Kentucky Columnist Ruffles Jackson Newsroom
When Merlene Davis‘ son told her he wanted to go to Jackson State University, a historically black institution, she replied, “Excuse me? Jackson State? Isn’t that in Mississippi?”
“There are only a few things I know about Mississippi, and none of them are good, especially in association with black people,” Davis, 54, related Tuesday in her column in Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader.
“I know. I know. The world has changed. The Mississippi where Emmett Till died and where Medgar Evers was slain isn’t the Mississippi my son now thinks is cool,” she wrote.
“As it stands right now, my son’s chances of going to JSU are slim.
“If I am misguided, let me know.
“If Mississippi has changed, tell me.
“I’m willing to change, and I’m willing to ask others to follow suit.
“But only if you can convince me the Mississippi of my youth has changed dramatically, has transformed itself enough to warrant my sending my son down there.
“Let me know at the phone number and e-mail below [(859) 231-3218 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3218, or mdavis1@herald-leader.com].
“Otherwise, we’ll take our own tour there this summer and have him whistle at a white woman to see what happens.”
Then the storm began. Davis said yesterday she had received more than 40 phone calls and 130 e-mails, many from Jackson State alumni and from Mississippi natives in her circulation area. The president of the university called and offered to guide her around the campus.
But more reaction came from the newsroom of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, which is gearing up to cover the start of the murder trial of reputed Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, accused of orchestrating the infamous 1964 killings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who had come to Mississippi to help black residents register to vote. The trial begins Monday.
Some Jackson journalists have e-mailed Davis with their outrage or with offers to educate her. The editor of the Clarion-Ledger, Ronnie Agnew, has written a column about the Davis piece for Sunday. Davis herself plans a follow-up for Tuesday.
“Mississippi is a little bit on edge right now,” Agnew, 42, an African American who grew up in Tupelo, Miss., told Journal-isms. “Mississippi is always on trial as far as race is concerned. I wouldn’t have my wife and three little kids in Mississippi if I felt their lives were in danger.”
Don Hudson, a native of Louisiana who is African American and is managing editor of the Jackson paper, also noted the timing. He said 200 out-of-town journalists were expected in Jackson for the trial and that in that connection, he had already received an e-mail from the grand wizard of the Klan in Georgia.
Underlying the back-and-forth is a debate about the role of columnists and of journalists in general.
“The average Mississippian who has written has been bordering on the rational,” Davis told Journal-isms, and Jackson State alumni have been eloquent. But “it blew my mind” that such fervent reaction “would come from journalists who would act like the Chamber of Commerce,” Davis said. “One told me that my column alone has set Mississippi back 50 years.”
But Jackson features editor Jamesetta Walker, a 35-year-old native Mississippian who found Davis’ column “incendiary,” said, “I just wondered how this could have gotten in the paper, because journalists are committed to the truth, not fanning stereotypes. The paper as well as the state have worked very hard to bring about change, and that balance is lacking.” Among the characteristics of today’s Mississippi, she said, is a black middle class in Jackson “that rivals that of Atlanta.”
Agnew agreed that columnists are entitled to their opinions, but contended that “even in a column,” a writer “has to have some standard of fairness and balance.” Davis was writing “based on assumptions.”
Davis, a 1982 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists, said she still plans to visit the campus with her son. However, the columnist said she turned down the offer to be escorted. She said she’s going incognito.
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Public Radio Cuts Could Hit Black, Native Outlets
Rural, African American and Native American public radio stations would be hurt most under proposed budget cuts approved Thursday by a House Appropriations subcommittee, a spokeswoman for National Public Radio told Journal-isms today.
The subcommittee “approved a spending bill that would cut the budget for public television and radio nearly in half and eliminate a $23 million federal program that has provided some money for producing children’s shows that include ‘Sesame Street,’ ‘Clifford the Big Red Dog,’ ‘Between the Lions’ and ‘Dragon Tales,'” as Stephen Labaton reported today in the New York Times.
“By a voice vote, the House Appropriations subcommittee adopted a measure that would reduce the financing of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that directs taxpayer dollars to public television and radio, to $300 million from $400 million.”
“The hardest hit will be the weakest,” said Andi Sporkin, NPR’s vice president for communications. And those are the 131 public radio stations at historically black colleges and universities, in rural areas and on Indian reservations, which generally do not hold pledge drives as do stations in many large cities. These stations are dependent on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s community service grants to pay for operation and programming costs, she said.
