Diana Griego Erwin Accused of Fabrication
“A member of a Pulitzer Prize winning team resigned from The Sacramento Bee amid an investigation into whether she fabricated some of the people she mentioned in several recent columns, the newspaper said Thursday,” the Associated Press reported.
“Diana Griego Erwin, who won a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award while working at the Denver Post in the 1980s, came to The Bee 12 years ago. She came under suspicion more than two weeks ago, when an editor raised questions about inadequate sourcing in one of her columns, Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez wrote in Thursday’s editions.
“The column wasn’t published and the newspaper launched an inquiry, Rodriguez wrote in the space usually reserved for Griego Erwin’s three-day-a-week column.
“‘During our inquiry we found we could not authenticate the existence of several people even though they were identified by name, age and sometimes by the neighborhoods in which they were reported to have lived,’ Rodriguez said. ‘When asked to provide confirmation . . . she was unable to do so to our satisfaction.'”
“This inquiry came at the end of a six-month string of personal crises in my life,” Griego Erwin told the Los Angeles Times in an e-mail, that paper reported today, “and, frankly, I didn’t have the emotional reserve to answer The Bee’s questions quickly enough.”
Rodriguez last month became the first Latino president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Rodriguez said that during his tenure he intended to emphasize ethics and the watchdog role editors must play. On the organization’s Web site, he listed his pet peeve: “Sloppy mistakes,” the L.A. Times noted.
In such columns as “Outrage spreads over beer billboards that stereotype Latin women,” “Mixed opinions on Johnnie Cochran reflect racial divide in America,” and “To hometown essayist, brown is a melding of many hues, cultures,” Griego Erwin included issues important to Latinos, including immigration. She said she was “half-Hispanic,” and described her background this way in a June 13, 1989, column in California’s Orange County Register:
“My maiden name Griego goes back to 16th-century Spanish colonization in what is now New Mexico.
“My mother is a descendant of Rutherford B. Hayes, a do-nothing president perhaps, but an American president nonetheless. Mom’s grandparents were of German, English, Scottish and Irish descent.
“Sounds pretty melting-pot to me.”
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D.C. TV Reporter Charges Manhandling by Police
“A reporter for [Washington’s] WJLA-Channel 7 and her cameraman were following a high-ranking Prince George’s County official and her police officer driver to investigate a news tip last month about the possible inappropriate use of a county car when they were suddenly surrounded by county and Cheverly police and ordered out of their vehicle at gunpoint,” Ruben Castaneda reported today in the Washington Post, discussing actions in the suburban Maryland county.
“Andrea McCarren said in an interview yesterday that she was manhandled by a county police officer who she said yanked her right arm out of its socket during the April 15 incident. McCarren said that happened after she followed police commands to get out of her Toyota Highlander sport-utility vehicle with her hands up and slowly walk backward toward the officer.
“McCarren filed a complaint Wednesday with the internal affairs unit of the police department, alleging excessive force.”
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Black Woman Named President of MTV
MTV, which began life in 1981 ignoring black artists, this week named Christina Norman, honored as an Ebony Magazine Outstanding Woman in Marketing & Communications, as its new president.
“Norman was previously President of VH1 where she is credited with leading the network out of a prolonged ratings slump into a continuing ratings rebound during the past two years. She has also revamped VH1?s on-air design and overall creative direction,” Jim Cooper wrote Wednesday in MediaWeek.
“As President, Christina will be responsible for the day-to-day leadership, strategy and management of MTV,” a news release said. “Working with the MTV team, she will oversee and direct: business development, research, marketing and promotion, finance, communications and human resources and will partner with the respective General Managers on the overall strategic direction of MTV2, mtvU, MTV Espanol, MTV Hits and MTV Jams. In addition, Christina will help manage MTV’s new media efforts, with the digital media group, including MTV.com and MTV Overdrive, the new hybrid service available via broadband. Finally, she will guide MTV’s strategy around new business initiatives and consumer products under the MTV brand.”
MTV’s addition of Michael Jackson‘s “Billie Jean” to its rotation in 1982 was considered a racial breakthrough.
An April 8, 1983, article in People magazine quoted the late funk star Rick James threatening to sue the network over its “blatant racism.”
“‘A lot of black asses are going to come together and explode on MTV,’ James fumes,” the article said. “‘There are no blacks on MTV’s program list except for Tina Turner, and she stopped being black about 10 years ago. MTV puts on little white punk groups who don’t even have record deals. Blacks are missing exposure and sales.’ On MTV’s current roster of some 800 acts, 16 are black (Turner and Michael Jackson are the biggest names). ‘We play rock and roll,’ says an MTV spokesperson. ‘We don’t play Rick James because he’s funk.'”
