Governor’s Signature Takes Indian Ban Off Books
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney signed a bill this afternoon repealing a 330-year-old law banning Native Americans from entering Boston, removing an obstacle cited by Unity: Journalists of Color in considering Boston as a site for the 2008 Unity convention.
“It is our hope that signing this bill into law will provide some closure to a very painful and old chapter in Massachusetts history,” said Romney, according to a news release. “This archaic law belongs in the history books, not the law books.”
He signed the bill in his office without ceremony, but there might be one later, spokeswoman Laura Nicoll said.
“It’s time to make things right. I thank Governor Romney, Senate President [Robert E.] Travaglini, Speaker [Salvatore F.] Di Masi, Senator Dianne Wilkerson, Chairman Antonio Cabral, Representative Byron Rushing and the City Council for their efforts in removing this blemish from our city’s records. This sends the message that hatred and discrimination have no place in Boston,” said Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino.
“Tolerance, equality and respect – these are the attributes of our city. These are the qualities that give Boston its vitality, that make diversity our strength.”
The state Legislature passed the bill Thursday, as Chris Reidy and Janette Neuwahl reported in the Boston Globe.
“The Muhheconnew National Confederacy, a group of Northeastern tribes, has advocated for the law’s repeal since 1996, said Gary McCann, the group’s policy adviser,” the Globe story continued.
“Helped by such Boston city councilors as Felix D. Arroyo of Hyde Park and Chuck Turner of Roxbury, the group stepped up repeal efforts last year before the Democratic National Convention in Boston. But the possibility that Unity: Journalists of Color Inc. might take its convention business elsewhere helped prod the Legislature into action, McCann said.
“Mayor Thomas M. Menino also recently ramped up repeal efforts.
“According to the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which has made booking minority meetings a priority, Unity conventioneers could spend an estimated $4.5 million in and around the city if they held their 2008 convention here. About 9,000 people would be expected to attend.”
”When we talk to planners for minority conventions, we deal with perceptions that exist about Boston’s past,” said James Rooney, the authority’s executive director, in the story. ”And when news about this law pops up, it could reinforce old beliefs. It’s important we take it off the books.”
Getting Unity to select Boston for a convention would be a coup, Larry Meehan, director of tourism for the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, said in the story, “because as journalists, these visitors can spread the word that old perceptions about Boston are outdated.
“Unity officials are scheduled to decide next month which of three cities will be the site of its 2008 convention, said Anna M. Lopez, Unity’s executive director. The other two finalists are Chicago and Washington, D.C.
“Referring to the law’s proposed repeal, Lopez said of Boston, ‘It’s a stronger contender than it was before,'” the story continued.
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Paper Reports on Afghan Deaths in U.S. Custody
If Newsweek caused an uproar with its retracted report that sources told the magazine that American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Koran down a toilet, and photographs of Saddam Hussein in his underwear are raising eyebrows today, what might the reaction be to today’s New York Times report, “In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates’ Deaths”?
In the first of a two-part series that began today, Tim Golden wrote that the newspaper obtained a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army’s criminal investigation into the case of Dilawar, “an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who died while in custody of American troops,” and a second detainee known as Habibullah.
“Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.
“In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.
“In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning,” the story said.
“Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002, including some details of the two men’s deaths, have been previously reported, American officials have characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated. And many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well treated.”
Another View of News Bias, as Selling Point (Virginia Postrel, New York Times)
The Buck Doesn’t Stop With Newsweek (Margaret Carlson, Los Angeles Times)
Abuse Week: Behind Bush’s latest assault on the press. (Jacob Weisberg, Slate)
Bashing Newsweek (David Brooks, New York Times)
Koran blunder transcends media vs. White House (Editorial, USA Today)
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Malcolm X’s 80th Birthday Front Page in Raleigh
The 80th anniversary of the birth of Malcolm X was noted in black and progressive circles Thursday, but in North Carolina’s Raleigh News & Observer, it was also front-page news.
“The reason I like the News & Observer is often the most interesting story gets on the front page,” James E. Shiffer, Durham editor for the paper, told Journal-isms today. “It’s a value of newspapers to take a long view of things.”
Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones came up with the idea to take a look at how the black nationalist, who was assassinated in 1965, was viewed in the South, particularly in Durham, where there is “a more visible black power . . . than in a lot of southern cities,” Shiffer said. Hannah-Jones interviewed residents whose lives Malcolm influenced.
It was in Durham on April 18, 1963, that Malcolm debated Floyd McKissick, head of the Congress of Racial Equality and an integrationist like Martin Luther King Jr.
McKissick’s son, Floyd McKissick Jr., said of Malcolm in the piece, “You have to remember, [Malcolm] was not viewed perhaps the way he is today. He was not considered one of the heavy hitters. He was more considered part of the fringe.”
“Others say that the message of Malcolm X, who would have been 80 today, was far more relevant to their lives than that of King, whose birthday has become a federal holiday. Malcolm X’s legacy resonates in popular culture through hip-hop lyrics, a 1992 Academy Award-nominated movie and an autobiography that has sold millions of copies,” Hannah-Jones wrote.
