Greatest Gap Is Reporting on Hispanic Children
“Experts agree that whites account for only half of the nation’s missing children. But white children were the subjects of more than two-thirds of the dispatches appearing on the Associated Press’ national wire during the last five years and for three-quarters of missing-children coverage on CNN, according to a first-of-its-kind study by Scripps Howard News Service,” Thomas Hargrove and Ansley Haman reported Wednesday.
As part of a series on missing children, the news service reported that “Scripps Howard studied 162 missing-children cases reported by the Associated Press from Jan. 1, 2000, through Dec. 31, 2004. Forty-three CNN reports were also studied. Scripps Howard determined the race of the child in each case by checking records maintained by missing-children organizations or by contacting police investigators.
“White children accounted for 67 percent of AP’s missing-children coverage and for 76 percent of CNN’s. But they represented only 53 percent of the 37,665 cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children during the same period and only 54 percent of the cases found in a 2002 study of missing children sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department.
“Black children accounted for 17 percent of the AP stories, 13 percent of CNN’s, 19 percent in the Justice Department’s study and 23 percent of cases reported to the National Center.
“The discrepancies for Hispanic children were greater, accounting for just 11 percent of AP’s reporting and 9 percent of CNN’s stories, yet 18 percent of children reported to the National Center and 21 percent in the Justice Department study.
While CNN executives refused to comment on the study, the story said, Associated Press Managing Editor Mike Silverman; Ivan Roman, executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists; and sociologist David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, were among those who did react.
So did Mattie Mitchell, great-grandmother of missing 4-year-old Jaquilla Scales. Jaquilla, who is black and has never been found, drew only slight national coverage in 2001 when she was snatched from her bedroom in Wichita, Kan., the story said.
“The thing about it, the ghetto mamas love their babies just like the rich people do. And they need to recognize that,” Mitchell said of news executives.
In its lead piece, Scripps Howard reported that “An intensive, seven-month investigative study by Scripps Howard News Service has found that dozens of police departments, and even the U.S. Justice Department, have violated federal laws requiring that the nation’s lost, runaway and kidnapped children must be accurately reported to state and federal authorities. Several police departments have promised to make changes because of this project.”
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San Jose Paper Unable to Sell Viet Mercury
“A proposed sale of the San Jose Mercury News’ Vietnamese paper, Viet Mercury, fell through on Tuesday. Local investor and former Mercury News ad executive Jim Chinh Nguyen was interested in the paper,” Editor & Publisher reported.
“Both Nguyen and Knight Ridder, who owned the publication, concluded that the current revenue and cost would not keep the paper viable.
“‘While we regret that our efforts to sell Viet Mercury to a group of community-based local owners were unsuccessful, both sides tried their best to complete the sale and our discussions ended amicably,’ said Mercury News Publisher George Riggs in a statement.
“There are no other parties interested in Viet Mercury. The paper was founded in 1999 and ceased publication on Nov. 11.”
The majority of Viet Mercury staffers stayed at the Mercury News in other capacities, but four took the buyout and one decided to retire, according to De Tran, former Viet Mercury publisher. The Mercury News listed 52 reporters, copy editors, photographers and newsroom support staff who accepted buyout offers or agreed to retire. Tran, who told Journal-isms he was taking time off, said an additional staffer had hoped to sign on to the new paper and another had been looking for a job.
A farewell notice on the Viet Mercury Web site, written before the latest development, says: “While we are saddened by the end of this era, we are very excited that Viet Mercury will live on under new community-based ownership and a new masthead.
“In two weeks, beginning Dec. 2, VietUSA News will publish its inaugural edition. Under the leadership of Jim Nguyen and a group of community-based investors, the new publication has plans for a nation-wide expansion that will begin right here in San Jose.
“The San Jose Mercury News wishes Jim and his investor group every success, and we look forward to assisting them with the transition for this new endeavor. It has been our pleasure and privilege to serve the Vietnamese community for the past six years, and we hope the community will continue to provide strong support for VietUSA News.”