Norman first joined MTV in 1991 as a production manager.
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Philly Papers Said to Cut Delivery Routes to Poor
“Knight Ridder seems to be dealing from a deck stacked against the city’s scrappy tabloid,” the Philadelphia Daily News, Steve Volk wrote this week in the Philadelphia Weekly.
Volk quotes John Laigaie, president of Teamsters Local 628, saying that the Daily News and Inquirer, both owned by Knight Ridder’s Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., have cut at least 25 delivery routes between them over the last three years. “Abandoned stops are added to routes manned by the remaining drivers, but it doesn’t always work out,” Volk writes.
“The routes the DN gave up are predominantly in poorer neighborhoods, says Laigaie. But that’s also part of the paper’s strategy. ‘Advertisers don’t want you to sell a paper to someone who doesn’t have money to buy stuff in their store,’ he says. ‘This is all about advertising now.'”
“. . . Last week PNI publisher Joe Natoli told the Inquirer the drop in circulation was partially explained by ‘a conscious decision’ to cut back on mass sales ‘because advertisers told us those are not important to them.’
“In an email exchange with PW [Philadelphia Weekly], Natoli says there’s ‘no support’ for a claim that PNI is redlining. ‘Most of the specific outlets that were eliminated were selling a minimal amount of newspapers,’ he writes. ‘With respect to my comments regarding circulation numbers, the ?conscious decision’ I was referring to had nothing to do with single-copy sales.’
“Natoli was referring to ‘third-party programs,’ in which a third party pays for newspapers to be given away in public places.
“‘Advertisers have told us to focus on home-delivered copies first, followed by single-copy,’ writes Natoli,” the story continued.
“Of course any policy that reduces the presence of PNI papers in the city’s neighborhoods lays a particularly big burden on the DN, which does little in the way of home delivery, and fills its pages with neighborhood stories.”
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Producers, Ethnic News Service Share $3.75 Million
The National Minority Consortia, which includes five independent organizations that develop the work of independent producers of color for broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service, and New California Media, which plans to launch an Associated Press-style national ethnic news syndication service, were included in a Ford Foundation announcement this week of $50 million in grants for “public service media.”
NMC is to receive $1.75 million “to augment the consortia’s efforts to provide additional skilled producers whose work would reflect greater diversity of subject matter and perspectives. In a significant shift, the NMC also plans to help producers to distribute shows to outlets beyond PBS TV as a way to cultivate new revenue sources,” the announcement said.
The five organizations in the consortia are Latino Public Broadcasting, National Asian Telecommunications Association, National Black Programming Consortium, Native American Public Telecommunications, and Pacific Islanders in Communications.
Journal-isms last year noted favorably the consortia group’s six-part series “Colorvision,” 23 short independent films by emerging Native American, African American, Asian American, Pacific Islander and Latino filmmakers.
Sandy Close, executive director of New California Media, which is to receive $2 million, told Journal-isms today that the idea behind her news service is to cross-fertilize the ethnic and mainstream media. “We’re a lot of competing vertical silos. What we need is horizontal,” she said: The Sacramento Observer, an African American paper, running a story from La Opinion, a Spanish-language one, she said by way of example.
“It’s fascinating. If you wanted to see a positive take on how Americans dealt with Terri Schiavo,” the brain-damaged Florida woman who died in March after her feeding tube was removed, “you had to read two Chinese-language publications. The editorials were breathtaking, about how America could stop everything for a single individual. They had insights about us that we need to understand.”
New California Media was founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service. It is “a collaboration of more than 600 outlets that produce news and perspectives about immigrant, ethnic and youth communities via print publications, television, radio and the Internet.”
Close, a past winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” who was honored last year by the National Association of Minority Media Executives, said the Ford money would go toward hiring two journalists who will help market and coordinate the news service. For her, the significance of the grant was also that New California Media was put “on an equal standing with National Public Radio and PBS.”
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Student Journalists in Middle of Capital Scare
“I went to Capitol Hill Wednesday for an osteoporosis luncheon, but by the time I left, I had more than bones on the brain. Things were hectic on the Hill, and I was in the middle of it all,” began a story by Ieesha L. McKinzie for the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire.
McKinzie is a Hampton University senior who, with five of her classmates, is participating in the Scripps Howard Foundation’s Semester in Washington Short Course program until June 2.
To help boost the number of African Americans in the journalism pipeline, Scripps Howard has made a $10 million commitment to Hampton’s journalism program.
