Police Union Strikes Back Over Hidden Cameras
Seventeen years ago — two years before the beating of Rodney King—an NBC-TV camera crew secretly recorded a police officer in Long Beach, Calif., appearing to shove Don Jackson through a plate glass window after a traffic stop.
Jackson, an African American former police officer in Hawthorne, Calif., and son of a veteran Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, won a $170,000 settlement and national attention after the tape aired.
But that wasn’t the sweetest victory for Jackson, 48, who has since changed his name to Diop Kamau and holds a master’s degree in criminal justice. He went on to establish an agency that helps the news media expose — and improve — racist and otherwise insensitive police, sometimes by providing “testers.” His operation, the Police Complaint Center, is involved in a dispute now playing out in South Florida.
“In conjunction with an independent watchdog group called the Police Complaint Center, WFOS-TV CBS 4 reporter Mike Kirsch presented remarkable footage of what happens when a civilian tries to file a complaint against a police officer in South Florida,” Jeff Stratton reported Thursday in the Miami New Times.
“The I-Team conducted an extensive hidden camera test, carried out by a police abuse watchdog group called the Police Complaint Center. Remarkably, of 38 different police stations tested around South Florida, all but three had no police complaint forms,” Kirsch told viewers in February.
The New Times story said, “At cop shop after cop shop, undercover investigators were met with intimidation. In Lauderhill an officer was hostile and threatening, taunting a man who simply asked for a complaint form. A Sea Ranch officer threatened to ticket a complainant’s car for ‘improper backing.’ Others simply refused to hand over a form, or denied they existed.
“The footage reinforced every stereotype about arrogant and uncooperative cops.”
Now the police are fighting back.
“The Broward County Police Benevolent Association has used its website to make CBS4 reporter Mike Kirsch and a tester for the watchdog group virtual targets, by posting a BOLO notice on the organization’s Web site,” WFOR-TV reporter Jawan Strader told viewers on Tuesday.
“In police parlance, BOLO stands for Be On The Lookout, and the notice urges law enforcement officers to keep a watchful eye out for Kirsch and the tester. BOLO notices are generally circulated to warn police officers of someone who has committed a crime; posting one urging them to be on the lookout for a journalist is highly unusual.
CBS4 Attorney Alan Rosenthal wrote a letter to the PBA demanding that the BOLO be taken down, citing it [as] a violation of federal law. It was, but it was then put back up, minus Kirsch’s personal information such as home address.”
“‘Typically a BOLO is put out by law enforcement agencies for criminals that need to be arrested,’ said Rosenthal.”
According to Kamau’s Web site, broadcasters that have used his company’s services include “Dateline NBC,” CBS’s “60 Minutes” and ABC’s “20/20.” The site features video of those network reports. He told Journal-isms he had worked with 40 to 50 local affiliates.
“A while back I had reported on an abusive cop in Broward County and through the victim I was working with,” Kirsch told Journal-isms via e-mail, discovered that Diop’s organization posted the story on policeabuse.org.
“Diop and I ended up talking over the phone a few times. He told me they were coming down for ongoing tests in South Florida and would I like to do a story on it. I did. And Im glad I did. It was great working with him and Greg Slate.
“He’s done a tremendous service around the country. The work we did with him down here is really going to bring about some positive change I think in the end.”
Quotes on Iraq They Wish They Hadn’t Uttered
“Weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, Fox News Channel host Brit Hume delivered a scathing speech critiquing the media’s supposedly pessimistic assessment of the Iraq War,” the left-leaning Fairness and Accuracy in Media reported this month.
“‘The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong,’ Hume complained in the April 2003 speech (Richmond Times Dispatch, 4/25/04). ‘They didn’t get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong.’
“Hume was perhaps correct—but almost entirely in the opposite sense. Days or weeks into the war, commentators and reporters made premature declarations of victory, offered predictions about lasting political effects and called on the critics of the war to apologize. Three years later, the Iraq War grinds on at the cost of at least tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The FAIR report goes on to quote syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, CBS reporter Joie Chen, NPR’s Bob Edwards, Fox News Channel’s Tony Snow, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, columnist Charles Krauthammer, Fox News Channel’s Fred Barnes, PBS’s Gwen Ifill, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post, Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum and others uttering words about the war that they likely wish they hadn’t.
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Immigration Debate Continues as Topic du Jour
“It’s easy for reactionaries to debase faceless people whom they brand as criminals — until they need some work done cheaply, some house repairs, go out to eat or need a freeway to suburbia built,” the Spanish-language newspaper Al Dia, published by the Dallas Morning News, editorialized Tuesday.
An abridged English-language translation was published today in the Morning News.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson made a similar point in a column on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the Asian American Journalists Association endorsed a statement by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists calling for “our nation’s news media to use accurate terminology in its coverage of immigration and to stop dehumanizing undocumented immigrants.” The statement covers such terms as “alien,” “undocumented” and “illegal.”
Radio Ink, a trade publication, reported that Spanish-language radio disc jockeys played a key role in boosting attendance at a rally last weekend in Los Angeles.
