Maynard Institute archives

Geraldo vs. New York Times

by richard0517

Public Editor, NAHJ Back Rivera Over Keller

Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera picked up two defenders in his battle to get the New York Times to correct an item it wrote about him, as the paper’s public editor wrote a strongly worded criticism of Executive Editor Bill Keller‘s refusal to do so and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists added its voice.

[Added Sept. 27: The Times today published what Rivera called a “grudging and ungracious” editors’ note as the last item in an eight-item Corrections box.]

Writing Sunday, Public Editor Byron Calame said of Keller: “I find it disturbing that any Times editor would come so close to implying — almost in a tit-for-tat sense — that Mr. Rivera’s bad behavior essentially entitles the paper to rely on assumptions and refuse to correct an unsupported fact.”

Calame wrote, “The underlying issue arose from the penultimate paragraph of Alessandra Stanley’s TV Watch column on Sept. 5 about the coverage of Hurricane Katrina: ‘Some reporters helped stranded victims because no police officers or rescue workers were around. (Fox’s Geraldo Rivera did his rivals one better: yesterday, he nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety.)’

“Mr. Rivera denied that he had ‘nudged’ anyone and demanded that The Times publish a correction. Mr. Rivera and Fox said a videotape of the segment that Ms. Stanley had watched on Sept. 4 shows no nudge.”

“The tape shows no such thing, and the New York Times owes Mr. Rivera an apology,” NAHJ President Veronica Villafane said in a letter to Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. dated Friday.

Last week, Manuel Mirabal, president of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, wrote Sulzberger that “your refusal to issue a correction and admit your error is arrogant, injurious to Mr. Rivera, and insulting to the Puerto Rican and Latino community,” Lloyd Grove reported in the New York Daily News.

According to Calame, Keller acknowledged that the tape showed no nudge, but suggested, “‘frankly,’ that in light of Mr. Rivera’s reaction to the review, Ms. Stanley ‘would have been justified in assuming’ — and therefore writing, apparently — that Mr. Rivera used ‘brute force’ rather than merely a ‘nudge’ on Sept. 4. (One of the on-air threats cited by Mr. Keller, however, actually was made by Bill O’Reilly.)” It was that line that Calame said he found disturbing.

[Added Sept. 27: Tuesday’s editors’ note said: “The editors understood the ‘nudge’ comment as the television critic’s figurative reference to Mr. Rivera’s flamboyant intervention. Mr. Rivera complained, but after reviewing a tape of his broadcast, The Times declined to publish a correction.

[“Numerous readers, however — now including Byron Calame, the newspaper’s public editor, who also scrutinized the tape — read the comment as a factual assertion. The Times acknowledges that no nudge was visible on the broadcast.”

[“As far as I’m concerned, the case is closed,” Rivera said, according to David Bauder of the Associated Press. “I want everybody to remember who made the factual error and refused to correct it.”

[“Rivera said the newspaper’s editors “tailor their journalism on the basis of whether it’s someone they like or respect or not, and I think it’s really scandalous,” Bauder reported, adding that Rivera called the Times statement “grudging and ungracious.”]

The flap has provided others, such as Chicago Tribune television critic Phil Rosenthal, an opportunity to revisit Stanley’s past mistakes.

“The Times has issued corrections to point out that the WB is not a cable network and Fox’s short-lived hotel soap ‘North Shore’ was not a program about the sex industry,” Rosenthal wrote on Sept. 11. “Another piece, according to the correction, ‘misstated the political backdrop of the economic recession that preceded the good times that were the setting of “Friends.”‘

“A personal favorite, though, is the 2004 column that mentioned Adm. James Stockdale. As the correction said, ‘The admiral ran as an independent in 1992 with Ross Perot, not as a Republican in 1996 with John McCain, who was not a nominee.’ Um, yeah.”

The public editor began his piece with an assurance that he was no Geraldo fan. “One of the real tests of journalistic integrity is being fair to someone who might be best described by a four-letter word,” Calame wrote.

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“No Layoffs,” Diversity Records Set at D.C.’s Post

The Washington Post will not follow the New York Times Co., Tribune Co., Knight Ridder and other media companies in instituting layoffs or buyouts this year, and it has recorded higher-than-ever numbers of journalists of color and women since staff members expressed diversity concerns late last year when a new managing editor was named, Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., said late today.

The number of full-time professionals of color stands at an all-time high of 151, Downie told a Post staff meeting, representing 23.3 percent of the paper’s 647 full-time newsroom staffers. Last year that figure was 21 percent, he said.

“More than half the newsroom professionals who were hired this year have been journalists of color,” Downie said.

Among women, whose numbers he said were also an all-time high, the figure was 288, or 44.5 percent. Likewise, the number of editors of color has set a record.

