Maynard Institute archives

Newsday’s Lonnie Isabel Laid Off

by richard0484

Deputy ME Guided Pulitzer-Winning Series

Lonnie Isabel, a deputy managing editor at Newsday and the second-highest ranking black journalist at the paper, is being let go in a new round of cutbacks at the Tribune Co.-owned paper, he confirmed late today.

“This paper’s been through a bunch” of job cutbacks. “I’ve had to eliminate a number of jobs of people who work for me. Now it’s my turn,” Isabel, 53, told Journal-isms. His said his job was being eliminated after an “involuntary buyout” along with that of the other deputy managing editor, Steve Ruinsky. The paper must eliminate 45 jobs and “this is the first wave,” he said.

“Lonnie is one of the smartest, most able editors in this newsroom, refined by his years of reporting at several other newspapers . . . and by his highly merited ascent through the editors’ ranks at Newsday,” the newspaper’s Black Caucus said in a statement. “Among other achievements, he directed Dele Olojede’s reportage from Rwanda, which netted Newsday its most recent Pulitzer Prize. Many on the staff – black, white, Asian, Latino – know him as a newsman among newsmen. His eye has been consistently fixed on the story and the reader.

“With Les Payne, Newsday’s most senior black editor, nearing retirement, Lonnie’s position as the next highest ranking black has been crucial to assuring expansive, balanced coverage at this newspaper. His dismissal leaves us heartbroken and, more urgently, concerned about what his removal signals about Newsday/Tribune’s commitment to newsroom diversity.”

The caucus asked for a meeting with editor John Mancini.

Ruinsky and Isabel, who is a 1977 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists, were promoted to deputy managing editor only in December. He was to “oversee the health and science department in addition to his current supervision of national, foreign and state coverage,” a Newsday story said then.

Isabel spent 16 years at the paper, recalling as highlights supervising coverage of the 2000 election, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the war in Iraq, the terrrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the O.J. Simpson trial and the election of Hillary Clinton as senator from New York, along with working with Payne and others. “It’s been a really, really wonderful legacy,” he said. “The paper is phenomenal. I’m going to kick back and do some reading, do some traveling and then look for a job.” He said his last day would be Tuesday.

The Black Caucus said that last month, Tribune Co. CEO Dennis J. FitzSimons “sent out a corporation-wide letter congratulating Tribune for “again [being] recognized for its strong commitment to diversity. The August issue of ‘Fortune’ magazine includes Tribune among the ‘Top 50 Employers for Minorities.'”

“Will Newsday/Tribune be hiring a similarly proven black editor to replace Lonnie and help shape coverage in this shop? To what extent will Newsday remain committed to diversity?”

Mancini did not return a call seeking comment.

[Added Sept. 13: Mancini said in a memo to the staff, “Our decision to reduce staff requires reshaping the newsroom management structure, and we have made the difficult choice to eliminate the two deputy managing editor posts,” that “We plan to distribute buyout packages in the newsroom by the end of the week,” and that “We anticipate that the remaining New York staff will become part of the Long Island desk structure to better organize the regional report.”]

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Ousted Dorothy Bland, Michael Limon: We’re “Fine”

Dorothy Bland and Michael Limon, ousted last week as publisher and executive editor, respectively, of the Gannett Co.’s Fort Collins Coloradoan, both say they are fine and wish their former employer the best.

Neither would discuss the reasons behind their surprise dismissals, but Gannett last week also summarily replaced the publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, Leslie Giallombardo. Her “fall was most assuredly tied to falling revenues at the daily newspaper,” according to Liz Garrigan in the Nashville Scene.

Perhaps coincidentally, the actions took place after Gannett announced Sept. 2 that Gary L. Watson was concluding his 39-year career with the nation’s largest newspaper company and retiring Sept. 30 as president of its Newspaper Division. He is to be replaced by Susan Clark-Johnson, publisher of the Arizona Republic.

“I’m fine,” Bland told Journal-isms. “I thank Colorado readers, employees, advertisers and other customers for a terrific 11 years . . . I’m proud of my 25-year track record in Gannett and our industry. It’s time to move on. I’m exploring a number of opportunities and I wish the Coloradoan and Gannett all the best,” she said.

Limon said today, “I’m doing fine. . . I’m just taking some time to get in touch with my life and think about the future. I wish the newspaper and its staff the best and I’m grateful to Gannett for all the opportunities it’s given me. I’m just taking it easy.”

