Maynard Institute archives

Reporting the Excesses

by richard0552

“Possibly Deadly” N.O. Actions Described

“Blackwater Down: Fresh From Iraq, Private Security Forces Roam the Streets of an American City With Impunity,” is the title of a segment that aired today on Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!” It is based on a story in the Oct. 10 issue of The Nation magazine by Jeremy Scahill, a correspondent for the program.

The story involves Blackwater USA, a firm known for its private security work guarding senior U.S. diplomats in Iraq, which is now in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

“In an hourlong conversation I had with four Blackwater men, they characterized their work in New Orleans as ‘securing neighborhoods’ and ‘confronting criminals,’ Scahill wrote the Nation. “They all carried automatic assault weapons and had guns strapped to their legs. Their flak jackets were covered with pouches for extra ammunition.

“When asked what authority they were operating under, one guy said, ‘We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.’

“‘This vigilantism demonstrates the utter breakdown of the government,’ says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. ‘These private security forces have behaved brutally, with impunity, in Iraq. To have them now on the streets of New Orleans is frightening and possibly illegal.'”

After a reference to F. Patrick Quinn III, “who brought in private security to guard his $3 million private estate and his luxury hotels, which are under consideration for a lucrative federal contract to house FEMA workers,” Scahill continued:

“A possibly deadly incident involving Quinn’s hired guns underscores the dangers of private forces policing American streets. On his second night in New Orleans, Quinn’s security chief, Michael Montgomery, who said he worked for an Alabama company called Bodyguard and Tactical Security (BATS), was with a heavily armed security detail en route to pick up one of Quinn’s associates and escort him through the chaotic city. Montgomery told me they came under fire from ‘black gangbangers’ on an overpass near the poor Ninth Ward neighborhood. ‘At the time, I was on the phone with my business partner,’ he recalls. ‘I dropped the phone and returned fire.’

“Montgomery says he and his men were armed with AR-15s and Glocks and that they unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.'”

“. . . One might ask, given the enormous presence in New Orleans of National Guard, US Army, US Border Patrol, local police from around the country and practically every other government agency with badges, why private security companies are needed, particularly to guard federal projects. ‘It strikes me . . . that that may not be the best use of money,’ said Illinois Senator Barack Obama.”

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San Jose to Cut 52 Newsroom Jobs, Guild Says

“As most of you know, the Mercury News said it would cut a total of 56 Guild-covered jobs — including 51 in the newsroom — through buyouts or possibly layoffs,” Luther Jackson, executive officer of the San Jose Newspaper Guild, told members tonight.

He later amended the note to say, “The MN just informed me that the total number of newsroom buyouts is 52. There are another five in three other Guild-covered departments. There are another three non-union buyouts for a total of 60.” A notice on the Guild’s Web site said, “There are currently 308 editorial positions covered by the Guild.”

“This is a tragic day for loyal and hardworking Mercury News employees, the paper’s readers and ultimately Knight Ridder shareholders,” Jackson’s original note continued.

“In light of buyout programs announced at Knight Ridder’s Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News as well as the New York Times Company, a number of folks raised concerns about the impact of cuts on the quality of papers and the ability of papers to retain their lifeblood — readers.

“I think all of these comments apply to the San Jose situation.

“‘At the end of the day, you cannot cut your way to prosperity.’ — Joe Natoli, publisher at Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.

“‘There’s an old expression that I think fits this situation; I think newspaper companies are eating their seed corn. I fear for their future because you can’t save your way into profit increases every year. If you’re running a steak house, you still have to serve them steak.’ — Walker Lundy, ex-Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor.

“‘Cutting newsroom staff, on paper, looks like a good idea, but it diminishes the quality of the product. The more newsroom staff you cut, the worse the product gets and you lose customers.’ — Ben Silverman, equity analyst and publisher of the Princeton, N. J. based newsletter Profit Find.

“It’s time for a new vision in the newspaper industry,” Jackson said. Like the Philadelphia newspapers, California’s Mercury News is a Knight Ridder paper, in the same city as its corporate headquarters.