“Los Angeles radio personality Eddie ‘El Piolin’ Sotelo called for a summit with fellow Spanish language broadcasters including KHJ’s Humberto Luna, KBUE’s Ricardo ‘El Mandril’ Sanchez and Renan ‘El Cucuy’ Almendarez Coello. Together, they got the word out.
“Mike Garcia, president of Local 1877 of the Service Employees International Union, said, ‘If you listened to Spanish-language media, they were just pumping, pumping, pumping this up,'” the story reported.
In the New York Times, Bill Carter and Jacques Steinberg wrote about CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, saying, “In the course of insistently offering his ever more passionate views on immigration all across the television landscape in just one 24-hour period, Mr. Dobbs underscored that what works in cable television news is not an objective analysis of the day’s events but hard-nosed, unstinting advocacy of a specific point of view on a sizzling-hot topic.”
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Chicago Defender Plans Radical Makeover
“Next Monday, the 100-year-old Chicago Defender hits the street with the most radical makeover in its history, and an audacious new slogan: ‘Honest. Balanced. Truthful. Unapologetically Black,'” Mark Fitzgerald reported today in Editor & Publisher.
The paper plans to drop the sphinx included in the paper’s nameplate and to feature an all-black roster of comics, editor Roland S. Martin is quoted as saying.
“Ken Parish Perkins will write a regular national television column, Martin said. Perkins, who resigned from the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram last November amid plagiarism charges, has been writing occasionally for the Defender since the beginning of the year,” the story continued.
“A rotating corps of advice columnists — each with a different specialty in advice for single[s], women and married couples — will soon be introduced, along with a feature that harkens back to the very roots of the newspaper . . . . ‘Robert Abbott used to write a column telling folks coming from the South how to act in the city,’ Martin said.”
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K.C. Columnist Lewis Diuguid Being Cut Back
The opinion column by Lewis Diuguid, which now runs twice a week in the Kansas City Star, will be reduced to once a week at the end of the month to help achieve more “balance” on the pages, Editorial Page Editor Miriam Pepper told Journal-isms.
“We love Lewis and I love his column,” Pepper said of Diugiud, the Star’s vice president for community resources and a member of the Trotter Group of African American columnists. But he is “out of synch by writing twice a week; everyone else writes once a week.”
Pepper went on to say that “we live in a very divided community” politically in Kansas City and that the Star’s editorial page is perceived as left-leaning. “We have pretty good diversity in points of view, gender and background,” she said. Diuguid “has been very strong in opposition to Bush and opposition to the war. Running him more frequently gives the impression that we’re partial to his point of view,” she said.
By way of background, Diuguid told Journal-isms, “I have been with The Star since 1977 starting as a reporter/photographer. I have been writing a column since 1987. I have been writing at least two columns a week since the early 1990s and I have never missed an opportunity to write a column — not because of vacations, out-of-town assignments, illnesses or deaths in my family.”
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Magazine Aims at Young Dads in the ‘Hood’
“Anwan Wesley is doing it for the ‘hood,” Monica Haynes wrote March 13 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“Next month, this young black father of two is set to publish his first full edition of Fatherhood, a magazine aimed at young urban dads.
“The publication grew out of the 24-year-old’s search for parenting information to which he could relate.”
Wesley was interviewed by Carol Lin on “CNN Live” on Saturday. He told Journal-isms he has volunteer writers but “we need some experienced journalists, too” to write about real-life situations faced by young, urban dads, except that he cannot pay them. “I ain’t even getting paid,” he said.
Wesley can be contacted at kingwanwes1@hotmail.com. A Web site, www.fatherhoodmagazinepgh.com, is under construction.
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U.Md. Still Accepting Associate Dean Candidates
The University of Maryland is still accepting applications from candidates to succeed Christopher Callahan as associate dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Carl Sessions Stepp, the professor heading the search committee, told Journal-isms today.
Callahan joined Arizona State University in August as the first dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Stepp said that while the committee had some diversity among candidates for the job, “if there are people who would add to the diversity,” the process is still open. He defined diversity as women and members of minority groups. Stepp may be contacted at the school for more information, but he said prospective applicants should do so quickly.
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Short Takes
- “McClatchy Co.’s planned sale of a dozen Knight Ridder Inc. newspapers drew bids from at least three potential buyers Tuesday,” Joseph Menn and James Rainey reported today in the Los Angeles Times. “Yucaipa, controlled by billionaire Ron Burkle, is allied with the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America, the union that represents employees at eight of the papers.” The second is “Denver-based MediaNews Group Inc., which owns the Denver Post and Daily News in Los Angeles.” In addition, “wire services reported that a group led by Bruce Toll, vice chairman of home builder Toll Bros. Inc., bid for the two Philadelphia papers â?? the Inquirer and Daily News.”
- “Three new Vietnamese-language newspapers and an online news outlet are vying to fill the void left by the closing of the Mercury News’ Viet Mercury publication, underscoring the vibrancy of ethnic media even as mainstream newspapers face uncertain futures,” K. Oanh Ha reported today in the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.