“In North Carolina and across the South, the day will pass with little notice. But not among those whose lives were touched by the brilliant orator who told them to take their freedom, not ask for it, and to be proud of their dark skin.”
Exhibition in Harlem Offers New Look at Malcolm X (Christine Hauser, New York Times)
Malcolm X tribute draws hundreds (Lansing State Journal, Mich.)
Malcolm X’s words leave lasting impact (James Ragland, Dallas Morning News)
Story of Malcolm X shows how a wasted life can be redeemed (Cary Clack, San Antonio Express-News)
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F-Word Costs Arthur Chi’en His Job at WCBS
“TV reporter Arthur Chi’en was canned by WCBS/Ch. 2 yesterday after he shouted the F-word at two meddlers who horned in on his live shot,” Tracy Connor reported today in the New York Daily News.
“Chi’en was in the middle of a 6 a.m. broadcast about MetroCard scammers when two men sneaked up behind him with a sign promoting radio shock jocks Opie & Anthony.
“For a few moments, as the knuckleheads heckled him and gave the finger to the camera, Chi’en kept his cool and continued talking.
“But as soon as he finished his report, he spun around and shouted at the intruders: ‘What the f— is your problem, man?'”
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Isabel Wilkerson Resurfacing in N.Y. Times
Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has been on leave from the paper since the mid-1990s working on a book, is about to resurface in the paper, she told Journal-isms Thursday.
“I took a break from the final draft of the book” in order to report and write a piece for the Times, she said.
Wilkerson, who had been Chicago bureau chief, has been working from Atlanta on the saga of several generations of families during the Great Migration of African Americans to the North. Her book spans 90 years and is being published by Random House.
She is the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first African American to win a Pulitzer for individual reporting. Wilkerson won her Pulitzer in 1994 in the features category “for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago’s South Side and for two stories reporting on the Midwestern flood of 1993,” according to the Pulitzer board.
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Vicente Fox Comments Expose “Disturbing Reality”
The outrage spawned by Mexican President Vicente Fox‘s statement that Mexican migrants do work that “not even blacks want to do” has led to a commitment by Fox to appear on the Rev. Jesse Jackson‘s radio show and more detailed reporting on what writers are describing as Mexico’s denial of its racial problems.
Fox is to be Jackson’s guest on “Keep Hope Alive” Sunday on Clear Channel Radio’s gospel WGRB-AM (1390), Robert Feder reported in the Chicago Sun-Times.
Jackson’s talk show also airs in 27 other markets and online at: KeepHopeAliveRadio.com
“President Vicente Fox’s controversial comment about blacks in the U.S. is typical of a Mexico that fails to recognize its own racist attitudes, even as skin tone and economic success move in near lockstep, analysts said Tuesday,” reported Laurence Iliff and Lennox Samuels Wednesday in the Dallas Morning News.
In the New York Times on Thursday, Mexico bureau chief Ginger Thompson wrote that “here in Mexico . . . some commentators said that President Fox inadvertently exposed the disturbing reality beneath the facade and forced Mexico to take a more honest look in the mirror.
“Audiences here still get a laugh from performers in black face, or newspaper cartoons that show Africans drawn more like apes.
“Mexico’s 10 million Indians are not only last in almost every social indicator, including levels of literacy, infant mortality, employment and access to basic services. They still appear on television mostly as maids and gardeners.”
Africa’s Legacy in Mexico (Luz Maria Martinez Montiel, Smithsonian)
Afro-Mexicans face discrimination (José Carreño, El Universal)
Fox ‘regrets’ remark about blacks (CNN)
Teaching Race in Venezuela (Abigail Elwood, Venezuelanalysis.com)
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“Mistake” Leaves Student Journalists Shunned
Some 30 student journalists representing 17 historically black colleges and universities are in New Orleans for a training program known as the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, and one thing the students are learning is how they can be victimized by bureaucracy just like everyone else.
“In working on their assignments, some of our students have run into ridiculous barriers in the New Orleans mayor’s press office,” Keith T. Reed, a business writer at the Boston Globe who is teaching at the institute, told Journal-isms Thursday.
“Several of them haven’t been able to get their calls returned, so we sent two down to a press conference to ask the mayor questions in person. At the press conference, they were told by his flack that they couldn’t talk to him because the mayor has a system in which they decide who he talks to and who he doesn’t — based, I’m guessing, on what outlet you work for.
“While, of course, it’s not unheard of that flacks for public officials have to prioritize in their work, I think you’d agree that it’s ridiculous that a spokeswoman for any big city mayor would admit freely to a reporter that they have a policy of limiting access to information and officials based on some undisclosed criteria. . . . the students are really frustrated by the roadblocks that are being thrown up.”
Sally Forman, director of communications for Mayor Ray Nagin, told Journal-isms tonight that her office had made a mistake. “We put them in a priority that was too low,” she acknowledged, speaking of the students. At a busy time for the mayor, “We sent the message that they were not important, and that was a mistake on our part.”