- Andrew Lam, New America Media: Sale of Viet Mercury Troubles Bay Area Vietnamese (Oct. 26)
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Perkins: “Hello. I’m Ken. And I’m a Plagiarist”
As mentioned in Wednesday’s column, Ken Parish Perkins, the television critic who resigned from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram over plagiarism charges, wrote a commentary that morning that he submitted to the local public television station. Journal-isms now has permission to publish it:
By Ken Parish Perkins
Hello.
I’m Ken.
And I’m a plagiarist.
And not just any plagiarist.
The worst kind.
The serial kind.
The kind so insidious I ought to be registered like some sex offender who, from what I hear, is never cured, either.
I know this because I’ve been reading and hearing about my affliction nonstop for a week now, though in my household it seems so much longer.
In newspapers. On TV. On the radio.
But mostly the death of my writing career has taken place on the Internet, that nameless, soulless bastion of unpoliced zeal. The place where words run wild and free and everyone arrives with his or her own set of facts.
What are the facts? Nothing extraordinary, I’m sorry to report. Nothing premeditated. It was mistakes. Just silly, stupid, careless mistakes that have been illuminated tenfold, from misdemeanor to murder.
But that’s how word travels in our spectacular information age. That’s how opinions flow in our lightning-quick communications technology.
That’s how our faiths take such mighty leaps from black to white while forgetting all the gray peeking out from the middle.
I know of the snowball information effect since I was a part of it until recently, when copy I was going to rework in a review in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wasn’t removed as I rushed to hit deadline.
There it sat, the next day, like beaming see-me-please headlights.
The Star-Telegram circled its wagons and went into defense mode.
Then attack mode.
Had to protect its credibility.
I was gone in days.
And so began my demonization.
First by my own newspaper. Then by my former newspaper.
Then by the bottomless pit of the Internet.
I know, I know. It was my own rope that hung me.
I have no quibble with that.
But who’s tightening it now? We’re living in an intriguing time for newspapers. For journalism. For business. A time of such panic we’re eating our own. Circulation is plummeting. Profit margins are dwindling. Space is being cut. Newsroom employees are being let go. Morale is low. News is being redefined and repackaged. We’re looking for answers but finding few.
Add to that the post-Jayson Blair world in which we now reside journalistically, and it’s like a chokehold from which we can’t escape.
My world is now that world, and it’s one I will likely never escape. This newspaper career I’ve had for the past 20 years is now mush, my legacy now tainted. I can live with that. What I can’t live with is the distrust of readers who think I deliberately misled them, which I did not.
I am not circling my wagon. I refuse to demonize anyone. Point the blame elsewhere.
Writing is what I know. It’s what I do. What’s glorious about this craft is that you don’t need a degree to do it. No permission. You can do without a newspaper or a magazine.
It isn’t a job. It isn’t a label.
Writing is a soulful, spiritual enterprise that just is.
And those are my words.
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Radio One Sees Untapped Market in Talk Radio
“We’re in the black people business,” Radio One Inc. chief executive Alfred C. Liggins III told analysts in a recent conference call, Krissah Williams reports today in the Washington Post. “We are in the business of aggregating audience for this particular demo and providing content to them.”
Williams discusses Liggins’ plans for the first national talk radio network targeting a black audience.
“There are 2,179 news talk radio stations in the country. Their primary audience, according to radio research firm Arbitron, is white men. Only about 7.6 percent of talk radio’s listeners are black,” she writes.
“Holland Cooke, a talk radio consultant for Cleveland-based radio consulting firm McVay Media, said those statistics are indicative of the lack of diversity in talk radio.
“‘I make my living advising talk radio stations, and I keep ending up in these meetings where everyone in the meeting is a white male 50-something-year-old Republican, and the reason we are having the meeting is that the [station’s] ratings just came in and the only people who are listening are white male 50-something Republicans,’ Cooke said. ‘They can’t figure out where the women and black listeners are.’
“Talk programming targeting blacks could fix that, Cooke said.”