“This could literally put us out of business,” said Paul Stankavich, president and general manager of the Alaska Public Radio Network, an alliance of 26 stations in the state that create and share news programming, according to Paul Farhi, writing in the Washington Post. “Almost all of us are down to the bone right now. If we lost 5 or 10 percent of our budgets in one fell swoop, we could end up being just a repeater service” for national news, with no funds to produce local content.
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Editor Tells Staff Why Helms’ Legacy Matters
Rob Christensen of the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., offered readers a preview Thursday of former Sen. Jesse Helms‘ 303-page memoir, “Here’s Where I Stand,” scheduled to be published in September.
Though the book contains “Helms’ first extended comments on the national scene” since the North Carolina Republican retired to Raleigh in January 2003, many who are outside North Carolina might be forgiven if they met the paper’s news with a shrug.
But in a day-after memo to the N&O staff, Metro Editor Linda Williams offered a reminder of why Helms still matters to African Americans in the state:
“Growing up in Fayetteville during the 1960s, I never missed the Channel 5 evening news,” Williams wrote. “That is, after my father reinstated TV to our household when he discovered ‘Friday Night Boxing’ (pre-ESPN) . There had been a brief flirtation with the boob tube in our house in the late ’50s because of the ‘Nat King Cole‘ show. But the show, and its Negro star, was only shown sporadically on the only NBC affiliate we could get. When some tubes went bad in our black and white, dad saw no reason to get it fixed or to spend his money on a new one.
“The pugilists, many of them dazzling black men, got us back into TV land.
“Jesse on the Channel 5 news was also for us appointment TV. Jesse was an important representative of the other side and it was important to know what the enemy was saying about us. So we listened, day in and day out. I remember clearly nearly everything he said. I remember the tiny eyes behind the big glasses; the mouth in a perpetual scowl. Jesse became the single most influential individual in my decision to become a journalist. Our side needed a piece of that kind of power.”
After evaluating the N&O piece, Williams concluded: “Helms is in the twilight of his life and the media will be chewing over his legacy. The degree to which we can accurately detail his history will make the difference in whether his enduring legacy is that of the man who courageously stood by his beliefs in the face of a culture of ‘political correctness,’ or a man who was a co-conspirator in an era of extreme violence against a group of people who were not willing to abide by the ‘timetable’ of Helms and his ilk.”
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2 in Texas to Co-Chair NAHJ’s Gay Caucus
Frank Trejo, a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, and Brandon Benavides, a news producer for KETK 56 News in Tyler, Texas, will co-chair the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus, NAHJ announced yesterday.
Mó®©£a Taher, the people of color media director for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) will chair the caucusÂ?s Media Monitoring Task Force, the association said.
“Trejo and Benavides will work to bring other GLBT members of NAHJ to the caucus, help create panels for local and national conventions and put together mixers at those events. The caucus will also serve as a resource for NAHJ members who write about issues relating to gay Latinos.
“As chair of the Media Monitoring Task Force, Taher will identify homophobic coverage of gay Latinos in the Spanish-language and English-language media in the U.S. and offer suggestions to the NAHJ Issues Committee on how to respond.” The caucus is also setting up an e-mail exchange.
The NAHJ board voted to create the caucus in February.
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Writer Who Went Public on Rape Illustrates TV Story
Lori Robinson, who as associate editor of the late Emerge magazine wrote in 1997 of her own rape, and then authored a book about being a rape survivor, was featured Thursday in a “CBS Evening News” story on the debate over the morning-after pill.
“The federal government is siding squarely with religious conservatives,” who call the emergency contraception tantamount to abortion, correspondent Bill Whitaker said in his piece. “Dr. Michael Weaver helped draft national guidelines for rape victims, which strongly recommended offering the morning-after pill.
“But when the Justice Department released the final version, all mention of emergency contraception had been removed. . . .
“Some 25,000 women become pregnant from rape each year. To this rape survivor, there is no debate.
“‘How dare someone tell me what’s best,’ says Robinson.
“But for many hospitals and physicians it’s a moral issue.
“‘I think that it’s not their decision to make,’ says Robinson.
“Right now, that depends where a rape occurs,” Whitaker said.