“‘Go south,’ the police officers yelled, frantically directing traffic and pedestrians,” McKinzie’s story continued.
“People came pouring out of the Cannon House Office Building next to where I was standing. I followed suit and fled. People looked around in confusion, but few stopped to see what was happening. A pink pump, deserted, lay on its side. People ran down the hill toward M Street SE, nearly a mile away, crossing a bridge near Garfield Park.
“It was my third day in Washington as a reporting intern, and I was torn. Should I run, or should I stay and report?
“I was scared, an amateur, and thought I should leave the reporting to the pros. But then, duty called, and I began to work my way back up the Hill, getting quotes as I went.”
McKinzie filed a story, aided by fellow Hampton journalism students Kara N. Edgerson and Tiffany Rae Leonard.
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PBS’ Gwen Ifill Portrayed as Tool of Right Wing
The Black Commentator Web site isn’t known for limp criticism, and on Thursday its columnist Margaret Kimberley, “a freelance writer living in New York City,” unloaded on public television’s Gwen Ifill.
“Gwen Ifill is a journalist? That is news to any thinking person who watches her closely. It is true that she is a News Hour anchor on PBS, and the moderator of Washington Week in Review and of a Vice Presidential debate. Her journalistic credentials shouldn?t be called into question, but her own words betray her claim,” Kimberley wrote.
Kimberley accused Ifill of sucking up to the right wing. “Truth is the first casualty of war because of people like her, who put accommodation to the powerful ahead of honesty and integrity,” she wrote.
Journal-isms asked Ifill to respond.
“What to say [to] that??” Ifill wrote.
“Maybe only that I may have missed the author’s own journalistic credentials.
“In the 25 years I’ve been asking questions for a living, I have learned at least to ask the subject of the article for comment. But, nah, why do that if it would get in the way of a good screed? Selective arguments are so much more compelling.”
Ifill’s friend and colleague, Michel D. Martin of ABC News, was more blunt in a letter sent today to the Black Commentator’s editors.
“If Kimberley is so annoyed that committed, overt progressives don’t have voices with the prominence and standing of say a George Will or Fareed Zakaria—then get on the case of the network executives who make those decisions, not an honest reporter who upholds the standards of the craft and makes a significant contribution while doing so,” Martin wrote.
“The days of black people having to be all things to everybody is over—or should be.
“. . . And if black commentator.com can’t distinguish between worthwhile commentary and lame player hating, maybe it doesn’t deserve the time and attention of the community it claims to serve.”
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Defamation Suit, Warning over Terrorist Label
“The chairman of the board of trustees of the Islamic Society of Boston filed a defamation suit yesterday against the Boston Herald and WFXT-TV (Channel 25), marking the second time in three months an official of that group said he had been unfairly harmed by news reports linking him to terrorism,” Mark Jurkowitz wrote Thursday in the Boston Globe.
“In the suit filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Osama Kandil, a biomedical researcher and a US citizen residing in Egypt, alleges that a series of Herald stories that began in October 2003 and a Channel 25 broadcast in November 2004 destroyed his reputation ‘by sensationalizing a story that Dr. Kandil . . . was linked to radical Islamic terrorists and that both he and the ISB [Islamic Society of Boston] presented a danger to the community.'”
Meanwhile, the Asian American Journalists Association noted, “A nationwide terrorism alert was issued in mid-January by federal authorities to help round up a group of Chinese nationals. The alert was based on an anonymous tip about several Chinese and Iraqis planning to detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in Boston, even though the FBI itself at the time expressed skepticism about the credibility of the tip, saying the names of the suspects had been run through all available databases of criminals and terrorist watch lists’ and nothing had come up.
“Yet many media outlets pasted the photographs of the four Chinese nationals at the top news broadcasts or stripped across the front page, under the banner headlines of ‘terrorists’ or ‘dirty bombers’ sought,” the AAJA statement continued.
“In the days that ensued, many of them had to backpedal and retract the legitimacy, veracity of the story.
“The lack of healthy skepticism by the news media in the absence of concrete evidence only feeds the myth that people of Asian heritage in this country are perpetual foreigners whose motives are easily suspect,” AAJA Media Watch Co-Chairs Aki Soga and Abe Kwok said.
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Short takes
- “The Rev. Jesse Jackson renewed his call for radio stations to ‘draw the line on dignity’ during a visit yesterday to WBLS (107.5 FM),” David Hinckley reported Wednesday in the New York Daily News. Jackson accused some radio stations, not by name, of “making a profit from degrading us.” He cited popular songs that refer to women as “ho’s” or “bitches,” as well as songs that use the N-word.