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Some Flee, Some Blog as Texas Awaits Hurricane

Television stations pledged to help each other stay on the air, broadcast and print reporters turned to blogging, and some broadcast journalists heeded advice to evacuate from their workplaces as news outlets in the projected path of Hurricane Rita awaited the landfall predicted for early Saturday.

“They live for this stuff,” Michael Schneider, a spokesman for the Texas Association of Broadcasters and a former reporter, told Journal-isms, describing his broadcast colleagues. Most stations had backup generators. A notice on his organization’s Web site read, “As of Friday, 9/23 at 7 a.m. Eastern / 6 a.m. Central, Belo will offer KHOU-TV Houston’s off-air signal to all broadcasters in non-Belo markets for simulcast on their digital multicast channel.”

One of the takers was KFDM-TV in Beaumont, Texas, near the Louisiana border, from which 73 employees had evacuated. At noon Central time, chief meteorologist Greg Bostwick told Journal-isms that just seven employees remained and that the station was simulcasting coverage from Belo’s KHOU and doing its own hourly cut-ins.

Farther down the Gulf coast, in Corpus Christi, a notice dated today on the Caller-Times Web site read: “Due to the evacuation of our market area as a result of Hurricane Rita the Corpus Christi Caller-Times will not publish a print edition until Sunday morning, September 25.

“The Caller-Times will continue to be published and updated regularly on our website, www.caller.com. Our reporters are continuing to provide in-depth coverage of Hurricane Rita and other local news. All of these stories can be viewed online.”

Univision station KORO-TV, in the same city, was still broadcasting, assignments editor Mary Ramirez said. “The evacuation has been lifted. Thank God we’re out of it,” she said at midday, referring to a downgrading of the storm’s intensity. About 20 people were still at the station, and the Monday-through-Friday news department was considering broadcasting news this weekend, Ramirez said.

Reporters at KTRK-TV in Houston, the ABC affiliate, and at the Houston Chronicle took to blogging on their news outlets’ Web sites as they reported. Among those at KTRK -TV were Laura Whitley, Elissa Rivas, Darren Lyn and Miya Shay.

The extensive Houston Chronicle blog included Purva Patel, Jim Newkirk and Andrew Guy.

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Tribune Co. Cuts Oust 17 Broadcasters of Color

Seventeen broadcasters of color are losing their jobs as two Tribune Co. television stations, KSWB-TV in San Diego and WPHL-TV in Philadelphia, close their news departments.

The announcements were made Wednesday in both cities and affect 30 employees in Philadelphia and 31 in San Diego, according to their general managers.

“KSWB, San Diego’s WB affiliate, plans to cease producing its own nightly 10 p.m. newscast and hand the operation over to KNSD, the NBC owned-and-operated station,” Robert P. Laurence reported Thursday in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

“News is a very expensive business. KNSD can do it on a much more efficient basis,” Bob Ramsey, KSWB general manager, said in the story.

In Philadelphia, “WB affiliate WPHL will outsource its struggling WB17 News at Ten to NBC’s WCAU beginning in mid-December, ‘CAU boss Dennis Bianchi confirmed yesterday,” Gail Shister wrote Thursday in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Channel 17 general manager Vince Giannini dropped the bomb in an emotional newsroom meeting. The staffers had no idea it was coming.”

“The heavy production costs for 30 minutes of daily news simply couldn’t be justified, given WB17 News’ on-life-support numbers,” Shister wrote.

Ramsey told Journal-isms the broadcasters of color affected in San Diego were reporters Darlynne Reyes and Robert Santos, reporter and sports anchor Ryan Yamamoto, weekend anchor Adriana Alcaraz, photographer Brian Choo, producer Evelyn Fernandez, photographers Phil Ige and Victor Vargas, assignment editor Jesse Macias, editor Gerald White and graphic producer Roberto Rios.

