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August Wilson: Nice Play

richard

Dramatist’s Death Front-Page News in Big Cities

“August Wilson, who chronicled the African-American experience in the 20th century in a series of plays that will stand as a landmark in the history of black culture, of American literature and of Broadway theater, died yesterday at a hospital in Seattle. He was 60 and lived in Seattle,” began the story this morning in the New York Times, headlined “August Wilson, Theater’s Poet of Black America, Dies.”

With that, the newspaper gave front-page story display to the passing of a prominent African American for the first time this year. The deaths of actor Ossie Davis, lawyer Johnnie Cochran, singer Luther Vandross and publisher John H. Johnson might have been front-page stories elsewhere, but in the Times they were consigned to brief mentions in a front-page box referring to articles inside.

Still, as with those other passings, newspapers around the country varied in the play they gave the death of the two-time Pulitzer winner, Tony awardee and playwright some called the foremost of his generation. A Broadway theater is to be renamed in his honor.

Wilson’s death was somewhere on the front page of the Los Angeles Times; Orange County (Calif.) Register; Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise; Sacramento Bee; San Diego Union Tribune; San Francisco Chronicle; Hartford (Conn.) Courant; The Day in New London, Conn.; Denver Post; Washington Post; Orlando Sentinel; Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Honolulu Advertiser; Chicago Tribune (PDF); Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader; Baltimore Sun; Boston Globe; St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press (PDF); Star Tribune of Minneapolis; Kansas City Star (PDF); Courier News in Bridgewater, N.J.; Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.; New York Sun; New York Times; Newsday; Charlotte (N.C.) Observer; Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer; Durham (N.C.) Herald Sun; Cleveland Plain Dealer; Philadelphia Inquirer; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PDF); Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C.; Dallas Morning News; Austin (Texas) American-Statesman; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot; Everett (Wash.) Herald; Seattle Times; Seattle Post-Intelligencer (PDF); USA Today and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, according to front pages appearing on the Newseum’s Web site and other sources.

Some of these were simply photos with references to stories inside. The story led the newspaper, however, in the two Seattle papers, published in the city where Wilson lived, and in the Twin Cities, where Wilson had strong ties. It was the off-lead in the Chicago Tribune and stripped across the top of the page in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Newsday. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, based in the city where Wilson was born and set many of his plays, placed a five-column photo of Wilson under the paper’s nameplate, with a story underneath. The Los Angeles Times ran a 4,303-word story written, as in some other papers, by its theater critic, and began it, with photo, on the bottom of the front page. (An appreciation runs Tuesday.)

Yet Wilson was missing from front pages in the Detroit News; Detroit Free Press; Cincinnati Enquirer; Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal; Memphis Commercial Appeal; Rocky Mountain News; The State in Columbia, S.C.; San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News; New York Daily News; Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal; Raleigh News & Observer; Washington Times; Buffalo (N.Y.) News; Houston Chronicle; New Orleans Times-Picayune; St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other heartland newspapers.

“August Wilson, as Tony Kushner said in our obituary this morning, was ‘a giant figure in American theater,'” Sam Sifton, New York Times culture editor, told Journal-isms. “Certainly he was the most significant African-American playwright of the 20th century. I don’t think there was any thought given to not putting his obituary on the front page of the paper.

“And the coverage continues. Tomorrow Wilson will be on the front page of the Arts section, as the subject of an appreciation by Ben Brantley, who is the chief theater critic of The Times.”

While editors at papers that played Wilson prominently said his stature alone made the front-page play a no-brainer, some noted his local connections. George DeLama, Chicago Tribune deputy managing editor for news, noted that his paper had given Wilson its 2004 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize and honored him with a luncheon. The paper devoted an entire inside page today to the playwright. In the Twin Cities, where Wilson moved in 1978, Star Tribune Editor Anders Gyllenhaal recalled that the Aug. 27 news that Wilson had liver cancer was also played on his paper’s front page. “He’s a huge figure,” Gyllenhaal said.

Atlanta is not only home to Kenny Leon, who directed many of Wilson’s plays, Hank Klibanoff, the Journal-Constitution’s deputy managing editor for news, told Journal-isms, but “we have a large and important arts-connected African American community here,” noting, for example, the National Black Arts Festival.

It also might be, as one editor said privately, that Wilson reached upper- middle-class whites in a way that Johnson, Davis, Vandross and Cochran did not.

At the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., Johnson’s death was on page 2 but Wilson was played above the fold on the front page, with 30 more inches on the back page describing Wilson’s works, and a box listing his awards.

“In some circles he may not be well-known, but I felt this may be a chance to educate people,” Jonell McFadden, the A1/planning editor, told Journal-isms. “You’re telling people this is an important person; it was an important story.”

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Conservative Pundits Rally Behind Bill Bennett

Bill Bennett’s radio comments last week linking crime, race and abortion might have been roundly denounced, even by the White House, but Bennett’s conservative friends in the news media are rallying to his side.

The Reagan administration’s education secretary had said, “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do. But your crime rate would go down.”

“What was false?” asked Brit Hume, Washington managing editor of Fox News, on the “Fox News Sunday” roundtable yesterday.

“False was saying that blacks are responsible for the crime rate,” replied Mara Liasson of National Public Radio.

