- Michael Jackson verdict: Instant analysis (Bruce Britt, BET.com)
- Michael Jackson verdict: Instant analysis (Trey Ellis, the Huffington Post)
- Michael Jackson verdict: Instant analysis (Jimi Izrael, AOL Black Voices)
Miss. Newsroom Leader Points to Kentucky Racism
Executive Editor Ronnie Agnew of Mississippi’s Jackson Clarion-Ledger struck back Sunday at a piece by Kentucky columnist Merlene Davis that questioned whether Mississippi had changed enough to allow her to send her son to college there. “Kentucky is many things, but I’ve never held it up as a model of racial harmony,” Agnew replied.
“As far as I know, We Are The World was not recorded there.”
As reported Friday, Davis wrote in the Lexington Herald-Leader that her son was interested in attending Jackson State University, a historically black institution. “There are only a few things I know about Mississippi, and none of them are good, especially in association with black people,” she said, asking readers to tell her whether the state had truly changed.
“Otherwise, we’ll take our own tour there this summer and have him whistle at a white woman to see what happens,” a reference to the infamous Emmett Till lynching in 1955.
Agnew, who like Davis is African American, told readers that, “I’ve spent a lifetime debunking ignorant diatribes like Davis’ to the point where they barely merit a shrug. This is different. She used the power of a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper to reveal her own naivete. She got personal.
“Her paper just reported on a huge flap involving Rex Chapman, once the boy wonder of the University of Kentucky basketball team. Chapman, who is white, told reporters he faced stern opposition from UK officials for his choice of dating black women when he played at the school and that the words n—– lover were scratched into the door of his car. For non- sports fans, Chapman played in the 1980s; not the 1950s.
“In 1997, when UK was preparing to hire Tubby Smith to lead its nationally renowned team, the same Davis who dissed Mississippi wrote a column advising Smith not to come, saying she didn’t think UK fans were ready for a black basketball coach and that she feared for his safety if he took the job.”
Agnew recounted how he visited Kentucky last October and was mistaken for the elevator operator. Davis, he wrote, “hardly has reason to boast of living in a place of racial enlightenment.”
Agnew and his managing editor, Don Hudson, noted last week that Davis’ piece coincided with heightened racial sensitivities, given today’s start of the murder trial of reputed Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, who is accused of orchestrating the infamous 1964 killings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Hundreds of reporters were expected in town for the trial.
Today, the Clarion-Ledger reported on its Web site that J.J. Harper of Cordele, Ga., imperial wizard of the American White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, greeted Killen as the trial got under way.
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Columnist Staples Hits Hip-Hop Media, Advertisers
“The segment of the hip-hop press that embraces violence and criminality is clearly growing, both in influence and affluence,” New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples wrote last week.
“This reflects the extent to which hip-hop itself has devolved from a richly blended tapestry that valued poetics and sophisticated political commentary into a field where only those who have been shot, committed crimes and spent time in jail are judged to hold the authentic street credentials that make them worthy of studio recordings.”
Exhibit A for Staples is the July issue of the magazine XXL, “The Jail Issue,” which “trumpets ‘exclusive interviews’ with ‘hip-hop’s incarcerated soldiers.’
“. . . For the time being, makers of luxury goods seem to have embraced this ‘crime pays’ marketing strategy. They buy into the disturbing vision offered by some of these magazines. The message is disastrous for minority young people, who are already at risk of spending their lives in prison or of dying prematurely from street violence,” Staples wrote.
Since Wednesday, “The column has been widely-discussed — both inside and outside the industry,” Staples told Journal-isms today. “My emphasis on advertisers who buy space in some of the ‘street bible’ magazines surprised people.”
Dennis S. Page, publisher of XXL, told Journal-isms that only editor-in-chief Elliot Wilson could respond on behalf of the magazine — and that Wilson was on his honeymoon. He was married in Los Angeles Saturday to hip-hop writer Danyel Smith, former editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine.