In Philadelphia, according to Giannini, they are news director Chuck Carter, anchor Mary Stoker-Smith, reporter/anchor Tasha Jamerson, reporter Steve Highsmith, photographer Lark Patrick and operations manager Rob Gibson [Added Sept. 26: Highsmith, who is chief political correspondent, said today his mother is half-Hispanic.]

“As with our other staffers, these are some high-quality diverse individuals available in the marketplace,” Giannini said. He said the station was working to place them at other Tribune Co. stations and contacting other broadcast groups. He said he was also working with WCAU to have some of them hired. Ramsey said of his employees from San Diego that, “We’re working very hard with them to get them placed.”

The San Diego layoffs are effective at the end of October; in Philadelphia, on or about Dec. 9.

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http://www.postherald.com/

Birmingham Post-Herald Closes After 55 Years 

 

The afternoon Birmingham Post-Herald in Alabama published its final issue today, barely 24 hours after the E.W. Scripps Co. announced the paper’s demise.

“Paid circulation of the Post-Herald has declined to about 7,500 copies, a level at which it no longer makes economic sense to continue publishing, Scripps officials said,” the paper reported Thursday.

The Post-Herald had reported that 11.1 percent of its journalists were of color, compared with the morning Birmingham News’ 17.6 percent, in the latest census of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

As the paper folded, it had a Latino reporter, Rosa Ramirez; an Asian American editor, Wade Kwon; an African American reporter, William Singleton III, and a black journalist who worked part-time, Jason Coskrey, who split his time between the Metro and Sports sections, staffers told Journal-isms.

“It’s been a whirlwind day-and-a-half,” said Kwon, who edited the features section and had been at the paper nine years. “Any time you lose a voice in the community, it weakens the press coverage. The competitive factor is always a big deal. Fortunately, you have other papers in town. We’ll see if the competition we have will drive journalism forward.”

Ramirez, speaking as she added her name to those of colleagues on a copy of the final issue, arrived a little less than six months ago after writing for the Hispanic Link, a laboratory project based in Washington. “I’m going to clean my desk and start looking for work,” she said. “It’s a little bit of a shock — they didn’t give us much notice.” Singleton, who covered education, said he had been at the paper 19 years.

Among the remembrances in the paper’s last edition was one by Clarke Stallworth, 79, who described being attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan and later attending a Klan meeting. “I remember the bitter taste of fear as I was surrounded by hooded men with rifles and shotguns,” he wrote.

“One of them was Robert Chambliss, who later blew up Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four little girls.”

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Response to Katrina Raises Tom Joyner’s Profile

“To listen to the Joyner show lately has been to swim in an alternate media universe,” Bryan Curtis wrote on slate.com Wednesday about syndicated radio jock Tom Joyner.

“What Fox News is to CNN — a refuge for the dispossessed — Joyner’s radio show is to Fox News and CNN. His show is pitched to African-American listeners with an abiding distrust of the major news media. Since Katrina hit, Jesse Jackson has appeared on Joyner’s show to make common cause; New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Lt. Gen. [Russel] Honore have called in to defend themselves. Joyner has begged listeners to donate plus-size clothing, explaining that Size 10 blouses will not fit many of those swimming out of New Orleans. He started his own relief fund, which has raised more than $1.5 million for Samaritans who are housing the displaced.

“What makes Joyner worth pausing over is his retrograde vision for black radio. The more swollen Joyner’s media empire has become — his show plays in 120 markets, and he has a new book and TV series in the offing — the smaller and more concentrated his vision. Joyner wants to move black radio back toward its founding mission, when radio was a subterranean political mechanism — a conduit, Joyner writes, for ‘talking specifically to black folks.'”

On Thursday on “News and Notes with Ed Gordon,” Gordon said to Joyner, “there are so many people who sit in your position who could just walk away and go home and . . . put your feet up. And you have never done that.”

“No, I can’t live my life like that,” Joyner replied. “I think that we’re supposed to help. You know, you help yourself and then you’re supposed to help others. I just think that that’s what God put us here for, you know? . . . I’ll be doing this to the grave.”