Next week, she said, the students are invited to cover the mayor as he goes to the state capital, Baton Rouge, to lobby. “They will absolutely have access to the mayor. They’ll get to see Louisiana politics in action.”
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Diana Griego Erwin: “Trust Had Been Broken”
Diana Griego Erwin, the Pulitzer-winning Sacramento Bee columnist who resigned last week amid an investigation into whether she fabricated some of the people she mentioned in several columns, said she resigned because of personal crises, including a divorce, that left her emotionally unequipped to deal with an inquiry that she says quickly turned ugly, Jeffrey M. Barker wrote this week in the Sacramento News & Review.
“Griego Erwin sat down with SN&R for an exclusive interview, during which she insisted she’d done nothing wrong, explained her column-writing philosophy and talked about what she’ll do now that her journalism career appears over.
“‘Trust had been broken both ways,’ she says. ‘I didn’t feel trusted anymore, and I didn’t trust their process.'”
“. . . If Griego Erwin’s version of events is accurate,” Barker continued, “no Bee editors ever raised a red flag to question her continual use of unnamed and pseudonymed sources or her almost-uncanny ability to find a local person who perfectly illustrated her column’s theme or topic.
“‘It was never a big deal,’ she says of writing about unnamed people.
“And she has done it as far back as 1994, when she was first hired by the Bee.”
On Sunday, Bee public editor Armando Acuña wrote, “My response to her: Show us the goods.
“Think about the newspaper and your colleagues. Why have their hard-earned credibility besmirched — directly or indirectly — if you have the power to stop it, if you have the answers to the questions?”
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Short takes
- Roy Track, “who for 28 years gabbed with tribal leaders, powwow dancers and anyone else who’d show up at 6 a.m. on a Sunday for his Phoenix-based television show 21st Century Native American, has died. Services were April 28-29 in Phoenix,” Unity’s Web site reports.
- David Cho of the Washington Post and Ismaila Dieng of Le Journal De LEconomie from Senegal are among 10 Knight-Bagehot Fellows in economics and business journalism named by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
- “Today we stopped live, unmoderated comments on the stories on our website,” California’s Ventura County Star announced Wednesday, after a surge in abusive racial comments.
- Fifty-four college students of color and recent graduates have been selected as Summer 2005 Chips Quinn Scholars by the Freedom Forum, the foundation said Wednesday. Scholars come from 44 college campuses. The summer class brings to 953 the number of Scholars named to the internship program since the diversity initiative began in 1991.
- “ESPN announced during its upfront presentation Wednesday night it would extend its growing ESPN Deportes cable brand with the launch of the nation’s first around-the-clock Spanish-language Sports radio network,” Katy Bachman reported Thursday in Media Week.
- “It’s past time for black professional groups — such as those representing doctors, social workers, lawyers and journalists — to demand or create more effective drug-treatment, prison-rehabilitation and job-placement programs,” Vanessa Gallman, editorial page editor of Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader, wrote in an April 17 piece on the black middle class and addiction problems, picked up this week by other papers.
- In 1985, “When the bosses of WBBM-Channel 2 demoted Harry Porterfield, their only African-American weekday news anchor, that was all the Rev. Jesse Jackson needed to dramatize the unfair treatment of minorities by local television,” Robert Feder wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, reviewing highlights of his 25 years on the TV/radio beat. “For 10 months, Jackson led a boycott by Operation PUSH before the CBS-owned station caved in to his list of demands.
“Channel 2 has never fully recovered from the ratings and revenue catastrophe. Jackson subsequently used his clout to land contracts for Lester Holt, Warner Saunders and Felicia Middlebrooks, among others.”
- “At a high-energy presentation at Lincoln Center, part of what the advertising industry calls upfront week, executives of the flagship Univision network of Univision Communications said they would introduce a late-night talk show, to be called ‘¡Ay, Qué Noche!,’ or ‘Oh, What a Night!,’ and a Sunday morning discussion program from Washington, to be called “Punto de Encuentro con Jorge Ramos,” or “Meeting Point with Jorge Ramos,” Stuart Elliott wrote in the New York Times. “Mr. Ramos is a longtime Univision news anchor.”
- Former CNN reporter Miguel Marquez was to start this week as a reporter for ABC News.
- RadioScope, a syndicated broadcast of “urban” entertainment news created by Lee Bailey, plans to celebrate its 22nd year on the air the last weekend of June.
- “Ann Curry, the ‘Today’ show’s news reader, is getting a second job: She will be named a co-anchor of ‘Dateline NBC,’ TelevisionWeek has learned,” Michele Greppi reported Monday.
- A Miami Herald series that exposed widespread problems in Florida’s clemency system was named a winner this week in the Unity Awards in Media, a national journalism competition that honors stories affecting minorities and disabled people, the Herald said on Tuesday. “The Long Road to Clemency,” written by Debbie Cenziper and Jason Grotto and edited by Jacquee Petchel and Manny Garcia, won in the public affairs reporting category.
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