“Well, as a matter of fact, is it not the case that the per-capita crime rate among African Americans in this country is higher than other groups? If that’s true, then it seems to me that’s the point he was making,” said Hume.

“The only thing I would think would be problematic about that is if it carries a suggestion that every black baby in the country is going to grow up and participate in crime at that same rate. That’s an arguable point, it seems to me, at best.”

To which Juan Williams, the African American on the panel, replied: “You know, Brit, it really speaks to a deeply racist mindset to imagine America somehow as better off if we didn’t have those black people around and all those racial issues and all these — you know, so many of these blacks end up in jail, as if they’re criminals because they’re black.”

“. . . To have someone with that credibility on the right speak in that way, I think it suggests a mindset, and it’s indicative among many black conservatives, of why you can’t get black people to trust the Republican Party as a home. So it really speaks to a larger mindset, Brit, about racism in America.

“I think he wishes he hadn’t done that,” said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. “But he had in his mind this very popular book, ‘Freakonomics,’ which in turn was based on an article in ‘The Economist’ that made an argument that abortion had reduced crime because the babies who were being aborted were precisely from the socioeconomic class that was most likely to commit crimes.

“And black Americans have a higher abortion rate than white Americans and are predominantly poorer — and are poorer, obviously, than the average white American. So I think Bill had in his mind the social science argument and he was rejecting it. This is the point Brit was — he was rejecting it. He’s saying this is the wrong way to think about moral issues. . . . I totally want to defend Bill.”

Kristol’s magazine, The Weekly Standard, ran a piece called “Smearing Bill Bennett,” and in the National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy wrote an essay headlined “Shameful Attacks: Bill Bennett stresses our morality . . .and pays the price.”

Bennett, meanwhile canceled a campus appearance scheduled for Tuesday, writing in a letter that, “The current controversy that has arisen around comments I made on my radio show, based on a willful distortion of what I said, will take away from the serious discussion I want to engage in with the student[s] and community at the University of Cincinnati,” Michael Rovito reported today in the student paper, the News-Record.

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Ghiglione to Step Down as Dean at Medill

“Loren Ghiglione plans to step down as dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University at the end of August 2006,” the university announced today.

“Provost Lawrence B. Dumas announced that, upon returning to the Medill faculty following a year’s leave of absence, Ghiglione will be actively involved in developing and directing a media ethics program at Medill. He is slated to become the inaugural incumbent of the Richard Schwarzlose Professorship of Media Ethics, a term professorship the University anticipates establishing shortly.”

Ghiglione, a one-time board member of the Maynard Institute, was honored in April by the National Association of Minority Media Executives for championing diversity.

“He has co-chaired the Dr. Martin Luther King Day Committee two years and made Medill the home of the prestigious Ida B. Wells Award for the employment of minorities in news media. He has supported the development of an annual High School Journalism Day, a Medill-City Colleges of Chicago journalism program, student chapters of minority journalists’ organizations, and the Academy for Alternative Journalism. He has encouraged diversity in the school’s leadership posts and in faculty and staff hiring. More than 20 percent of Medill’s full-time faculty, 50 percent of staff directors and 35 percent of this year’s entering undergraduate class are people of color,” Dumas said in a statement.

As for his successor, “I expect a search will begin later this fall. Such searches normally take an academic year to complete,” Ghiglione told Journal-isms.

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Armstrong Williams in Talks to Return Money

“Commentator Armstrong Williams said Sunday that he is in negotiations to return some of the money he received under a Bush administration contract to promote the president’s education law,” Greg Toppo reported today in USA Today.

“Federal investigators, in reports issued Friday, said the contract violated a government ban on ‘covert propaganda.’ Investigators said the Williams contract and others — including a government-produced video made to look like a news report — were illegal because the government’s role wasn’t made clear.”

The Government Accountability Office said Friday that federal payments to Williams to promote President Bush’s education law were illegal but that a contract with syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher for work on the administration’s marriage initiative was not, as Christopher Lee wrote Saturday in the Washington Post.

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Hispanic Evacuees Threatened With Deportation

“Last Wednesday, police and the U.S. Marshals Service swept into a Red Cross shelter for hurricane refugees here. They blocked the parking lot and exits and demanded identification from about 60 people who looked Hispanic, including some pulled out of the shower and bathroom, according to witnesses. The shelter residents were told to leave within two days or else they would be deported,” Chad Terhune and Evan Pérez reported today in the Wall Street Journal.

“The roundup at the Red Cross center underscores deeper social and economic tensions that are surfacing as areas battered by Katrina and Rita struggle through what will be a frustratingly long recovery. Some communities will need to house thousands of displaced storm victims for months at least, further straining government agencies and relief groups. Meanwhile, undocumented workers are likely to be a major part of the massive cleanup and rebuilding, competing for jobs against some non-Hispanics thrown out of work by the hurricanes,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, commentators of color continued their observations on post-hurrricane developments:

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NABJ Fears Newsroom Cuts Will Hurt Blacks

“Newspapers and other media outlets have turned again to job cuts to slash costs in newsrooms, and the National Association of Black Journalists remains concerned that black journalists will disproportionately feel the pain,” NABJ said in a statement Friday.

“Editors, however, could instead seize this as an opportunity to accelerate the hiring and retention of black journalists, using any new openings created by oversubscribed buyouts as a chance to further diversify their staffs,” the organization’s leaders said in a statement.

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Short Takes

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