“‘I’m distressed when I go to a club and see people dancing to songs that use these words,’ he said. ‘We should never dance to degradation. It’s diminishing the worth of our life,'” Hinckley reported.
- “Columbus NBC O&O WCMH-4 reporter Elenora Andrews will be joining Atlanta’s WSB-2-ABC in June as a general assignment reporter,” the NewsBlues Web site reported Thursday.
- KNBC-TV news anchor Michele Ruiz announced Thursday that she will leave her position at the Los Angeles station, TV Week and Broadcasting & Cable reported today. “As I look ahead, I need to make a change to accomplish my goals,” Ruiz said in a statement, according to TV Week. “She has been off the air for three weeks recovering from surgery and decided not to return, according to the statement.” Paula Madison, KNBC-TV president and general manager said Ruiz was leaving “to pursue opportunities KNBC cannot offer her.”
- Atlanta WXIA-11-NBC Assignment Editor Art Franklin resigned to take the weekend anchor job across the street at WAGA-5-Fox, the News Blues site reported Wednesday.
- Valerie Jackson-Warner will become the new 5 a.m. weekday anchor and traffic reporter at Chicago’s WGN-TV, Marc Watts of Signature Management Group told Journal-isms. Jackson-Warner is an anchor at WEYI-TV in Flint, Mich., and starts in Chicago July 6.
- “Lawyers for five journalists found in contempt for refusing to name confidential sources told a federal appeals court Monday that a former nuclear weapons scientist who is suing the government should have tried harder to get the information from other sources before taking the journalists to court,” the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday. Among the five are Pierre Thomas, a former CNN correspondent now with ABC News.
- “A team of Detroit Free Press reporters is continuing to investigate past stories by sports columnist Mitch Albom, who is back at work after [having his column] suspended for writing about a basketball game before it happened,” Howard Kurtz reported Monday in the Washington Post.
“A Free Press reporter called USA Today correspondent Patrick O’Driscoll to confirm that O’Driscoll had personally interviewed attorney Larry Pozner for a March 3 report on the civil settlement between Kobe Bryant and the woman who accused him of rape. An Albom column used the same wording as O’Driscoll’s story, Kurtz said.
- Mister Mann Frisby was the subject of a profile by Annette John-Hall May 5 in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Adversity seems to kick him into overdrive. Frisby escaped the drugs and doom of Philadelphia’s projects to graduate from Penn State, become a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, write two novels, and make Ebony magazine’s future leaders 30 and under list—all by age 30,” John-Hall wrote.
- “In 1998, Mirta Ojito returned to Cuba for the first time since she and her family fled their native island 18 years earlier in the Mariel boatlift that brought 125,000 of her countrymen to U.S. shores during a five-month period,” Chip Scanlan wrote May 4 on the Poynter Institute Web site. “She traveled there to report a series of stories for her newspaper, The New York Times, including a poignant first-person account of visiting her childhood home. . . . In a new book, Ojito returns home once again. ‘Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus’ combines years of painstaking research and reporting and a painfully honest personal account to investigate the individual and institutional causes behind this historic event and its impact.”
- On AOL Black Voices, media writer Amy Alexander noted the irony of Ed Gordon and Tavis Smiley prospering on public radio and television while their former employer, Black Entertainment Television, eliminates most regular news programming. “Perhaps the biggest lesson to take away from this is that the ongoing corporate consolidation of media in America is indeed making for strange bedfellows—and that black Americans should take care not to get short-sheeted,” Alexander wrote. Michael K. Fauntroy, an assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University, added to the discussion in a syndicated column headlined, “BET Nightly News cancelled—no big loss.”
- “Spanish-language and Hispanic-oriented newspapers enjoyed significant growth at a time [when] the circulation of mainstream daily newspapers declined 1.9%, the National Association of Hispanic Publishers says,” Mark Fitzgerald reported May 6 in Editor & Publisher. “But a look at the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ Fas-Fax numbers released this week shows that Spanish-language dailies—once the fastest growing segment in the industry—are now seeing circulation reverses.”
- Brenda Blackmon, co-anchor at WWOR/UPN 9 in the New York market, was profiled on EURWeb.com on May 3 in “Anchored to the News and Loving It” by Deardra Shuler.
- Former president Bill Clinton told Jamal E. Watson of the New York Amsterdam News on Wednesday that one reason he is popular with blacks is that, “I come out of a culture that?s very similar to that shared by a lot of African Americans.” He said he was intuitively connected to African Americans and they to him because ?you like people that you think get you.?
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