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ABC News Producers to Follow Displaced Families

Seven ABC News producers — five of them of color — “have spread out across the country to chronicle the lives of seven families displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the network announced today. They “will follow the families for a month as they try to settle into their new lives, and will check in with them periodically over the coming years as they rebuild.”

ABC News spokeswoman Cathie Levine identified the producers of color as Eddie Pinder, Tarana Harris, James Wang, Barbara Garcia and Iman Hobbs, who will join Marika Kelderman and Dan Beckman.

The producers will be “with displaced Katrina families in Seattle, WA; Colorado Springs, CO; Baton Rouge, LA; Gulfport, MS; Summersville, SC; Atlanta, GA and Houston, TX,” a news release said.

“Reports and video diaries will be featured on all ABC News broadcasts and platforms, including ‘Good Morning America,’ ‘World News Tonight,’ ‘Nightline,’ ABCNEWS.com, ABC News Radio and ABC News Now.”

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Short Takes

  • CBS correspondent Vicki Mabrey’s status “is to be determined” now that “60 Minutes” is absorbing personnel from the canceled “60 Minutes II,” CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco told Journal-isms today. Nine correspondents will compete for space each week on a broadcast that generally runs three stories, as the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
  • Allison Keyes joins National Public Radio’s National Desk as general assignment reporter in October, NPR spokesman Chad Campbell confirmed today. Keyes has spent the last three years reporting for the old “Tavis Smiley Show” on NPR and for “News and Notes.”
  • M.L. Elrick and Jim Schaefer of the Detroit Free Press won a Clark Mollenhoff award for a series that exposed scandals in the administration of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the Washington-based Fund for American Studies announced.
  • “Fox News Channel’s Geraldo Rivera will star in a new syndicated half-hour, weekday strip that will air on those Fox broadcast network TV stations and those UPN stations that in fact are owned by Fox Television Stations,” Lisa de Moraes reported in the Washington Post. “When ‘Geraldo at Large’ launches in November, it will take the time slots on the Fox and UPN stations where the revival of ‘A Current Affair’ had aired.” That show’s cancellation was reported Wednesday.
  • Alan Wang, a reporter at WSB-TV in Atlanta, is joining KGO-TV in San Francisco as its weekend anchor, the Willinger Talent Agency announced.
  • “The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the health of jailed independent journalist Víctor Rolando Arroyo, who went on hunger strike two weeks ago” in Cuba “and is now in the prison hospital, his sister Blanca Arroyo told CPJ,” the organization said today.
  • “Over the past decade or so, the 34-year-old journalist, author and cultural critic — known by his first name only — has gained a following covering music, all things hip-hop and American pop culture for many of the nation’s best-known media outlets,” Donna M. Owens wrote Thursday, profiling the writer Touré. “With his free-flowing Afro, funky style and photogenic looks, Touré has star quality to rival the folks he interviews.”
  • Entertainer Bill Cosby “now forbids promoters from advertising his hometown concerts in either the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Philadelphia Daily News (not to mention the Boston Globe), according to the 68-year-old comedian’s recently revised contract rider,” thesmokinggun.com reported today. The Web site speculated that Cosby “has not been too pleased with Philadelphia newspaper coverage of his ongoing sex assault lawsuit.”
  • Janice Min, 36-year-old editor in chief of Us magazine, “is one of the highest-paid magazine editors, with a reported salary of $1.2 million a year, and has filled 90 staff positions at the publication with editors from ‘serious’ titles such as Newsweek, New York Magazine and Harper’s Magazine,” Ariana Eunjung Cha reported today in the Washington Post. “Her goal is to break news.”
  • The Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières “has voiced concern about the Rwandan government’s continuing crackdown on the opposition press after police seized issues of the latest edition of the fortnightly ‘Umuco’ and detained its editor, Bonaventure Bizumuremyi, for seven hours on 19 September,” the group reported on Tuesday.

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