In January, when Journal-isms questioned an XXL cover showing rapper 50 Cent brandishing what looked like an Uzi to promote his album, “The Massacre,” managing editor Juleyka Lantigua replied that the magazine had run an editorial about violence and had “an exclusive feature called ‘Victim’ in which artists talk about their horrible experiences being shot.”
A press release about that March cover quoted Wilson as saying, “50 is the only MC that gets it: All publicity is good publicity.”
[Added June 14: A returning Lantigua replied Tuesday that “we have no comment” on the Staples column.]
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1,500 Registered for NAHJ Convention in Fort Worth
More than 1,500 people have registered for the convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists this week in Fort Worth, Texas, Minerva Canto wrote today in TV Week.
“NAHJ leaders say the organization has adopted some new goals to address members’ needs, which have been changing with the ever-evolving nature of the news industry.
“In 1983, the year before NAHJ was founded, 50 corporations controlled most every mass medium and the largest media merger until then was worth $340 million, according to research by NAHJ. Twenty years later, only six companies dominated the industry and the AOL Time Warner merger was worth $350 billion. This resulted in news units that had become smaller divisions of media conglomerates, thus more prone to economic and political pressures.
“Current NAHJ President Verónica Villafañe, ‘a convergence journalist’ who works in both English- and Spanish-language television, said the annual convention is a time for the organization to address these changes and interpret them for members.
“One of the ways NAHJ is doing this is by offering, for the first time, simultaneous interpretation in Spanish of many convention events, including 15 of the 20 broadcast journalism sessions at the convention. It reflects the organization’s new emphasis on creating more professional development opportunities for Spanish-language journalists, whose ranks have been increasing with the growth of Spanish-language media.”
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Kristof on Darfur: What Will We Say in 10 Years?
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof did a flurry of media appearances late last week after winning the second annual Michael Kelly Award, named for the former Atlantic Monthly editor and Washington Post columnist who in April 2003 became the first U.S. journalist killed in the Iraq War.
Kristof won the $25,000 prize, which is sponsored by Atlantic Media owner David Bradley, for “his columns denouncing genocide in Sudan and sexual exploitation in Southeast Asia.”
On PBS’ “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” Friday, Ray Suarez said to Kristof, “instead of just sort of hurling thunderbolts from Olympus, you climb out of the pulpit and talk directly with your readers. You ask them to write you, you provide your e-mail address. What are the kinds of things that Americans have been saying to you in reaction to these columns?”
The columnist replied: “Obviously, there are some people who would love to help. But especially when there is some individual who is named, people identify with them. They don’t have empathy for 400,000 people being killed, but they have a lot of empathy for one particular young mother who has lost her child.
“On the other hand, I must say I get an awful lot of e-mails from people who say, you know, that’s a real tragedy out there. It’s too bad it has to happen. But look, Africa is always a mess. It’s always will be a mess. We have a lot of other problems. We’re busy in Iraq and Afghanistan. You know, we gave already. Don’t ask any more of us.”
Suarez: “So how do you answer that?”
Kristof: “I say two things. First of all, we have a genuine national interest ourselves in trying to deal with this security mess in Darfur. If Sudan collapses, it’s going to be a haven for terrorists. It’s going to spread into Chad; Chad is already unstable because of this. Those are both oil-supplying states. And there’s a whole record of failed states not only supporting terrorism, but also being havens for disease, for refugees and so on. So I think we have a real national interest.
“But beyond that, I think if you look at the history of genocide, then the clear message is in 10 years we’re going to be looking at each other and say how can we not have done anything at all when hundreds of thousands of people were being killed in this way? And we’ve never been ashamed after the fact at having done too much in a humanitarian sense; it’s always been the opposite. I think that if we can understand that this statistic, this genocide, is being made up of individuals who we can relate to, who are just like us, then I think we would act.”
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Riz Khan Defends Leaving CNN for Al-Jazeera
Riz Khan, a senior anchor with CNN International and host of its “Q&A with Riz Khan,” wrote in the Wall Street Journal today that he is joining the new Al-Jazeera International satellite channel because it “provides the ideal vehicle to bridge gaps between communities in the East and West. It’ll be the first English-language news channel with an international perspective that is broadcasting from within the Middle East.
