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Oprah, Gwen Ifill Speak at Parks Service

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Tribute Personal for Some Journalists in D.C.

Media figures Oprah Winfrey and Gwen Ifill were among those speaking at the Washington memorial service today for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks that capped two days of tributes in the city. Those hours included Parks becoming the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda and a service of personal and professional significance for the black journalists who attended.

Thousands stood in long lines to view Parks’ casket in the Capitol Sunday and today, and hundreds listened to the memorial service inside and outside the 2,500-capacity Metropolitan AME Church, founded by free blacks and a historic site where Franklin D. Roosevelt adviser Mary McLeod Bethune and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt once spoke.

It was the second of three cities where “the mother of the modern civil rights movement,” who died Oct. 24 at age 92, was to be honored. The first was Montgomery, Ala., where Parks’ arrest for refusing to change her seat on a segregated bus prompted a bus boycott and the modern civil rights movement. The final service is scheduled for Wednesday in Detroit, where Parks relocated in 1957.

“She was the kind of woman who had . . . quiet moral authority,” Ifill, senior correspondent for PBS’ “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” told the crowd. Ifill, speaking as a member of the church, said, “Our young people need to be reminded there is more to courage than to get rich or die trying,” a reference to the hit CD and now movie starring rap star 50 Cent.

Winfrey, who parlayed her television talk show into becoming the first African American woman billionaire, said, “I would not be standing here today, or standing where I stand every day,” were it not for Parks. “You, Sister Rosa Parks, changed the trajectory of my life and the lives of so many others in the world.”

Winfrey said she recalled hearing about Parks as a little girl. “In my child’s mind, I thought she must be at least 100 feet tall. . . strong and stalwart, holding a shield to hold back the white folks.”

Winfrey had been criticized for not attending the funeral of Publisher John H. Johnson in Chicago in August. But she received a standing ovation when she concluded her remarks by thanking Parks for helping to change history — “a history that for 400 years said you were not even worthy of a glance, certainly not much more than that. . . . You reclaimed your humanity and gave us back a piece of our own.”

After hearing a roster of politicians, friends and admirers of Parks and civil rights figures, after the choirs had sung and prayers were said, CNN photographer Reggie Selma, a native of Birmingham, Ala., recalled that he grew up hearing about Parks. He was born in 1957, two years after Parks’ famous stand. “I felt a special kinship to it,” Selma said of the service he helped bring to an international audience. Reporting on the day’s events, he said, was like coming full circle.

At the non-air conditioned church, those events included actress Cicely Tyson repeating “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” in the voice of one of her most memorable characters, Miss Jane Pittman; and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., earning a standing ovation after reciting the 23rd Psalm, substituting Parks as its central character: “She walked through the valley of the shadow of death; she feared no evil.” Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., in whose office Parks worked, remembered the newly freed Nelson Mandela’s visit to Detroit in 1990. Discovering that Parks was in the audience, Mandela led a chant: “Rosa Parks! Rosa Parks!”

Bruce Gordon, president of the NAACP, said Southwest Airlines paid for the private plane that is taking Parks’ casket from Detroit to Montgomery to Washington and back to Detroit, and that it was piloted by three African Americans who tilted the plane over Montgomery as they departed Sunday, as their way of waving goodbye. Gospel singer Tramaine Hawkins sang “Amazing Grace,” and the Howard University Choir accompanied the church’s own chorus. Johnnie Carr, 94, who worked with Parks in the Montgomery Improvement Association, and is a veteran of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was one of many to caution that the struggle was not over. She urged young people to get a good education and to obey their parents. “Who knows but that I’m not looking at a future president?” she said.

“I like the way Eleanor Holmes Norton,” the D.C. delegate to Congress, “linked Rosa Parks to the issue of voting rights in D.C.,” Denise Rolark Barnes, publisher of the weekly Washington Informer, said as the nearly three-hour service ended. “Dr. Height told us about how it really was back in those days,” she said, referring to Dorothy Height, president emeritus of the National Council of Negro Women.

“This is history we can’t get in our history books. It was like a shot in the arm. Everybody is going to leave here thinking, ‘What is our Rosa Parks contribution?’ Then there is the history of this church, even the seat I’m sitting in. Frederick Douglass sat in these pews,” Barnes said.

A journalist for a mainstream newspaper noted that most of the journalists who covered the event were African Americans, beneficiaries of the civil rights movement.

One was Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Michel duCille of the Washington Post, who was asked how he saw the event professionally. “Funerals are all about speeches, especially when it is not a local person,” he said. “The mourning is probably already over. I just do it like a Capitol Hill assignment. You look for little slices of life.”

The activist Dick Gregory, one of those who posed for photos outside the church, pronounced the service “fabulous.

“America is known for being impolite enough to never say thanks,” he told Journal-isms. “America was polite today, and for the last three days. I called her the quiet, persistent butterfly,” he said, speaking of Parks. “There is nothing more pretty than a butterfly, but a butterfly can fly across the Atlantic, fly across the Pacific, and a big, bad bald eagle can’t make that trip. God said ‘just be beautiful, sweet and kind, and I’ll work through you.'”

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CNN, C-SPAN Out Front on Parks Coverage

CNN and C-SPAN appeared to be out front in providing live coverage of the Rosa Parks commemorations in Washington.

CNN showed the procession Sunday to the Capitol Rotunda and the tributes there; and did more of the same this morning, though President Bush’s nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito competed for airtime.

At MSNBC, “We had extensive live coverage of today’s events and plan to have live coverage from the funeral on Wednesday,” spokesman Jeremy Gaines told Journal-isms. “We did not have live coverage of last night’s events because we are in taped programming at the time they occurred.”

