Maynard Institute archives

Black Men’s “Image” Led to ’95 March

by richard0498

Farrakhan Traces Origin to Portrayals as Thugs

On the eve of the Millions More Movement sequel to the 1995 Million Man March, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam said the event 10 years ago “shattered” the negative image of black men as bandanna-wearing, gun-toting thugs, his motivation for generating the original march.

As of last night, 1,300 requests for media credentials to Saturday’s event on Washington’s National Mall had been processed, according to Linda Wharton-Boyd, its national director for media and public relations, and she said they were still coming. She also said George E. Curry, editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, would appear before the throng, “representing all the African American journalists.”

“I am speaking on the media in general and the Black Press in particular,” Curry told Journal-isms, saying he is scheduled between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. “It’s certainly appropriate for journalists to address issues about the media.”

Economist and commentator Julianne Malveaux, who co-chaired the Labor and Working Issues part of the program, is also addressing the crowd, Wharton-Boyd said.

Farrakhan has given 30 interviews during the three days he has spent in Washington, including an appearance today before about 15 journalists at the Washington Post, she said. On National Public Radio’s “News and Notes” with Ed Gordon, the Nation of Islam leader was asked about the 1995 event. “There was also a want to initiate a movement, if you will,” Gordon said. “Do you believe that the movement itself was successful?”

“No, because our focus was truly on the day,” Farrakhan replied. “The thing that motivated me to do the Million Man March was the image of young black men that was portrayed around the world showing black men with colorful bandannas on their head and shotguns in their hand.

“This image made the black man look like a bestial, savage thug. And so if government or the National Guard or police force moved against black youth and destroyed many, there would be no outcry in the world because it would seem as though America were ridding itself of an unwanted piece of the fabric of American society.

“So I went on that speaking tour, ‘stop the killing.’ And at the end of that tour, I asked black men in New York City if I came back, would they come out to hear what I have to say to black men, and they said yes.

“And within four to six weeks, I was back in New York and out of my mouth came a call for a million black men to come to Washington. And that went around the world. And the image that black men had through media was shattered in one day.”

Meanwhile, broadcasters firmed up more of their coverage plans.

  • Black Entertainment Television said it plans to interrupt its regular programming with updates at 11:10 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 2:10 p.m. and 4:10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time, a news release said. That programming consists of “The Parkers” from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.; “106 & Park” at 11 a.m.; “BET.com Countdown” at 12:30 p.m.; “Rap City Top 10” at 1 p.m.; “Top 25 Countdown” at 2 p.m.; “Rap City Top 10” at 5 p.m. and “106 & Park” at 6 p.m.

In addition, the network plans “One Million More — A Decade Later in the Life of Black America,” a one-hour special hosted by BET News anchor Jacque Reid on Sunday at noon Eastern and Pacific time. “Black America’s youth will also take center stage as ‘Cousin’ Jeff Johnson, host of BET’s THE COUSIN JEFF CHRONICLES, travels along side some young people making their trek to the march. BET News reporter Sharon Carpenter will add the march’s point of view from the hip-hop world in a conversation with rapper/producer Kanye West; and hip-hop legend Russell Simmons weighs in on today’s critical issues,” a news release said.

  • CNN had an “in-depth” interview with Farrakhan on Thursday, conducted by reporter Tom Foreman, looking ahead to the weekend and discussing Hurricane Katrina. Kathleen Koch analyzed the state of the black family the same day. The network will carry some of the event live via cut-ins, Darius Walker, Washington-based senior director for news coverage, told Journal-isms on Thursday. “We plan on being there in force,” he said. “How much will be live will be determined by the news of the day.”
  • National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered” plans to include a discussion Saturday with Ron Walters, University of Maryland government and politics professor, and conservative commentator Shelby Steele. Reporter Allison Keyes reported on the event Friday for “Morning Edition,” and “All Things Considered’s” coverage on Friday included a commentary by conservative commentator and linguist John McWhorter.
  • On Washington’s WJLA-TV, “We’re planning our normal news coverage for Saturday on ABC-7,” news director Jamie Foster said today by e-mail. “Our first newscast is at 11pm, so that will be our only coverage, unless there is a ‘breaking news event’ involving the Millions More Movement.” He said WJLA’s sister cable station, all-news NewsChannel 8, “will have live coverage during their 7am show and their Noon show. They may also do some cutins.”

As reported Wednesday, the event will be covered live on C-SPAN and on Washington’s WPFW-FM.

