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Debating Christmas Values

richard

Make War on “Holiday” Word or Help Save Lives?

Here’s a challenge: The crisis in Darfur, Sudan, where killings, rapes, burning and looting continue, has receded from the headlines. Meanwhile, the religious right, and the commentators who make common cause with it, are making an issue of retail stores and White House greeting cards that say “Happy Holidays” and not “Merry Christmas.”

So, wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof yesterday, continuing a public quarrel with a Fox News Channel commentator who has decried the so-called “war on Christmas”: “Let us all pray for Bill O’Reilly.

“Let us pray that Mr. O’Reilly will understand that the Christmas spirit isn’t about hectoring people to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ rather than ‘Happy Holidays,’ but about helping the needy.

“Let us pray that Mr. O’Reilly will use his huge audience and considerable media savvy to save lives and fight genocide, instead of to vilify those he disagrees with. Let him find inspiration in Jesus, rather than in the Assyrians,” Kristof continued.

“I have a challenge for Mr. O’Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I’ll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped and then mutilated — and to the government-armed thugs who do these things.

“You’ll have to leave your studio, Bill. You’ll encounter pure evil. If you’re like me, you’ll be scared. If you try to bully some of the goons in Darfur, they’ll just hack your head off. But you’ll also meet some genuine conservative Christians — aid workers who live the Gospel instead of sputtering about it — and you’ll finally be using your talents for an important cause.”

O’Reilly replied today on his Web site, “As everyone who watches this program knows, we donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the poor each year through proceeds from BillOReilly.com.

“In fact, the website was actually set up to help the needy, and I think it’s safe to say that this year alone, I’ve donated more money to help the poor than you have in your entire life. What say you, sir?” He commended Kristof’s “good work” on Darfur and denied that he had ignored it.

Jan Egeland, U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, still has Darfur on his front burner. He told the Security Council “that the largest humanitarian operation in the world, in Darfur, remains ‘under constant threat, and our operations can now be disrupted completely any day and anywhere in Darfur’ because of continuing violence,” according to Edith M. Lederer, writing for the Associated Press.

Egeland continued, “Humanitarian aid cannot be an alibi for unwillingness to address the root causes of conflict,” Lederer reported. “The greatest contribution we can make to addressing humanitarian crises in Africa is determined, energetic and sustained efforts to bring an end to conflict and injustice that cause so much suffering in Africa.”

Columnists of color have not revisited the Darfur conflict, but they have weighed in on the so-called “War on Christmas.”

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Jack Anderson Was “Best Pure Reporter” He’s Seen

When the roster is compiled of those who learned their craft under muckraker Jack Anderson, who died Saturday at age 83, include Frank S. Washington, a black journalist based in Detroit who specializes in the auto industry.

“To this day, Jack Anderson is probably the best pure reporter that I’ve ever seen,” Washington told Journal-isms. “It was the kind of experience you couldn’t get anywhere else.”

In the New York Times’ obituary today, Douglas Martin wrote, “Mr. Anderson was a flamboyant bridge between the muckrakers of the early 20th century and the battalions of investigative reporters unleashed by news organizations after Watergate. He relished being called ‘the Paul Revere of journalism’ for his knack for uncovering major stories first almost as much as he enjoyed being at the top of President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

“His journalistic reach extended to radio, television and magazines, and his scoops were legion.”

Anderson’s “investigative column once appeared in more than 1,000 newspapers with 40 million readers, won a Pulitzer Prize and prompted J. Edgar Hoover to call him ‘lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.'”

Washington came to work for Anderson in the late 1970s as one of five journalists in a 12-week unpaid internship program. He was the only person of color in the office, part of a converted house in downtown Washington described as castle-like. The internships were not advertised; he learned about it through a Republican National Committee staffer he had gone to school with in New Orleans. Washington had spent about three years at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Interns were expected to produce copy for the 20 radio reports a week that aired on Mutual Broadcasting. If hired as a full staffer, as Washington was after the internship, “your responsibility was to do columns,” he said. “It was a daily column that had to be fed.” The staff also had to supply material for daily reports on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America.”

“A five- or 10-minute conversation with Jack was worth one or two years of experience. He just knew things,” Washington said. For example, “When you go into an adversarial interview, know the answer to the first two questions you ask,” Washington recalled Anderson telling him. That way, “You can judge how truthful the person is being once you go into the questions you don’t know the answer to.” On another occasion, days after the Iranian revolution of 1979, he said, Anderson took him into the Iranian embassy in Washington. He recalls glass ceilings in rooms used for opium-smoking.

Washington said he didn’t realize the value of his work with Anderson until the 1984 convention in Atlanta of the National Association of Black Journalists, where he worked the job fair. Joe Boyce, then Time’s Atlanta bureau chief, told him how rare it was that an applicant had his D.C. reporting experience. He leveraged that into a job as a stringer in the Time bureau, and then, in 1988, went to work for Newsweek in Detroit. There, he came to specialize in automobiles.

Today Washington is managing partner and editor of the AboutThatCar.com Web site, freelances on automotive subjects and writes a syndicated weekly column, also named AboutThatCar.com, that he said runs in about 30 African American newspapers.

The Web site Fishbowl DC today listed some of the other interns and Anderson proteges: the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, who wrote an appreciation for the Post while on vacation and on his way to the airport, as he told online readers today; CNN’s Ed Henry; Fox’s Brit Hume; National Journal’s Julie Kosterlitz; the Boston Globe’s Michael Kranish and Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, among others.

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Wall St. Journal Lists Blacks, Latinos in Pipeline

Updated Dec. 20:

“We have never had as many minorities in the pipeline” for top management jobs, a Wall Street Journal spokesman said Tuesday.