C-SPAN showed the Parks memorial service in Washington. “C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 aired coverage of Rosa Parks lying in honor in the Capitol and her procession this morning leaving the Capitol, as well as covered the visit by Sen [Bill] Frist and Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito,” spokeswoman Jennifer Moire told Journal-isms. “The network will air coverage of the Detroit service but cannot say at this point whether it will be live.”

Fox News Channel planned to discuss Parks tonight on a segment of Brit Hume’s “Special Report.” [ Added Nov. 1: The network plans to carry the Detroit event live, a spokeswoman said, with correspondent Jeff Goldblatt covering.]

At Black Entertainment Television, “We will be televising a documentary special on the life of Rosa Parks on Sunday, November 13 at Noon ET/PT,” said spokesman Michael Lewellen. “Coverage of the memorial services and special observances will be part of that one-hour special.”

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“Powerhouses” Plan Black Talk-Radio Network

“Two powerhouses of urban radio are teaming up to launch an African-American-centered talk-radio network, the cornerstone of which will be programming hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton,” Clea Simon reported Saturday in the Boston Globe.

“Baltimore-based Radio One, the nation’s seventh-largest radio company, and Reach Media, which owns and syndicates the highly successful ‘Tom Joyner Morning Show,’ aim to roll out the network after the first of the year. Radio One owns a controlling interest in Reach Media.

“If all goes as planned, the fledgling talk network will begin broadcasting on as many as 10 of Radio One’s 70 stations, including AM outlets in Baltimore, Detroit, Miami, Cleveland, Washington D.C., and a handful of other cities. The programming would also be offered to stations not owned by Radio One.

”When we look across the landscape of formats that are missing,” Radio One CEO Alfred Liggins III said in the story, “black — African-American — [talk radio] is one that is really underrepresented.” The network is as yet unnamed.

Bay State Banner Celebrates 40th Anniversary

“It was 1965 — the height of the civil rights movement, and his father definitely disapproved.

” Why would a black man, a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School, leave his job as a federal prosecutor in Boston to start a weekly newspaper?” Adrienne P. Samuels began her story Saturday in the Boston Globe.

“For Melvin Miller, then 31, the answer was simple. He didn’t want to. He heard the call.

“Now, 40 years later, the 30,000-circulation Boston Banner (known outside the Hub as the Bay State Banner) is celebrating a legacy of providing coverage of the black community in a city that at times has been hostile to black people and black business.”

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Caldwell Case: “Triumph of the Black Journalists”

“The story of Earl Caldwell, whose U.S. Supreme Court case galvanized journalists and First Amendment advocates across the country in 1972, is worth retelling as Congress considers a federal shield law for journalists,” Steve Montiel, a former director of the Maynard Institute, wrote Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“With the spotlight on Judith Miller of the New York Times, Caldwell and his case have been barely visible in mainstream media, or any media, including the blogosphere.

“Why should we care about the forgotten case of United States vs. Caldwell?” asked Montiel, who is now director of the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.

“Caldwell’s story exists against a backdrop of race and power; journalistic passion, courage and betrayal; of black journalists desegregating America’s newsrooms; of political assassinations, politicized trials, FBI spying on citizens, Nixon’s enemies lists and Watergate.

“. . . His case, grouped with the cases of two other journalists as Branzburg vs. Hayes, was the only time the Supreme Court has considered whether the First Amendment guarantees journalists protection from revealing confidential information.

“. . . [T]he decision established, for the first time, a basis for some form of constitutional journalistic privilege.

“. . . In a course he developed at Hampton” University, “Caldwell calls his case ‘the triumph of the black journalists.'”

Upset When CNN Cuts Away From Spanish Speech

Gabriel Cazares, an 85-year-old former mayor of Clearwater, Fla., became angry “after watching CNN break away from Gov. Jeb Bush’s remarks to residents as Hurricane Wilma threatened the area. While other stations carried Bush’s remarks in both English and Spanish, CNN broke away when the governor began to speak in Spanish,” Jose Cardenas reported Saturday in the St. Petersburg Times.

“Cazares believes that showed disregard for Spanish speakers in Florida, and said he plans to write a protest letter to the network. He urges LULAC members to do the same,” referring to the League of United Latin American Citizens.

“Cazares also wants to bring attention to a boycott that LULAC, which he has rejoined, launched against the network last summer.

“LULAC members think CNN is hostile toward immigrants because one of its reporters, host Lou Dobbs, has spoken regularly against illegal immigrants on his program Lou Dobbs Tonight.

“Laurie Goldberg, a spokeswoman for CNN, wrote in an e-mail response to the St. Petersburg Times that CNN has a separate Spanish-language channel that carried in-depth coverage of hurricane preparations and sound bites from Bush on Sunday afternoon.” sound bites from Bush on Sunday afternoon.”

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Janice Min Defends Being “Caught Up in Celebrity”

Janice Min, editor of Us Weekly, calls her magazine “the high school newspaper of Hollywood,” and defends it from critics who fault it for contributing to a culture whose priorities are askew.

“The magazine “brings pleasure to millions and millions of women every week, about subjects they are interested in,” Min told Douglas Brown in Monday’s Denver Post. “I think anyone who tries to undermine interest in celebrities is insulting the vast numbers of women who are interested in celebrity news and celebrity fashion. There’s an industry for it, and a huge appetite for it. . . . Our magazine celebrates celebrity, and the other magazines tear down celebrities.

“Our readers don’t resent the celebrity lifestyle,” Min continued. “They’re caught up in celebrity in a very positive way . . . It is something that has gotten under their skin.”

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