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3 Journalists, Lawyer Win Press Freedom Awards
“The Committee to Protect Journalists presented its 2005 International Press Freedom Awards on Tuesday to three journalists and a media lawyer -â?? from Brazil, China, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe -â?? who have endured beatings, threats, intimidation, and jail because of their work,” the committee reported Wednesday.
“The 15th annual awards presentation, held at the Waldorf-Astoria, honored: Galima Bukharbaeva of Uzbekistan, Beatrice Mtetwa of Zimbabwe, Lúcio Flávio Pinto of Brazil, and Shi Tao, currently imprisoned in China. CPJ also honored the late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings with the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for a lifetime of distinguished achievement. Manuel Vázquez Portal , who was imprisoned in Cuba and unable to receive his award in 2003, accepted the honor on Tuesday.”
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Critical Column on Vine Deloria Prompts Picketing
A column critical of Native American writer Vine Deloria, who died Nov. 13, prompted some drum-accompanied picketing at the Denver Rocky Mountain News and a response from Deloria’s son, Philip Deloria.
“Deloria insisted that we shouldn’t sanitize America’s past. Fair enough. But let’s not sanitize his legacy, either,” Editorial Page Editor Vincent Carroll wrote in a Nov. 18 column.
“Vine Deloria Jr. was a complicated thinker, to be sure, and he was open to any number of ideas that might be called ‘wacky,'” Philip Deloria wrote in a letter published (end of column) Wednesday. “He was willing to step outside the boundaries of acceptable knowledge, but he did so as a way of asking others to question seriously that knowledge.
“Of course, this isn’t the first time the News has felt compelled to make light of his intellectual openness and curiosity. Who could forget the complaint a couple of years ago that the Center of the American West’s Wallace Stegner Award was being given, not to a legitimate figure of some import, but to a ‘crank’?”
The son also questioned the timing of the column, the day of the funeral.
“I was not aware the funeral would occur the same day the column appeared and, as I told Vine’s son, I would not have published it on that day if I had it to do over,” Carroll told Journal-isms today. “I do not regret the column’s content, however, just its timing.”
Some 10 to 15 protesters picketed the building Monday about 10:15 a.m, a spokeswoman said, and one delivered a letter to Publisher John Temple‘s office.
The protesters, from the American Indian Movement Colorado, delivered a letter that “included a long statement denouncing the paper, a list of demands, and a number of clippings,” Carroll said. Demand No. 3 was “that the Rocky Mountain News provide a standard, editorial-size column to a member of the Deloria family, or an author of their choosing, to refute the venom of Vincent Carroll.
“So, in effect, we already published the rebuttal they wanted (although not in a deliberate effort to meet their demand) when we printed Philip Deloria’s letter,” Carroll said.
The Thanksgiving holiday prompted some news outlets to publish columns on Deloria by others, including Suzan Shown Harjo, Mary Annette Pember and Billy Frank Jr..
- Christopher Reed , The Guardian, London: Vine Deloria: Working with wit and wisdom for Native American rights
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Short Takes
- Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s views on civil rights, as stated in his 1985 application to a senior post in the Reagan administration, are under fire from at least two African American columnists. “A nominee so willing to prostrate himself to an administration that left virtually nothing to be proud of on civil rights is a solid warning that if Alito gets on the court, he will have no shame exhuming the ideology he claims has been buried,” Derrick Z. Jackson wrote Wednesday in the Boston Globe. In Alabama’s Huntsville Times, David Person wrote last week he was troubled by Alito’s statement then that he was inspired by the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater.
- Stanton Tang, national vice president for broadcast of the Asian American Journalists Association, becomes daytime executive producer for WZZM-TV in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Dec. 19, AAJA reports. “Stanton is moving from Las Vegas where he was the managing editor for Las Vegas ONE and executive producer for KLAS-TV for the last five years.”
- John W. Fountain, journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and former reporter at the New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, contributes a “This I Believe” essay Monday on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Fountain’s essay on his belief in God contrasts with one by Penn Jillette, the vocal half of comedy- magic duo Penn & Teller, who took the opposite view Nov. 21 on “Morning Edition.” Fountain says God became the father he never knew.