A sampling of commentary and news reports:

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CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Expands to an Hour

“Reliable Sources,” the Howard Kurtz-hosted CNN Sunday talk show on the news media, expands to an hour starting this weekend, a CNN spokeswoman confirmed today, but whether the additional half-hour means more journalists of color will appear is an open question.

“Unfortunately, we don’t discuss our bookings,” spokeswoman Edie Emery told Journal-isms.

A 2003 analysis of the show’s bookings by the media-watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found: “White guests outnumbered all others on Reliable Sources, 194 to 9, making the show’s guest roster 96 percent white. To put it another way, 33 percent more guests were employees of National Review than were people of color.”

A show last month invited three black journalists to discuss why the media had devoted so little attention to the “other America” represented by poor and black residents of New Orleans.

But when the show went to its reporters’ roundtable, to discuss the nomination of John Roberts as chief justice, a subject considered nonracial, it reverted to three white journalists.

“Reliable Sources” will now begin at 10 a.m. Eastern time, followed by “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. A replay of Saturday night’s “On the Story,” in which CNN correspondents discuss what they have covered, is to air at 1 p.m. Sunday.

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Historically Black College Ends Free-Paper Program

“As the newspaper industry struggles to attract younger readers, a program that provides newspapers at no cost to students in Tennessee State University residence halls has ended because the university says it can no longer afford them,” Ashley Goodman reported Thursday on the Black College Wire.

“USA Today’s Collegiate Readership Program, which supplies USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Nashville Tennessean to seven dormitories, was scrapped this year.

“The program, which had been in operation for four years, cost the university $10,741.50 last academic school year, according to Larry Carpenter, assistant director of housing,” Goodman wrote.

The program started in 1997 at Penn State University. USA Today’s Douglas Fraser, the program’s director, said in the story that as of March, nine of the 350 schools participating were historically black colleges or universities. In addition to Tennessee State, they were Wiley and Bethune-Cookman colleges and Alabama A&M, Delaware State, Elizabeth City State, Florida A&M, Grambling State and Norfolk State universities.

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Move from Old Media “Seemingly Irrevocable”

A survey of 18- to 34-year-olds for the Carnegie Corporation of New York concludes that “the future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news,” Merrill Brown, a media consultant and founding editor in chief of MSNBC.com, wrote this week in the Carnegie Reporter.

“Surprisingly to some, among 18-to-34-year-olds, local TV is ranked as the most used source of news, with over 70 percent of the age group using it at least once a week and over half of those surveyed using local TV news at least three times a week. The local TV ranking is driven in an overall sense by women and low- and middle-income groups. Meanwhile, the second-most-used weekly news source, the Internet, is number one among men, high-income groups, and broadband users.

“With over half of Internet users now connecting via high-speed broadband services, daily use of the Internet among all groups is likely to climb, because broadband access, the way an increasing number of households go online, makes daily usage more likely. Already, Internet portals — widely used, general interest web sites such as Yahoo.com and MSN.com that include news streams all day, every day — have emerged in the survey as the most frequently cited daily news source, with 44 percent of the group using portals at least once a day for news.

Measured by daily use, local TV comes in second at 37 percent, followed by network or cable TV web sites at 19 percent, newspapers at 19 percent, cable networks at 18 percent and national broadcast networks at 16 percent.”

A Brown associate, Rich McGuire, told Journal-isms no racial breakdown of the findings was available. “Ethnic/racial comparisons were not a primary objective of this research. As a result, the gender and age profile of specific racial groups do not represent the U.S. Census data as closely as we would like to report racial group findings,” he said.

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Hoy Editor Asks, What About Spanish Media?

The excoriation of mainstream news coverage of the deadly mudslides in Guatemala by Veronica Villafañe, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, drew agreement from the Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins but criticism from Javier J. Aldape, editor of the Tribune Co.’s Spanish-language Hoy newspapers.

Aldape, a former NAHJ board member, said NAHJ should have acknowledged coverage by Spanish-language media outlets, such as his own.

“On the 5th, we ran a front-pg item and it led our Latin American coverage. On the 6th, [Hurricane] Stan led our coverage, dominating the front page. On the 7th, another front-pg item, also leading our Latin American coverage, with an on-site report from El Diario de Hoy. On the 10th, another front-pg item, also leading our Latin American coverage, with an on-site report from Prensa Libre,” Aldape wrote Villafañe, who could not be reached for comment.