- “A strike scheduled for 12:01 a.m. today at the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s largest black-oriented newspaper, was averted yesterday when a contract extension until April 28 was worked out,” the Philadelphia Daily News reported today. “Negotiators for District 1199, Hospital Workers’ Union, and the newspaper spent most of the day in contract talks and agreed to the extension after no agreement could be reached.”
- Jeff Cohen, editor of the Houston Chronicle, responding to Monday’s Journal-isms item about papers such as his that are in “majority minority” circulation areas, said, “the percentage of people of color in the newsroom is at a historical high. Those numbers need to continue to progress in the right direction. More important than numbers are that the newspapers cover all sections of the Houston community in an inclusive and populist way. I say we are. I ask the decision-makers in the newsroom to factor that into their assessment” of the news.
- Yvonne Latty, who took a buyout last year as a reporter for the Philadephia Daily News, has been hired by New York University as a clinical associate professor of journalism, teaching “Journalistic Inquiry” and graduate level writing, research and reporting classes. “I started grad school there a month after my sister died in a car accident,” Latty told Journal-isms. “I was down and out and one of my professors, Jon Katz, really supported me and got me believing in myself. He really changed my life.”
- It was not orchestrated, according to spokesman Neil Foote, but all contributing columnists on BlackAmericaWeb.com wrote this week and last about the same topic — the plight of black men: Deborah Mathis, Judge Greg Mathis, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Joseph C. Phillips and Tonyaa Weathersbee. “All the contributors were moved by the issue and wanted to write about it,” Foote told Journal-isms today. The issue came to the fore after a front-page story March 20 in the New York Times.
- “Tonight on ‘Nightline,’ correspondent Vicki Mabrey investigates sexual abuse within the famed Boys Choir of Harlem. A former choir member tells his story for the first time on camera of how the choir’s director of counseling abused him for more than two years and how, despite his complaints and accusations,continued to work with the organization and the children it serves,” an ABC-TV news release said.
- “In most states felons who have served their time are permitted to vote. But a survey in New York shows that one-third of local election boards either don’t know the law or don’t follow it,” Barry Sussman wrote Friday on his Nieman Watchdog Web site. “With this New York record in mind, reporters may want to follow up in their own areasâ??both to see what the law is, and whether election officials know the law and are following it.”
- “As video of a chaotic February clash between Puerto Rican journalists and the FBI silently filled a screen in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing room today, one of the reporters, Normando Valentin, described how FBI agents pushed him in the rib cage and pepper sprayed him in the face, sending him to the hospital for several hours,” according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. An ad hoc House committee of seven Democrats convened by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., heard testimony Tuesday.
- “A free press on the reservations is sorely needed but hard to build. Tribal government skirmishes are covered by mainstream press when there is a major crime or a recall petition, but other than that, there is little day-to-day coverage by off-reservation media. That is where hometown, reservation-type newspapers could come in,” Dorreen Yellow Bird wrote Tuesday in the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald.
- “The head of New York City’s Human Rights Commission both praised and reprimanded the advertising industry in a public forum yesterday morning,” Lisa Sanders wrote Friday on AdAge.com. “Patricia Gatling, who is leading the investigation into minority hiring practices on Madison Avenue, praised the industry for being ‘extremely open’ to talking about ways to improve minority hiring,” but “also took issue with agencies’ explanation for the low numbers of minority employees. ‘Their reply is “I can’t find anyone.” Well, for 40 years, you should have been able to find someone.'”
- “Tuesday, March 28, 2006, will be my last official day at the newspaper,” Wil LaVeist, columnist for the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., wrote Monday. He did not disclose his new job, but said, “This time, I’m going home. Not to Brooklyn, N.Y., where I was born and reared, but to the city my wife and children miss – sweet home Chicago.”
- “Jaime Castillo, a veteran political writer and editor for the San Antonio Express-News, has been named the paper’s newest Metro columnist,” Matt Flores reported in the Express-News on Monday.
- New York-based CNN correspondent Adaora Udoji sent a goodbye message to colleagues saying, “This is my last week at CNN. I’m going to put my law degree to use — much to my parent’s joy — and try out . . . some anchoring over at Court TV,” according to Brian Selter‘s blog on television news. A Court TV spokeswoman said, “We have no comment at this time, but will let you know when we do.”
- “Pushed by its Washington Post Co. corporate owner and pulled by a burgeoning Latino population, The Herald in Everett, Wash., is launching a Spanish-language weekly with ambitions to dominate the Puget Sound market,” Mark Fitzgerald reported Tuesday in Editor & Publisher. “La Raza de Noroeste launches Friday, April 21.”
- Plainclothes Gambian security agents today sealed the offices of the twice-weekly newspaper The Independent and arrested staffers found on the premises, local journalists told the Committee to Protect Journalists,” the organization reported Tuesday. “Most of the staff members were released after brief questioning, but Editor Musa Saidykhan and General Manager Madi Ceesay remained in custody at the end of the day.”