- Lori Robinson: A Rape Survivor Takes Back her Life (Hazel Trice Edney, NNPA News Service)
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1,400 in New York for Expo on Ethnic Media
“More than 1,400 editors, marketers, sales representatives and others turned out for a national expo of ethnic media, which organizers hail as the first of its kind,” S. Mitra Kalita wrote today in the Washington Post.
“Whether they work for organizations that have become staples in their communities or for struggling start-ups, officials from ethnic media outlets said that gaining advertising from major corporations often feels like an uphill, if not impossible, climb.
“The dozens of companies showcased here offered evidence of several trends. More outlets are targeting the children of immigrants, for example. Niche publications are further narrowing their target markets, with specialty magazines for Muslim women, Indians in Silicon Valley and Arab American business leaders.”
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Detroit TV Station Offers Local News in Spanish
“WUDT-TV 23 Univision/Detroit is the metro area’s first station to offer daily local news broadcasts in Spanish,” Alejandro Bodipo-Memba reported Thursday in the Detroit Free Press.
“To get the news to metro Detroit residents, WUDT employs a unique approach.
“Because the station doesn’t have its own broadcasting and production capabilities, all Detroit-area news, sports and traffic reports are shot, recorded and edited in its headquarters in Troy daily. After that, the segments are shipped electronically to Equity Broadcasting’s central production studios in Davenport, Iowa, where Univision news anchors read the Detroit feeds.
“Each broadcast leads with local news followed by national news briefs, Detroit weather, traffic and sports. The same arrangement is made for all of Equity Broadcasting’s Spanish-language affiliates.”
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Another Writer Focuses on Felt and COINTELPRO
“I’ve been called a black conservative, but that’s only 50 percent true,” Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane wrote Thursday on BlackAmericaWeb.com.
“I’m actually a political mulatto: half conservative and half libertarian.
“. . . So I reacted with much outrage when I learned that Deep Throat — the source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write about the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon -Â? was indeed W. Mark Felt, then the number-two man at the FBI.
Recalling the FBI’s targeting of the Black Panther Party, Kane continued, “Felt was in the FBI during that anti-Panther war, which was only part of the larger COINTELPRO operation. You can bet Felt either supervised, signed off on, knew of or participated in acts every bit as criminal as Nixon’s. The tactics were so vile and the trampling of civil liberties so great that Felt and his FBI cohorts still living could write a book called ‘How We Pimp-Slapped the Bill of Rights Back into the 4th Century, B.C.’
“While FBI agents were sending out letters to members of both the BPP and the US organization to foment hatred between the two groups, Felt was spewing nonsense like ‘most racial disturbances’ in black America were the work of ‘semi-professional hate-mongers and rabble rousers who . . . teach the ghetto’s receptive elements doctrines of hate.’
“Lordy, what a dimwit. Even the Kerner Commission report said that most of those ‘disturbances’ — i.e. riots — were caused when black ghetto residents clashed with police. Felt had his head crammed where the sun don’t shine on that one. But assuming only for the sake of argument that what he said was true, how did it justify the FBI inciting the Panther-US feud that left six members of the BPP shot to death?”
- Even Deepest Of Throats Can’t Keep Mum (Donna Britt, Washington Post)
- Frank Wills: The Real Hero of Watergate (George E. Curry, NNPA News Service)
- John Conyers and Deep Throat (Margaret Kimberley, blackcommentator.com)
- Denial, Now and 30 Years Ago (Eugene Robinson, Washington Post)
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Journalist Detained Covering OAS Meeting
“More than a dozen local law enforcement officers and Secret Service agents detained journalist Lyng-Hou Ramirez of Grupo de Diarios America for one hour Saturday at an Organization of American States meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., according to a complaint she filed with OAS. She was not told why she was detained, she said,” the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported yesterday.
“Ramirez is content director for the Miami-based Grupo de Diarios America, which compiles information from 11 newspapers in Latin America. Ramirez recounted the incident in an interview and in her complaint. She said she was exiting the Broward County Convention Center when deputies stopped her, saying she was not at an authorized exit. The deputies asked to see her credentials, and questioned her about pictures she had taken and about details of her driver’s license and press pass. They also inspected her purse and briefcase.
“The sheriff department’s chief of security and two Secret Service agents subsequently questioned her about her credentials and immigration status after she told the chief that she was from Venezuela. She said that agents were mocking her for not carrying a green card and knowing the date she obtained legal resident status. She told the officers that the OAS press office could confirm her credentials, but the agents declined.