“The newsroom is stronger than ever. The newshole and budget won’t be cut, but it won’t grow, either,” Downie said. He noted that one of six households in the circulation area represents people born in another country and that a diverse staff was needed to better cover those communities.

Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer announced plans to cut its editorial staff by 15 percent from 500 to 425, while the Philadelphia Daily News will cut its editorial staff 19 percent, from 130 to 105. Both are Knight Ridder papers. The New York Times Co. said it would cut about 500 jobs, or about 4 percent of its work force. The San Jose Mercury News, another Knight Ridder paper, announced Friday it planned to cut about 15 percent of its news staff “to combat an industry-wide slump in revenue.” Two weeks ago, Newsday, a Tribune Co. paper, eliminated the positions of two deputy managing editors and announced plans to distribute more buyout packages. Two Tribune Co. television stations announced last week they were closing their news departments.

And when Dean Baquet took over this summer as the first African American editor of the Los Angeles Times, another Tribune Co. paper, he did so after threatening to leave the paper. A meeting with Tribune officials “had left him wondering whether he would have the freedom and funds needed to maintain the paper’s worldwide news operation,” his paper reported.

As a family-owned paper, the Washington Post is protected from some of the pressure for greater and greater profits at such publicly owned companies as Tribune and Knight Ridder, Downie and Robert G. Kaiser wrote in their 2002 book “The News About the News.” Downie began the meeting saying his words were in the spirit of the advice given in the movie “The Graduate.” “Two words: No layoffs,” he said.

While the ruling out of layoffs, buyouts or a hiring freeze came as “reassuring,” science reporter Rick Weiss, a leader of the Post unit of the Newspaper Guild, said he expected a price to be paid during contract negotiations. With inflation, rising health insurance costs and the Post’s desire to hold back spending, Guild members can expect “a fairly lower standard of living,” he told Journal-isms.

“We’re one of the most productive newspapers in the country on a per-employee basis,” Weiss said of Downie’s staffing decisions. “I think they looked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which cut and cut, and they said, ‘that’s not the way to go.'”

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Newsday Editor Sees End to Cuts; Payne in New Job

Veteran Newsday editor and columnist Les Payne today was named to direct the national and foreign desks as associate editor, an “attempt to stabilize the national and foreign coverage,” he told Journal-isms, “which at the moment needs stabilizing.”

The paper has 45 buyout offers on the table in attempt to meet budget targets from the parent Tribune Co. Two weeks ago, it let go the two deputy managing editors, including Lonnie Isabel, the second-highest ranking African American in the newsroom, who oversaw oversee the health and science department and national, foreign and state coverage. Payne was the paper’s highest ranking black journalist.

“I don’t see other things we can cut and be true to our mission,” Editor John Mancini told Journal-isms tonight. “The latest round of buyouts is dramatic and drastic.” He said he met with the newspaper’s Black Caucus on Sept. 14. “Diversity is an initiative at Newsday. We want to continue that tradition. It’s very important to us, and to me,” Mancini said. “There’s no excuse not to make sure management is as diverse as the newsroom as a whole.” What cannot be accomplished through hiring, he said, can be done through promotions.

Mancini conceded that layoffs would follow if not enough people took the buyout offers. But he said that historically it had not come to that.

Payne is moving from his job as New York editor after Newsday decided it could cut costs by deemphasizing New York coverage and concentrating on Long Island. Payne noted that he was once responsible for the same portfolio he will have now, but said, “I haven’t done it under these conditions. This is a more liquid, more fluid situation. There are a lot of good reporters out there who need to make sure their work will continue to appear and need to be taken care of. The role of editors is to protect the work of reporters.”

Newsday “has always had a pioneer spirit,” he said, and has had “its nerve endings open,” and will continue to do so, he said, as it makes its way in the changing environment involving paid newspapers, free newspapers and the Internet.

Payne, who joined Newsday in 1969, was expecting to retire soon, a prospect that raised the concerns of the paper’s Black Caucus when Isabel was let go.

Payne replied that “the Black Caucus has established a system where they can assure the . . . fair representation of blacks at every level of the paper. It doesn’t depend on me as an individual, or Lonnie as an individual or Dele Olojede as an individual,” referring to the Pulitzer-Prize winning former foreign editor. One of the reasons people organize, Payne said, is to protect “coverage of the black community and Africans in the diaspora. If I’m hit by a brick or a buyout, the coverage continues apace.”

He plans to continue his weekly column.

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Columnist Envisions a Latino New Orleans

“No matter what all the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans,” Gregory Rodriguez, a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times and Irvine Senior fellow at the New America Foundation, wrote Sunday in the Los Angeles Times.

“Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they’re done, they’re going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It’s the federal government that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the hollowness of the immigration debate.”