“I’m fully aware of the negative image of the Al Jazeera brand in the U.S., especially at the government level,” said Khan, who also had worked at the BBC, “but I think part of that comes from a misunderstanding of the strong cultural position the Arabic-language channel has among the average people of the Middle East. It is extremely popular for being outspoken not only about the West but also about Arab governments.” Al-Jazeera International, based in Qatar and backed by the emir, is hiring journalists and plans to start broadcasting early next year, according to the Times of London. “With a healthy budget and a staff of 250, it aims to cover every major global news event. It says it aspires to be a respected, balanced provider of news, and to act as a counterweight to American and European media,” that paper reported.
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Conglomerates Blamed for Loss of Detroit Station
Soon after Detroit’s Martha Jean “The Queen” Steinberg — one of the first women, not to mention black women, to become an influential daily radio host — died in 2000, the station she owned, WQBH, was sold.
“As WQBH, the station had focused on liberal to moderate talk show formats, gospel music and religious shows,” Luther Keith, senior editor at the Detroit News, explained in a column today.
“Now it is called WDTK, featuring conservative talk show hosts daily and religious programming on the weekends.
“‘We fought to the last day — it was such a struggle,’ said Triniere Steinberg, who became station manager after her mother’s death, and has never talked publicly about the reasons behind the station’s sale. ‘The Federal Communications Commission (the regulatory agency for radio and television stations) has destroyed community radio by letting all these big conglomerates buy these stations. It’s leading to the destruction of minority-owned small stations — stations all over the country.
“‘We didn’t have an advertising budget to compete with the Radio Ones and Clear Channel (companies that have several stations in the Detroit market). They don’t have to make all their money off of one station,'” Keith wrote in his column.
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Reporter Divulges Creative Way to Get Job Interview
In a profile of Darian Trotter, reporter for Nashville’s WSMV-TV, Stacy Smith Segovia of Tennessee’s Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle wrote Sunday of her hometown guy’s tenacity. She describes how he got his first television job:
“Out of the 90 resume tapes he sent out, he got zero response. So Trotter, unwilling to take the retail job his teachers had warned him was the destiny of many journalism students, fell back on his old trick of wrangling his way in.
“‘I quickly learned the best thing is to see the person ? in person,’ he says.
“He went on an eight-state tour of television stations, sometimes using sneaky means to get in the building.
“‘I’d call and say, “Let me speak to that new black reporter,”‘ he says. When the person, whose name he did not know, came to the phone, he’d explain his situation and ask for a tour of the building. If that didn’t work, he hung out near the back door, talked to photographers returning from assignments and asked them for a tour.
“‘Other times, I got really friendly with the receptionist,’ he says.
“The person giving him the tour would say, ‘This is our set, this is our newsroom, this is our news director ?’
“‘And that was all I needed,’ Trotter says. ‘They were impressed with that ambition. That quick sell, 30-second sell, often turned into lengthy interviews. That’s how I landed my first job.’
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Latinos, Too, Said to Fear “Acting White”
“It’s not just black children who face ridicule and ostracism by their peers if they do well in school. The stigmatizing effects of ‘acting white’ appear to be felt even more by Hispanics who get top grades,” Richard Morin wrote Sunday in the Washington Post.
Discussing recent work by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. and graduate student Paul Torelli, Morin, the Post’s polling director, wrote:
“‘For blacks, higher achievement is associated with modestly higher popularity until a grade point average of 3.5 [a B+ average], then the slope turns negative,’ Fryer and Torelli wrote in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. A black student who’s gotten all A’s has, on average, 1.5 fewer same-race friends than a straight-A white student. Among Hispanics, there is little change in popularity until a student’s average rises above a C+, at which point it plummets. A Hispanic student with all A’s is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and has three fewer friends than a typical white student with a 4.0 grade point average.
“Fryer and Torelli based their conclusions on a federally funded survey of 90,118 junior high and high school students in 175 schools in 80 communities nationwide during the 1994-95 school year. The resulting data set contained a wealth of information on each student, including the number of friends they had and who those friends were. To prevent an inflated tally, the researchers counted students as friends only if each listed the other as a friend.