Spokesman Robert Christie was quoted in this space Monday as saying there were no African American or Latino journalists in the pipeline for such jobs, but he said today that he had misunderstood the question.

The original inquiry was raised after the Journal promoted four people to deputy managing editor and one to senior deputy managing editor, as reported Friday. They included Indian-born Raju Narisetti, who as deputy managing editor “will continue to direct all Journal reporting teams and coverage from Europe and the Middle East and to serve as editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe,” an announcement said. No African Americans or Latinos were in this group.

“There are indeed minorities in the management pipeline at The Wall Street Journal,” Christie said Tuesday. “We are proud of the number of news staffers who are minorities and indeed in the management pipeline at paper. In fact, we have never had as many minorities in the pipeline than at this present time.

“Some examples of minorities in the management pipeline include Jesse Lewis who is assistant managing editor in Europe; Constance Mitchell Ford who is our Economics editor; Paula Szuchman, who is deputy editor of the Pursuits section and Shelly Branch, a page one editor.”

Meanwhile, Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist, released a study that said “while the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times,” according to a news release.

“The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.”

The study is portrayed as “the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.”

[Added Dec. 21: Wall Street Journal response at the end of this posting.

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New Orleans: “You’re Not Seeing It” in Your Paper

“New Orleans is a devastated city. I know, that’s not exactly breaking news. But I just got back from there, and all I can say to everyone I’ve talked to since is: New Orleans is a devastated city, almost beyond belief,” Mark Fitzgerald wrote today in Editor & Publisher.

“You’ve got to see it, I told people again and again this weekend, back home in Chicago. Everyone in America should see it.

“Because you’re not seeing it in your newspaper. Not really.

“The press, of course, is famous for rushing to disasters, and then moving on. But it’s moved on too fast in New Orleans, with the result that Americans either figure the city has descended into anarchy, or is doing just fine.”

Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review recaps the debate over the words “Refugees” and “Evacuees,” through internal e-mails at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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Statewide Black Paper Planned in Florida

“Working with his brother Charles, Glenn Cherry has developed plans for a weekly paper called the Florida Courier, which would circulate across the state with black-focused news from a multitude of communities,” Eric Deggans wrote today in the St. Petersburg Times. “Initially, the Cherrys hope to get 100,000 copies circulated in five markets: Tampa/St. Petersburg, Orlando, Jacksonville, Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale/West Palm Beach/Miami; by the end of 2006, they plan to have 300,000 copies available each week.

“At a time when big newspaper chains have announced space cutbacks, shrinking circulation numbers and massive layoffs, the Cherry brothers will stake their family-owned company’s future on a corner of the media business increasingly seen as outmoded and in decline.

“In the process, they will create a type of publication that exists almost nowhere else in the nation — a statewide newspaper focused on Florida’s nearly 3 million black people.”

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Needed: Bolder Women as Op-Ed Voices

“What does it take to get a woman to speak her mind?” began a Dec. 12 column by Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

“That was one of the nagging questions hovering like a storm cloud over 35 journalists, most of us women, gathered Thursday in Washington to talk about why more of us aren’t writing for newspaper opinion pages.

“. . . As we hashed it out, it became clear that we’re never going to change the gender equation on op-ed pages until more women are willing to take on the risks that come with writing for them. Linguist and author Deborah Tannen said what all of us already knew from experience, that women have good reason to pull back because they are attacked for stepping out. Sonni Efron, who solicits and edits opinion articles for The Los Angeles Times, said she has to coax some women not to pull their punches.

“‘Outspoken women attract more attacks,’ she said. ‘But women are coming into positions where we want them to opine. They haven’t had much practice doing that, and they need to learn.'”

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Short Takes

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Added Dec. 21:

Wall St. Journal Statement on UCLA Survey

The Wall Street Journal’s news coverage is relentlessly neutral. Of that, we are confident.

By contrast, the research technique used in this study hardly inspires confidence. In fact, it is logically suspect and simply baffling in some of its details.

First, its measure of media bias consists entirely of counting the number of mentions of, or quotes from, various think tanks that the researchers determine to be “liberal” or “conservative.” By this logic, a mention of Al Queda in a story suggests the newspaper endorses its views, which is obviously not the case. And if a think tank is explicitly labeled “liberal” or “conservative” within a story to provide context to readers, that example doesn’t count at all. The researchers simply threw out such mentions.

Second, the universe of think tanks and policy groups in the study hardly covers the universe of institutions with which Wall Street Journal reporters come into contact. What are we to make of the validity of a list of important policy groups that doesn’t include, say, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the AFL-CIO or the Concord Coalition, but that does include People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals? Moreover, the ranking the study gives to some of the groups on the list is simply bizarre. How seriously are we to take a system that ranks the American Civil Liberties Union slightly to the right of center, and that ranks the RAND Corp. as more liberal than Amnesty International? Indeed, the more frequently a media outlet quotes the ACLU in this study, the more conservative its alleged bias.

Third, the reader of this report has to travel all the way Table III on page 57 to discover that the researchers’ “study” of the content of The Wall Street Journal covers exactly FOUR MONTHS in 2002, while the period examined for CBS News covers more than 12 YEARS, and National Public Radio’s content is examined for more than 11 years. This huge analytical flaw results in an assessment based on comparative citings during vastly differing time periods, when the relative newsworthiness of various institutions could vary widely. Thus, Time magazine is “studied” for about two years, while U.S. News and World Report is examined for eight years. Indeed, the periods of time covered for the Journal, the Washington Post and the Washington Times are so brief that as to suggest that they were simply thrown into the mix as an afterthought. Yet the researchers provide those findings the same weight as all the others, without bothering to explain that in any meaningful way to the study’s readers.

Suffice it to say that “research” of this variety would be unlikely to warrant a mention at all in any Wall Street Journal story.

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