“‘They said this was international territory because of the conference,’ she said. ‘They said “we make the rules, not them.”‘
“The agent finally told her she could leave, but kept her press credentials and told her she would have to obtain new press accreditation. Ramirez immediately reported the incident to the OAS press office.
“In response to her complaint, a spokesman for OAS said the organization’s director of communications, James Kiernan, is going to write a letter to local law enforcement agencies, raising concerns about Ramirez’ detention.”
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Short Takes
- The U.S. State Department held a digital video conference yesterday with Jamaican journalists, government officials and representatives of nonprofit organizations to call attention to its latest report on international slavery —”trafficking in persons” — which names Jamaica as one of 14 countries not doing enough to halt the practice. Similar briefings have been held regarding Pakistan, Ghana and Kazakhstan. “From our point of view, the more coverage the better,” Ambassador John R. Miller, senior adviser on trafficking in persons, said in a conference call Thursday with U.S. editorial writers. “Citizens become more aware and talk to the governments more” about the problem.
- “The Native American Journalists Association has received a $25,000 grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for capacity building, which will allow NAJA to better serve its more than 500 members,” NAJA announced Tuesday.
- “Since 2000, more than 20 journalists have been killed in connection with their work, making the Philippines the deadliest country in the world for the profession, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. . . . In response to the attacks, some reporters last month formed the Association of Responsible Media, or ARMED,” Ellen Nakashima reported last week in the Washington Post. “Guns and journalists are a pretty deadly mix,” Inday Espina-Varona, chairwoman of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, was quoted as saying.
- Saturday’s repeat episode of the Court TV crime series “Trace Evidence” features an interview with crime reporter Tina A. Brown of Connecticut’s Hartford Courant. Brown discussed the case of Matthew Johnson, who was convicted in February 2004 of the brutal murders of three prostitutes in Hartford. He was sentenced to three life terms. On July 11, Brown discusses the case of 14-year-old Aquan Salmon, who was fatally shot by a Hartford police officer in 1999. “Trace Evidence” looks at cases solved by noted forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee. In the Salmon case, Lee’s investigation helped clear the officer.
- The Washington Times ran this correction Wednesday: “The Washington Times yesterday inadvertently published a photograph of D.C. City Administrator Robert C. Bobb misidentified as the late soul singer Marvin Gaye.” The Web site DCRTV.com ran photos of the two men side by side under the headline, “Do All Bearded Black Men Look Alike?”
- The free-distribution El Semanario newspaper that circulates in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and other central New Mexico cities “has been the target of a vicious campaign of vandalism,” Mark Fitzgerald reported Thursday in Editor & Publisher. “Its newsracks have been jammed, and rack signage has been removed or defaced. Whole stacks of copies have been removed from racks and dumped in the trash, and sometimes replaced with other Spanish-language publications.”
- Disgraced former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, “after recently completing an online degree through Jones International University . . . said he is now looking to work in the human resources industry,” Matthew Perrone reported in the Times Community Newspapers of Northern Virginia, where Blair was raised. “I want to help protect employees who find themselves in situations like the one I was in,” Blair said.
- Sycophants of radio jocks Opie and Anthony are turning up in the background of live news shots, part of a disruption campaign launched by the XM Radio hosts that “has forced local news producers to end live shots early, and take other precautions to keep the knuckleheads off the air,” Richard Huff reported today in the New York Daily News. “A similar stunt, of course, got reporter Arthur Chi’en so fired up he dropped an F-bomb on-air and was immediately canned by WCBS/Ch. 2.”
- Diana Lewis, a WXYZ-TV Detroit news anchor since 1977, “has been off the air without explanation for nearly two weeks. Come to find out she’s on short-term disability, aiming for a return in early July,” Neal Rubin reported today in the Detroit News. Her daughter, Glenda Lewis, also a Channel 7 anchor, is getting married July 2, and when Diana Lewis isn’t helping prepare for that, she is serving as nursemaid to her own mother, Doris Spann, who is 86.
- “For much of his life, Michael Jackson has transcended race. But now, at a critical juncture in his life Â? facing imprisonment if convicted of child molestation charges Â? the race issue may prove to be his enemy. It has tainted public opinion about Jackson and continues to color the media coverage of his trial,” author and professor Mark Anthony Neal argued today in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times.
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