His commentary is among the latest from columnists of color on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the arrival of Rita:

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McAuliffe Wins Diversity Award for J-Educators

Denny McAuliffe, a founder of Reznet, an online newspaper by and for Native American student journalists, has won the Barry Bingham Sr. fellowship, an award presented by the National Conference of Editorial Writers to a journalism educator who has furthered diversity.

The presentation took place during NCEW’s conference Sept. 14-17 in Portland, Ore. He is the first Native American to win the award, which dates at least to 1990. “McAuliffe also helped create and teaches at the Freedom Forum’s American Indian Journalism Institute at the University of South Dakota each summer, and is a former board member of the Native American Journalists Association,” Mark Trahant, editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Maynard Institute board chair, said in nominating McAuliffe.

“I feel very honored, especially to have been nominated by one of my reznet students, Luella Brien of the University of Montana, and by a Native journalist I greatly admire, Mark Trahant of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,” McAuliffe told Journal-isms. “It’s very gratifying to be recognized for what at times seems like very lonely work. Those of us toiling in the diversity biz often feel like we’re out there all by ourselves and that there are no other people in the world like us — and fewer still who are interested in what we do. Come to think of it, we feel a lot like Native American journalists!”

The prize comes with a $1,000 honorarium.

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Whites Are Most of Military Fatalities

“The majority of soldiers and Marines killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were young, white, enlisted personnel from active-duty units, according to a study released Friday by the federal Government Accountability Office, Tony Perry reported Saturday in the Los Angeles Times.

“The demographic study involved 1,841 service personnel who were killed and 12,658 who were wounded, as of May 28.

“Whites, who constitute 67% of the active-duty and reserve forces, accounted for 71% of the fatalities. African Americans are 17% of the overall force and were 9% of the fatalities. Hispanics are 9% of the force and were 10% of the fatalities.

“Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are 3% of the force and were 3% of the fatalities. American Indian/Alaskan Natives are 1% in each category. The race of the remaining fatalities was listed as ‘multiple or unknown.'”

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Black Media Provided Better Civil Rights Coverage

“On Sept. 19, 1955, two white men went on trial in Sumner, Miss., for the slaying of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago. Author David Halberstam would call it the first great media event of the civil rights movement – and with good reason,” Craig Flournoy wrote Sunday in the Dallas Morning News.

“. . . Which publications provided the best coverage? Was it mainstream organizations like The New York Times and Look? Or black-oriented publications like the Birmingham World and Jet?

“The evidence suggests the black media provided the most accomplished coverage. An analysis of all stories about Emmett Till in the four publications showed that the World and Jet provided more sources, broader context, greater depth and a clear statement of the central problem. Look at the people interviewed. One-third of The Times’ stories contained quotes from more than one person. At the Birmingham World, the figure was 80 percent,” wrote Flournoy, who teaches journalism at Southern Methodist University.

Discussing the story today on the listserve of the National Association of Black Journalists, John Britton said, “One of these days, someone will actually look in-depth at the heroism, raw courage, and journalistic integrity of Emory O. Jackson, the long-time editor of The Birmingham World. Unlike its parent publication, The Atlanta Daily World, The Birmingham World, under Jackson, showed no distaste for a good brawl.

“Many worse things are likely to have been done to black people in Birmingham had it not been for the intense probing of The Birmingham World. Mr. Jackson took many a beating and many insults in order to bring information to his readers.

“As he would say to Bull Connor‘s cops when they tried to deny him a look at the police blotter, ‘I’ve come to get the story. And I’m not leaving until I get the story I came for.’

“Mr. Jackson was also a legendary English teacher at Birmingham’s Parker High School, a man able to stamp indelibly on the minds of his typically low-income students all of the grandeur and meaning of Shakespeare’s writings. He belongs in NABJ’s Hall of Fame, if he’s not already there.”

Britton was working at the time at the Atlanta Daily World, and said he got to know Jackson while at Jet magazine, covering the SCLC-led protest movement in Birmingham in 1963.

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Therman Toon, TV Photographer, Dies at 62

“House fires and car wrecks, murders and robberies, school busing and blizzards, even a visit by the pope. A Channel 7 cameraman for nearly four decades, Therman R. Toon filmed them all,” Tom Long wrote Wednesday in the Boston Globe.

”’He saw the world through one eye,’ Marlon Toon of Shrewsbury said yesterday of his father, 62, who died of colon cancer Monday at his home in Dorchester.

”He covered Mayor [ Kevin] White, Ray Flynn, and Mayor [Thomas L.] Menino. He covered the Patriots and the Red Sox when they were winning and when they were losing. There wasn’t anybody in the city that he didn’t know,” Ginny Lund, director of public relations at WHDH-TV, said yesterday.