“. . . They also found that more blacks ‘acted white’ in schools where less than 20 percent of the students were African American, while hardly any did in predominantly black schools or in private schools. ‘These findings suggest the achievement gap is not about cultural dysfunctionality,’ Fryer said, and that contrary to conventional wisdom, the phenomenon may be more prevalent among blacks living in the more affluent suburbs than among those living in the inner city. (There were no majority-Hispanic schools in the study.)
“Why is ‘acting white’ absent in mostly black schools?
“That’s easy, said Fryer, who is African American. He recalled his own experience growing up and attending predominantly black schools in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Dallas. ‘We didn’t act white — we didn’t know what that was,’ he said, stressing that he prefers data to anecdote. ‘There were no white kids around.'”
The late columnist Carl T. Rowan founded a scholarship program to help black students in Washington attend college after writing in 1987 that, “children caught up in anger and frustration are embracing a new kind of racism that says a black youngster who excels at speaking and writing is ‘using Whitey’s language.'”
The program awarded about $109.5 million in scholarships but ceased operations in 2002 after Rowan’s sons could not keep it going in the post-9/11 economic downturn.
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Short Takes
- Survivors of lynching victims were to be present today at the U.S. Capitol to personally receive a formal apology for Congress’ failure to enact an anti-lynching law first proposed 105 years ago, as Avis Thomas-Lester reported Saturday in the Washington Post. As she noted, “Black journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett devoted her career to ending lynching.”
- The Supreme Court today announced its refusal to review a federal appeals court decision that threw out a controversial Federal Communications Commission effort to relax media ownership regulations last year, TV Week reported. “The court’s decision Monday punts all the deregulatory issues back to the FCC, which will either have to pass on deregulation or try to deregulate again without raising the hackles of the justices on the Court of Appeals in Philadelphia,” Doug Halonen wrote.
- Cleveland television reporter and anchor Curtis Jackson was charged Thursday with disorderly conduct, misconduct at an emergency scene and obstruction of official business after Maple Heights, Ohio, police said he crossed a police line during an investigation May 15, his station, WEWS-TV, reported.
- “I went in search of my roots and had my DNA tested, and I am a Zulu,” Oprah Winfrey told a Johannesburg crowd, the South African Web site News24.com reported today. “I’m crazy about the South African accent. I wish I had been born here.”
- 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, ended the mystery about how she would resurface in the paper, as she told Journal-isms last month she would. Her story, “Angela Whitiker‘s Climb,” appeared as the above-the-fold centerpiece in Sunday’s New York Times as the last in the paper’s series on class in America. It was Wilkerson’s first bylined piece in the paper since Feb. 15, 1998.
- Curtis R. Holsopple, one of four faculty members who left Hampton University’s journalism program at the end of the school year, has joined Virginia State University as an assistant professor in the mass communications program. “I’ll be teaching broadcast journalism, specializing in radio production techniques, and I’m pleased to be a part of this new and growing program,” Holsopple told Journal-isms. He is in Champaign, Ill. for a month working with WCIA-TV as part of an educators-in-the-newsroom fellowship program sponsored by the Radio-Television New Directors Foundation. Awardees were announced today.
- Dateline NBC’s “A Pattern of Suspicion,” an April 2004 examination into racial profiling that analyzed data from more than 4 million traffic stops in a dozen cities, won an Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting from the Radio-Television News Directors Association. 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 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University and an Investigative Reporters and Editors awards.
- Sreenath Sreenivasan, who has been active in both the South Asian Journalists Association and the Asian American Journalists Association, becomes dean of students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, according to AAJA. Sree, who is already a faculty member there, is also a technology reporter, known as the Tech Guru, for New York’s WABC-TV and a freelance writer/reporter.
- Wyoma Best, a former reporter in Rochester, N.Y. for WHEC-TV who is retiring as vice president of communications for the Rochester Business Alliance, was honored June 1 by top media executives, business leaders and elected officials, Maidstone Mulenga, president of the Rochester Association of Black Journalists, wrote in an op-ed piece in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
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