“We were shocked,” Coloradoan photographer V. Richard Haro told Journal-isms, speaking of the departures. He noted that the paper had moved into a new building only three months ago. Moreover, Bland and Limon, who are African American and Latino, respectively, were widely viewed as Gannett loyalists.

“If anyone has a ‘G’ branded on their butt, he’s one of them,” said Limon’s friend Dino Chiecchi, editor of Hispanic Publications for the San Antonio Express-News and former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Bland is a three-time Gannett president’s ring winner and in 2000, 1998 and 1995, was named one of Gannett’s top 10 daily newspaper publishers. She was president and publisher of the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio, and from 1983 to 1990, served in a variety of news roles at USA Today, as noted in a Freedom Forum bio.

Limon, 51. was assistant managing editor at the Reno Gazette-Journal in Nevada from 1993 to 1997 and was managing editor at the Tucson Citizen in Arizona from 1997 to 2002 before joining the Coloradoan, according to the Coloradoan’s bio.

Christine Chin, former president and publisher of the Bellingham Herald in Washington, is replacing Bland, the Coloradoan announced.

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Nick Charles Named AOL Black Voices Editor

Nicholas Charles, a former reporter at the New York Daily News and People magazine, today was named editor in chief of the AOL Black Voices Web site.

“In this new role, Charles will be responsible for spearheading the day-to-day editorial activities across all content areas including News, Sports, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Finance, Education and Community. He will report into the newly named Vice President and General Manager, Janet Rollé,” a former vice president at VH1 who was named to the AOL post in July, an announcement said.

The regular lineup of writers has been missing from AOL Black Voices while it made personnel changes. “Due to an internal transfer of the Black Voices news programming manager, there will temporarily be less BV Views programming available on the service until her replacement is identified,” an AOL spokeswoman said in July. The regular columnists include Jimi Izrael, Amy Alexander and William Jelani Cobb.

It was unknown whether these columnists would return. “At this time, with his transition into his new role Nick is not doing any media interviews. Sorry for any inconvenience,” said AOL spokeswoman Sandra Correa after transmitting the announcement about Charles.

“We are excited to have Nicholas join AOL Black Voices and are confident that through his far-reaching editorial experience – having covered news, culture, lifestyle, business, sports, politics and entertainment for diverse publications – he will significantly contribute to the growth of the AOL Black Voices brand,” Rollé said in the statement.

Charles has freelanced widely and is founding editor of a culture and lifestyle magazine Forward, produced by the Toyota & Jungle Media Group, according to a news release. In July, he left a job as press secretary for the New York mayoral campaign of Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, a Democrat.

AOL BlackVoices combines three former Web sites: Black Voices, AOL Black Focus and Africana.com.

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Admissions of Media Failure to Report on Race

“It takes a hurricane. it takes a catastrophe like Katrina to strip away the old evasions, hypocrisies and not-so-benign neglect,” begins a Newsweek cover story by Jonathan Alter, “The Other America,” as race continued to play a major role in the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“It takes the sight of the United States with a big black eye – visible around the world – to help the rest of us begin to see again. For the moment, at least, Americans are ready to fix their restless gaze on enduring problems of poverty, race and class that have escaped their attention. Does this mean a new war on poverty? No, especially with Katrina’s gargantuan price tag. But this disaster may offer a chance to start a skirmish, or at least make Washington think harder about why part of the richest country on earth looks like the Third World.”

Columnists of color went to the hurricane zone. They and others continued to debate use of the word “refugee.”

The New York Times public editor, Byron Calame, took the paper to task Sunday, writing that, “over the past decade Times readers would have been hard-pressed to find a news headline about the poverty in the midst of the city that brings to the minds of many Americans the revelry of Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street. A search of substantive Times news articles about New Orleans since September 1995, conducted with the help of a researcher for the paper, found none that focused on the city’s poor and the racial dimension of poverty. And there were only two articles about the city — both feature stories — that contained a few paragraphs on poverty and race.”

On CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer,” media writer Howard Kurtz took the same tack:

“Well, Wolf, while we’re patting journalists on the back for the yeoman work they’ve done, and deservedly so during this two- week crisis, what about the last 20 years?” Kurtz said. “How come it was a shock to a lot of people to find out that New Orleans was two-thirds black, most of those people poor?

“Urban poverty, minority people who need help. These have been off the media radar screen for a long time. Newspapers, television networks are interested in chasing upscale readers and viewers, and I think now there is a long overdue look at the fact that a lot of these people couldn’t get out because they didn’t have a car.