Tompkins, broadcast and online group leader, raised similar concerns as Villafañe in his own “Al’s Morning Meeting” column, headlined “Charity Fatigue.” Tompkins noted that, “One week after the floods began, The National Association of Hispanic Journalists posted a resource page on their Web site for anybody who (still) cares about the tragedy that is (still) growing in Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador.”

He also mentioned this:

“‘Survivor: Guatemala,’ the fake reality show on CBS, mentioned the disaster last night. The network did not cancel its scheduled episode, which included torrential rain as part of the plot line, but it did air a public service announcement at the end of the program, directing viewers to the CBS homepage for information about how to donate to one of the relief organizations helping the region.

“But when you go to the section of the CBS.com Web site that the roughly 15-second PSA referred to, you will see that the ‘Survivor: Guatemala’ charity page recommends that people give to the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as one way to help the people of Guatemala. The site also includes FEMA tips on giving. Clearly, CBS has Hurricane Stan confused with Hurricane Katrina.”

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Comedian Cho Has Little Use for Michelle Malkin

Comedian Margaret Cho devotes a section of her new book, “I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight” (Riverhead Books), to conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, concluding, “African Americans have Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice. There’s a new race traitor on the block, and her name’s Michelle Malkin!”

But, Cho said, “If spouting racist propaganda and being a tool of conservatives are worth the right to live in the monochromatic world of right-wing political pandering, then I applaud Malkin’s effort. She inflames the need to uphold the ideals of equality and fairness, and she puts a new face on hate. I’d be happy to argue with someone who looks a bit like me for a change.”

Some first heard of Malkin after Unity ’99 in Seattle, when she dissed the gathering of 6,000 journalists of color in her Seattle Times column. She said she preferred to be known for her ideas and not for her Filipinio heritage, and so she had refused to join the Asian American Journalists Association.

Since she left Seattle and the Times for national syndication, Malkin has defended the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, publishing a book last year, “In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror.”

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Gossip Says Jayson Blair Up to Old Tricks

Disgraced former New York Times reporter “Jayson Blair’s most recent job was as an editor at Phoenix Books. He was editing ‘The Karasik Conspiracy,’ a thriller about terrorism, drug importation, Machiavellian machinations within our own pharmaceutical companies with a plot calling for invading them via Internet,” gossip columnist Cindy Adams wrote Tuesday in the New York Post.

“Author Julie Chrystyn tells me:

“‘I thought I’d give Jayson a break. He’d phone bright and early. He seemed conscientious. I was impressed. Besides, this was fiction, which is something for which he clearly has a talent.

“‘Then one midnight the guy called. I felt something was off. He said he wanted to review my contract, to ‘save’ me. I said I have lawyers and agents; I’m in good hands, thanks. He persisted, and I dodged. He said, ‘From now on, you have to run everything by me. You have to look out. I’ll protect you.’ He trashed people I was involved with, trashed whoever had been good to him and was giving him a chance. He became an angry young man.

“‘He was in North Carolina, I was in Arizona, and he wanted me to meet him in Texas. I said I wasn’t ready. He said then he’d fly to me the next day. I said I’m on a 45-day deadline, this is a waste of time; I’d e-mail him and we’d meet later on. By now my head was spinning. He wanted to be my ghostwriter. I thought he was kidding. Then he said, “Lie. Tell everyone you met with me.” ‘

“Julie has not heard from him since, nor does she want to. The book, due this month, has had to be postponed. Its new pub. date is January.”

Michael Viner, who formed Phoenix Books after publishing Blair’s 2004 memoir, “Burning Down My Masters’ House: My Life at The New York Times,” did not return telephone calls from Journal-isms, but another employee said without elaboration that Blair could not fairly be called an editor at the company. He referred calls to Viner.

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Lerone Bennett: Image “Revolution” Still Needed

“If you want to change what men and women are doing, and not doing, you must first change the image they have of themselves and their situation,” retired Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett Jr. writes in the 60th anniversary issue of Ebony, dated November.

“In the beginning, the EBONY Revolution laid siege to the Bastille hiding the Black image and announced a permanent revolution — which is needed today as much as it was needed in 1945 — to refresh, to free and to transform the consciousness of Blacks and Whites.

“. . . The same EBONY, the EBONY of the sit-inners and hip-hoppers and Freedom Riders, the EBONY of the NAACP and NUL and MBA and NBA, the EBONY of Beale Street and Wall Street and 125th Street and Auburn Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard and Malcolm X Boulevard and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, the EBONY of Louis Armstrong, who helped invent New Orleans, and the EBONY of the New Orleans evacuees who speak to him and through him to the Great Black Shout that gave New Orleans and America a new song and a new meaning, the same EBONY, young and sassy as ever, calls us at this 60th turning of the road to the permanent revolution in sensibility and culture that it embodies.”