Mr. Toon was reputed to be the first African-American photographer for a major TV station in New England. ”He was one of the first African-American photographers in the ’60s, and it wasn’t easy for him starting out,” said Lund, describing a 1971 incident in which Toon was knocked to the floor and beaten while covering the New England Rally for God, Family, and Country in the Statler-Hilton Hotel in Boston.

“Because he came from such a large family, there was literally nowhere in the state you could go where someone did not know him by name,” Carmen Fields, reporter/anchor from 1979 to 1986, said in the Bay State Banner.

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Deggans: College Pranks Parading as Debate

“In one week, we’ve seen college journalists in two communities earn national attention with heavy-handed commentary on race,” Eric Deggans wrote in his media column Sunday in the St. Petersburg Times.

“First, former St. Petersburg Times correspondent Jillian Bandes was fired from a columnist job Sept. 14 at the Daily Tar Heel newspaper at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill after writing a piece that said, ‘I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched’ during airport screenings.

“Next, the Independent Florida Alligator, the student-run newspaper at the University of Florida in Gainesville, published a cartoon Sept. 16 featuring Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice turning to rapper Kanye West and saying ‘N—a, please’ as he hands her a huge playing card titled ‘the race card.’

” . . . I’m concerned that these young journalists, who are learning the craft in a conflict-oriented media culture, have confused cutting-edge controversy with meaning, and angry reaction with debate. Both have said they wanted to spark discussion with their work; but it’s harder to have a constructive conversation on race if the dialogue starts with an insult.”

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Short Takes

  • “In front of 700 guests seated in custom-made chairs, surrounded by two dozen handmade trees each tied with 1,500 autumn leaves, cymbidium orchids and crystals,” BET co-founder Sheila Johnson “glided into the little white chapel constructed on Salamander Farm, her estate in Virginia’s luxurious horse country. Preceded by five bridesmaids and her 19-year-old daughter, Paige, her maid of honor, she was escorted by her son, Brett, 15, as the 30-piece Loudoun Symphony, the U.S. Marine Band Brass Quintet and an organist crescendoed the Trumpet Voluntary,” Darragh Johnson reported Sunday in the Washington Post. She married “the Hon. William T. Newman Jr., the Arlington judge who presided over her divorce” from BET co-founder Bob Johnson.
  • Aaron McGruder‘s “Boondocks” strip for Saturday showed Black Entertainment Television spokesman “Michael Llewelyn” denying that BET undercovered Hurricane Katrina. “Within hours of the hurricane, we played several hours of videos from Master P and Juvenile,” the spokesman said in the strip. The real Michael Lewellen told Journal-isms: “I guess after 23 years in communications and media, I may have finally arrived. I just wish Aaron had spelled my last name correctly.”
  • Syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette of the San-Diego Union Tribune examines Chief Justice-nominee John Roberts‘ comments on immigration and concludes that “Roberts’ comments suggest that he didn’t have a very high opinion of either U.S.-born Hispanics or Hispanic immigrants.” Hispanic organizations can’t be blamed for opposing him, Navarrette writes.
  • Abe Kwok and Mary Tan of the Asian American Journalists Association have complained to the Associated Press about a story about Chai Vang, who is charged with killing six men in Wisconsin in November 2004 after a dispute over hunting territory, saying that the story unnecessarily linked Vang’s Hmong heritage with the shooting deaths.
  • Black-owned Granite Broadcasting Corp., facing financial problems, has engaged Kevin O’Brien to serve as a consultant. O’Brien, the fired head of 13 stations of the Meredith Corp. broadcast group, denied making racist comments attributed to him then, and in May reached a settlement with Meredith.
  • Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote last Monday about David Sylvester, the bicyclist who encountered the N-word in Africa. “Blame hip-hop, sure, but blame also the slavery and oppression too many of us carry within,” Pitts wrote. “So long have some of us carried them that we can’t remember what it was like not to. We call ourselves a wretched name and have not the wit to hear what we’re saying or the sense to be ashamed. And being offended seems long ago and far away.”
  • Sheryl Hilliard Tucker last month became Time Inc. editor at large, a promotion from executive editor of Money magazine, Wayne Dawkins noted in the Black Alumni Network newsletter of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. “For over 10 years Hilliard was a mainstay of Money, where she served as an adviser to three managing editors and became, for many of the title’s advertising clients, the face of Money’s editorial leadership, said Norman Pearlstine, editor in chief of Time, Inc.”
  • “Al Roker Prods. just inked a deal to produce a pilot for a family-oriented sitcom for NBC, which Roker will write and exec produce. He’s also shopping a reality skein with Wilhelmina Models on the search for America’s next top child models, a show he believes is a natural franchise for ABC,” Michael Learmonth reported in Variety.
  • Reader complaints that the Washington Post covers killings involving whites differently from those involving African Americans “are a warning of a powerful disconnect that needs attention,” ombudsman Michael Getler wrote Sunday.

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