“They couldn’t afford the bus fare. They had no place to go. Journalism fell down on this job. Politicians didn’t talk about it. And we didn’t make them talk about it.”

Left unsaid was that Kurtz’ own media show on CNN, “Reliable Sources,” has long been a sore point among many journalists of color for failing to include journalists who might have raised those issues.

A study by the group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that, as of 2003. “White guests outnumbered all others on Reliable Sources, 194 to 9, making the show’s guest roster 96 percent white.”

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press announced Thursday its findings that:

“Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government’s response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm’s victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government’s response. Blacks make harsher judgments of the federal government’s response to the crisis, perceive the plight of disaster victims in a different light, and feel more emotionally connected to what’s happened.”

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Columnists of Color on Katrina’s Many Dimensions

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Black Caucus Develops Queries for Roberts

“Leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) on Saturday took their strongest step yet toward opposing the nomination of Judge John Roberts, urging senators to submit the Supreme Court nominee to tough questioning on issues of racial discrimination,” as Josephine Hearn reported in the Sept. 13 issue of The Hill, a weekly that covers Capitol Hill.

“‘We are both astonished and troubled by what the papers of Judge John Roberts Jr. . . . reveal about his views on civil rights matters in virtually all the areas of concern to African Americans,’ wrote Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.), the CBC’s chairman, and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), judicial nominations chairwoman for the caucus, to Senate Judiciary Committee members. ‘We have deep and expansive concerns about the Roberts nomination.’

“Watt and Norton highlighted eight areas of questioning they hoped the panel’s members would pursue, ranging from affirmative action to the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.”

Following are the questions submitted, according to a news release from the caucus.

1. ORIGIN AND OPERATION OF DISCRIMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

A 1981 government report described discrimination as follows:

Today’s discriminatory processes originated in our history of inequality. . . . These processes became self-sustaining as the prejudiced attitudes and behaviors of individuals were built into the operations of organizations and their supporting social structures (such as education, employment, housing, and government). These built-in mechanisms reinforce existing discrimination and breed new unfair practices and damaging stereotypes. (U.S. Civil Rights Commission Affirmative Action in the 1980s, p.2 (1982)).

Question: Do you believe this is an accurate or an inaccurate description of how discrimination has operated historically in our country?

2. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION REMEDIES

While working in key positions in the government, you strongly opposed affirmative action of all kinds, advising the Attorney General “that race and gender should never be factors in employment decisions” (Roberts Memorandum, August 9, 1982), even in the early 1980s when such remedies were barely a decade old. As you are aware, the Supreme Court has allowed the use of race and gender in some narrowly tailored circumstances in some areas with considerable results, particularly in employment where these remedies were deemed necessary to break patterns the employer could not show were free of discrimination.

Question: Considering that engrained patterns of employment discrimination were deeply rooted through hundreds of years of our history, do you believe that these patterns could have been removed, as many have, short of the remedies that have been in place since the 1960s, sanctioned by the Court and by Republican and Democratic administrations alike?

3. REAUTHORIZATION OF THE 1965 VOTING RIGHTS ACT

The Congress is considering the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act for the first time since 1982, when you were perhaps the most energetic opponent of a key section of the Act. In more than 25 memoranda, among other actions, you led an unsuccessful attempt by the Reagan administration to narrow Section 2 by requiring proof of intent in order to find a violation by state or local actions of the right to vote. The Congress instead adopted the effects test, finding that an intent test “places an unacceptable burden upon plaintiffs” and cited as an example of a Georgia case that had not survived the intents test “even though the evidence showed pervasive discrimination in the political process.” (S.Rep. No. 97-417, 97th Cong., 2d Sess. at 16, 39). You continued to oppose the effects test even following the compromise fashioned by Sen. Robert Dole making more explicit that proportional representation was disallowed (Roberts Memorandum to the Attorney General 2/16/82), although it had not been claimed or found by any Court.

Question: Now, after 25 years of court enforcement of the effects test, is there any evidence that the effects test has established “essentially a quota system for electoral politics” or even a “drastic alteration of local governmental affairs” as you feared? In light of 25 years of litigation under the effects test, do you still oppose this test?

4. DESEGREGATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

In a rare retraction, Solicitor General Kenneth Starr withdrew the position taken in a case you supervised, U.S. v. Fordice, 505 U.S. 717 (1992), endorsing “freedom of choice” as a means of removing unconstitutionally segregated higher education in the state of Mississippi that would have left in place most of the vestiges of segregation, including discriminatory testing and starkly unequal programs, facilities, and teacher salaries. Solicitor General Starr’s reply brief flatly stated that the positions taken in the brief you co-signed “no longer reflect the position of the United States…” and that “it is incumbent on the state… to eradicate discrimination from its system of higher education” (Reply Brief for the United States, U.S. v. Fordice, 505 U.S. 717 (1992) (No. 90-1205)). The Supreme Court, 8-1, agreed, rejected the freedom of choice position, and required the dismantlement by the state of policies and practices traceable to segregation.

Question: Because the White House has not provided your memoranda from this period, we must ask you whether you agreed with the position taken in the brief you originally supervised or with Solicitor General Starr’s reply brief retracting the freedom of choice position in the earlier brief?

5. THE SUPREME COURT’S ROLE IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE

The Supreme Court agreed with the position in an amicus brief, signed by you, in Herrera v. Collins (No. 91-7328, 1991 U.S. Briefs 7328 (July 10, 1992)) that newly discovered evidence proving the actual innocence of a condemned prisoner did not require court consideration under the Due Process Clause, but the Court said it assumed an execution in such a case would be unconstitutional if there were no state avenue for correcting “a truly persuasive demonstration of ‘actual innocence.'” However, in your brief, you disagreed and said, “There is no reason to fear that there is a significant risk that an innocent person will be executed under the procedures that the States have in place” (Herrera Brief at p. 9, n.18).

Question: With the emergence of DNA and other evidence that have resulted in the release of a significant number of people held on death row in states such as Illinois, do you believe that a revision of this view is justified that would require the Court to act in a case involving “a truly persuasive demonstration of ‘actual innocence'” if a governor refused to stop the execution?

6. STRIPPING THE SUPREME COURT AND OTHER FEDERAL COURTS OF JURISDICTION TO HEAR CIVIL RIGHTS AND OTHER CASES

Throughout your career in government you were at odds with the administrations in which you served on the constitutionality of proposals to strip the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, of jurisdiction over controversial issues. For example, you argued in a 25-page memorandum that the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, could be stripped of jurisdiction to hear school desegregation cases, among other issues (Roberts Memo on Proposals to Divest the Supreme Court of Appellate Jurisdiction, attached to an October 30, 1981 note from Kenneth Starr to Theodore Olson). You later indicated some opposition to court stripping as a policy matter, but continued to hold to the view that court stripping was constitutional (Roberts Memo to Fred Field re: S. 47, 6/21/95).

Question: In hindsight, would you now agree with Ted Olson, who as Assistant Attorney General along with others in the Justice Department, opposed your view and advised the Attorney General that Congress may not “make ‘exceptions’ which would negate the power of the Supreme Court to decide cases arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States” because only the Court has the power to provide “an authoritative and final _expression of the meaning of the Constitution”?

7. EFFECT OF LIFE TENURE ON JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE TO RENDER UNPOPULAR DECISIONS

In a 1983 memorandum opposing the Justice Department’s position supporting life tenure for federal judges, you favored a limited term of years today when judges live longer and argued that “the case for [insulating] the judges from political accountability” is outweighed by judges’ longevity, allowing them to live “decades of ivory tower existence.”

Question: In responding to whether this is still your view, please say whether you would agree that life tenure has the benefit of protecting judges to render highly unpopular decisions affecting, for example, racial minorities or unpopular forms of speech?

8. THE AIDS CRISIS AND THE LAW

This is a question about evidence that must guide a judge, regardless of the nature or controversy surrounding the issue. President Reagan was late and hesitant in offering leadership on the AIDS crisis, but by 1985, the White House believed it had to confront the shunning of children with AIDS that had resulted in discrimination against them in public schools for fear of contracting the disease. You recommended that the President avoid the position that had been recommended to the President by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that “as far as our best scientists have been able to determine, (the) AIDS virus is not transmitted through casual or routine contact,” (Roberts Memo to Fred Fielding, p. 1, 9/13/85) the very reassurance that needed presidential leadership.

Question: On the basis of what evidence did you believe that, notwithstanding the CDC’s expert opinion, President Reagan should omit this statement of reassurance and should “assume AIDS can be transmitted through casual or routine contact” because of “disputed” scientific evidence (Roberts Memo, p. 1)?

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