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Spike Lee Plans Film on Katrina Disaster

“Filmmaker Spike Lee on Tuesday announced he is making a film for HBO about the post-Hurricane Katrina flooding in New Orleans, and said he wouldn’t be shocked if conspiracy theories of intentional government involvement in the flooding proved true,” TV columnist Chase Squires of the St. Petersburg Times reported Wednesday.

“Lee’s appearance on CNN, to promote his new co-authored memoir/biography, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking To It, followed a report on the rumors circulating among evacuees that the government somehow engineered the flooding of the largely black and poor Ninth Ward section of New Orleans.

“. . . Lee, 47, said he is already in development on a film with HBO called When the Levee Broke.”

Meanwhile, the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Web site, Journalism.org, has devoted a section to how the Katrina story is being covered, including press criticism and Web coverage.

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Short Takes

  • John X. Miller, public editor of the Detroit Free Press, board treasurer for the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and a Washington and Lee University alum, returns to the Virginia school this winter as the university?s second Donald W. Reynolds Distinguished Visiting Professor. Miller is to teach ?Race, Gender and the Media? and ?Introduction to Reporting.? He remains at the Free Press.
  • “When a study released Tuesday revealed that just 14 percent of the guests on the influential Sunday morning political talk shows are women, and that 56 percent of the episodes included no women at all, I wondered if anyone was surprised. I wasn’t,” Joan Ryan wrote Thursday in the San Francisco Chronicle. “One need only listen to the weekly interviews and discussions — the dearth of ideas, the ponderous iteration of solutions that haven’t worked, the recycled assumptions that rattle inside the beltway like a shoe in a dryer — to know that women aren’t at the table.”
  • The media-watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting on Wednesday called an item in the Oct. 9 Parade magazine “an inaccurate smear against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The smear, appearing in the Q&A column ‘Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,’ was a response to a letter writer who wanted to know ‘where Fidel Castro gets the dough to shore up his bankrupt regime.'”
  • The Asian American Journalists Association is continuing its back-and-forth with Washingtonian magazine columnist Harry Jaffe, who wrote that a reporter who did not get a job at the Washington Post was “doomed by diversity.” Jaffe responded in Wednesday’s Journal-isms, and AAJA now replies: “We at AAJA find it laughable that Harry Jaffe equates our criticism with ‘killing the messenger.’ He chides us, ‘Facts hurt.’ Let’s look at the facts: Jaffe didn’t follow up on whether the Post did end up giving that reporting position to a Hispanic or why the paper may have needed diversity efforts. His was a column without balance or context and, thus, without merit. Facts indeed.”
  • “The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the arrest of a newspaper publisher by Nigeria’s State Security Service (SSS),” the organization said Thursday. “Owei Kobina Sikpi, publisher of the tabloid Weekly Star in the southern city of Port Harcourt, has been held without charge since Tuesday, the paper’s editor, Obinna Ahiaidu told CPJ. He said the arrest was over an article that accused a local official of money laundering.”
  • Millete Berhanemaskel and Jackie Charles, who went to Liberia to cover elections there as fellows of the National Association of Black Journalists, have begun to file stories.
  • The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C., ran competing book reviews, favorable and unfavorable, of a memoir by former senator Jesse Helms. “Here’s the problem. Newspapers don’t run competing book reviews. I can’t say it’s never happened, but I’ve never seen it. Nobody I’ve talked to has seen it,” Cat Warren of the Independent Weekly in Durham, N.C., noted Oct. 5.

“And J. Peder Zane, the N&O book editor, says it’s never happened in the eight years he’s been the book editor.”

  • “Latin View,” a weekly television show launched in Denver three years ago, is reaching a national audience thanks to the efforts of host and producer Sherri Vasquez, Francisco Miraval wrote Sept. 20 in Hispanic Business magazine. The show is broadcast on public television in more than 30 U.S. cities.
  • “Sharp Talk with Al Sharpton,” debuts on the TV One cable channel Oct. 28 at 8:30 p.m. Eastern, the cable network announced Wednesday. The half-hour show “takes place in Levels barbershop in Brooklyn, where public officials, journalists, authors, sports figures, celebrities, policy experts and other interesting characters join Rev. Sharpton in tackling a wide range of cultural, political and economic topics.”

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