newspaper of Seoul, South Korea, won a special citation, IRE announced Saturday.
Garcia was part of a team that won in the large-newspaper category (250,000-500,000 circulation) “Justice Withheld” was “a shocking computer-assisted investigation into an unsettling Florida plea-bargaining practice known as ‘withhold of adjudication of guilt,’ where serious crimes—rape, child molestation, spousal abuse—are wiped off the books,” IRE said.
In the radio category, a certificate went to “Abuse of Immigrant Detainees” by National Public Radio’s Daniel Zwerdling, Anne Hawke, Ellen Weiss and Bill Marimow, which “put a compelling human face on the Department of Homeland Security’s roundup of more than 200,000 aliens last year. It investigated what happened to immigrants detained at two jails in New Jersey, telling in horrific detail how guards attacked hapless prisoners with dogs and beat the jailed immigrants if they dared to complain.”
[Added April 5: In the network or syndicated television category, the winner was “A Pattern of Suspicion,” for “Dateline NBC.” “For this compelling and ambitious examination into racial profiling across the country, Dateline analyzed data from more than four million traffic stops in a dozen cities. It found that in almost every city, blacks were at least twice as likely as whites to be stopped or ticketed for non-moving violations. In a thorough and even-handed investigation, the network put into focus the subtle ways that police target non-white ‘suspects’,” IRE said. Producer Jason Samuels, senior producer Aretha Marshall, and associate producers Melanie Jackson and Shayla Harris, all black journalists, were among those credited for the piece, which earlier won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award.]
WOAI Radio in San Antonio won in the below-top-20 markets category for “Racial Profiling Problems.” The report by Brian Collister, Holly Whisenhunt and Steve Kline “deconstructed a city study that purported to show there was no racial profiling in San Antonio. WOAI exposed that the $54,000 study was useless; race information had been incorrectly marked by police on 26 percent of the tickets, and the database used to create the report was full of errors. The story uses examples that are both hilarious and disturbing,” the judges said.
As a result of “Children Trapped in Poverty,” “the Korean government quickly launched a comprehensive plan that includes paying for the cost of child care for needy families and the construction of more than 500 child welfare centers across the country,” IRE said.
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Short takes:
- ABC-TV executives offered assurances that the 11:35 p.m. time slot of “Nightline” would remain in the hands of ABC News, at least in the months immediately after Ted Koppel leaves, according to Jacques Steinberg in the New York Times. “But industry executives noted yesterday that the network, owned by the Walt Disney Company, is leaving as much as $100 million a year on the table by not scheduling an entertainment program at that hour.” As reported in February, “Nightline” runs third in the overall ratings behind “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on NBC and “Late Night with David Letterman” on CBS, but it rates first with African Americans, according to September-to-December Nielsen ratings.
- “The Boondocks” TV show is scheduled to debut this October in the Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” block of late-night animated programming, according to Universal Press Syndicate, Editor & Publisher reported Thursday.
- George Gutierrez has been named publisher of ¡ahora sí!, the Spanish-language weekly publication of The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, according to Editor & Publisher.
- Virginia Moore, an Asian American student at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., was presented Wednesday with a David S. Barr Award, given to high school and college journalists, at the Newspaper Guild awards dinner in Washington, D.C. Moore won a $1,500 scholarship for her reporting on unfair labor practices committed by manufacturers of popular clothing lines.
- “National Review magazine has apparently removed advertisements for two virulently anti-Muslim books attacking the Prophet Muhammad from its online store. The removal of the promotional materials for ‘The Life and Religion of Mohammed’ and ‘The Sword of the Prophet’ came after hundreds of concerned Muslims contacted the magazine and Boeing Co., one of the magazine’s advertisers,” according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
- Discovery Communications announced plans to set up U.S. Hispanic Network Group in Miami and launch two new Spanish-language networks in the U.S., Discovery Kids en Español and Discovery Travel & Living (Viajar y Vivir), on June 17.
- “After pulling the plug on Architectural Digest en Espanol late last year, Condé Nast International will stop publishing Vogue en Español and Glamour en Español with their May issues in a restructuring of its Latin American publishing operation. The company instead will distribute the Mexican editions of Vogue, Glamour and Architectural Digest,” Mickey Alam Khan reported for DM News, a publication for direct marketers.
- The editor of Southern California in Focus, an Islamic newspaper launched earlier this year to cover a growing and diverse Muslim community, is a woman, Asma Ahmad. In most Islamic countries, her job would be usually filled by men, H.G. Reza noted in a story on the publication Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times.
- Donald W. Blount, who held editing roles at California’s Sacramento Bee and Modesto Bee, was named managing editor of the Record in Stockton, Calif., the paper announced, adding to the ranks of African American managing editors.
- A two-part series by Jon Friedman on MarketWatch.com profiling Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons concludes that “Parsons’ Time Warner has rebuilt its credibility the old-fashioned way—by posting good results, quarter by quarter.”
- Kristen Welker, reporter and weekend morning anchor at WLNE-TV in Providence, R.I., was due to return to her Philadelphia hometown today as general assignment reporter for WCAU-TV.
- Both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill gave high praises to members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association on the 178th birthday of the Black Press, Hazel Trice Edney reported for the NNPA News Service.
- Spanish-speaking residents in two eastern Iowa counties can now keep tabs on the news for free. A Spanish-language newspaper has been launched by Iowa’s Muscatine Journal, the Associated Press reports. The newspaper, called Hispanos Unidos, will be published monthly and distributed at select sites in Muscatine and Louisa counties, AP said.
- Reporter Pei-Sze (rhymes with “Daisy”) Cheng has joined WNBC-TV in New York from WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn., the Hartford Courant reported.
- New York’s daily tabloid Hoy, owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co., has ended its agreement with Dow Jones & Co. to publish a weekly Spanish-language insert from The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a very good section, but its look and feel did not match the rest of Hoy,” Digby Solomon Díez, publisher of Hoy, told Marketing y Medios, Editor & Publisher reported.
- “When WSCV-Telemundo 51 Spanish-language weatherman Fidel ‘Felipe’ Ferro crosses over . . . to English language WSVN-Fox 7, he’ll be Phil Ferro, chief meteorologist,” the Miami Herald reported. “He signs off on April 1, and debuts April 25 on Channel 7.”
- Garry Leavell was named sports editor of the Dallas Morning News. He succeeds Dwayne Bray “as the second in command of SportsDay,” the paper said. Bray was named deputy managing editor for metro news, reducing the number of African American sports editors nationally to four.
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