“It’s About Damn Time”

Couric Ascension Confronts Issue of “Gravitas”

Gwen Ifill, moderator and managing editor of PBS’ “Washington Week” and senior correspondent for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” was succinct when asked about the significance of today’s announcement that Katie Couric would anchor the “CBS Evening News.”

“It’s about damn time,” she told Journal-isms.

At last summer’s convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, Carole Simpson, who anchored the weekend edition of ABC’s “World News Tonight” for 15 years until 2003, looked at the crowd and said:

“Is it 1970 again? What happened? I never thought we’d reach the millennium and we’d not see a woman anchor.”

There were congratulations all around this morning as CBS announced that “Couric will become Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS EVENING NEWS WITH KATIE COURIC beginning in September. Couric also will contribute to 60 MINUTES, the most successful program in television history and its most respected news magazine, and will anchor CBS News primetime specials as well.

“With the appointment, Couric becomes the first female solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast.”

On that last point, not exactly. Simpson held down the job on weekends, Diane Sawyer has filled in at ABC, and since Bob Woodruff was injured in Iraq in January, ABC “World News Tonight” co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas has more or less done that job solo. But Couric is the first to be assigned the job permanently, Monday through Friday, by herself.

Congratulations came from the competition – “We all know what she does. We’re a small fraternity that does this. . . .” Charlie Gibson said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” – as well from as her NBC colleagues.

“Hell just froze over!” weatherman Al Roker joked on “Today” after Couric made her announcement.

But some brought forth caveats. One was that as the network news shows lose audience to other media, it doesn’t much matter who sits as anchor, as David Hinckley argued Tuesday in the New York Daily News.

The other was the question of “gravitas.”

“Everyone knows that the gravitas question is the crucial one,” Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix wrote in his blog today. “This morning, while chatting about the health of President Gerald Ford with Brokaw,” a reference to retired NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, “Couric referred to the ex-president as ‘the energizer bunny.’ That kind of happy talk won’t cut the mustard on the evening newscast.”

“It is essentially a chauvinistic word,” Connie Chung commented to Rebecca Dana in the New York Observer.

“Ms. Chung was on the wrong end of gravitas in 1993, when CBS dropped her in to co-anchor the Evening News with Dan Rather, then yanked her out again two years later,” Dana wrote last week.

“Delicacy prevented Ms. Chung, reached by the phone while vacationing in Boca Raton, Fla., from putting her anatomical definition of ‘gravitas’ on the record.

“‘It is a posture,’ she said instead. ‘They’re posturing.’

“But it’s a posture that has worked. Industry types are vague about what constitutes gravitas, but an informal poll suggests it involves some combination of gray hair and a baritone voice. And that timbre of authority would rule out half the population.

“‘I have to say that I thought – in fact, I was so sure of my cocky little self, going back 10 years – I thought that by now there would be a sole female anchor of one of the network evening news shows,’ said 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl. ‘Not a partner, but a sole female anchor. Because I had assumed that we had arrived.’

“In fact, for all the hubbub about Ms. Couric’s plans, there is already a solo female anchor: ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, left alone on the World News Tonight desk after the wounding of her co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, in Iraq. But Ms. Vargas is another in the long line of perceived anchor lites – and one scheduled to go out on maternity leave to boot,” Dana’s piece concluded.

On Monday, Russ Mitchell was named anchor of the Sunday edition of the “CBS Evening News,” but CBS spokeswoman Sandra M. Genelius said it was “way too soon” to know whether he would become back-up anchor for Couric.

• Paul J. Gough, Hollywood Reporter: NBC remains tight-lipped about ‘Today’
• David Bauder, Associated Press: Meredith Vieira Chosen for “Today” Show [Added April 6]

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Russian TV Spotlights Home-Grown Racism

“The main domestic theme on Russian TV news in the week 27 March-2 April 2006 was the concern about the authorities’ failure to deal with racist crimes in the wake of high-profile court cases,” according to a weekly summary of Russian TV news Monday from BBC Worldwide Monitoring.

“Both state and non-state channels ran in-depth reports on neo-fascism in Russia and argued that inadequate sentencing will only exacerbate the problem. . .”

The summary mentioned that on “Nedelya,” a weekly current-affairs program on privately owned Ren TV, “black journalist Samson Sholademi complained that the racial harassment he experiences is mainly at the hands of the police.”

A database search shows that among other things, Sholademi covered a 2004 demonstration in Moscow by fans of Michael Jackson for the Russian magazine Express.

The BBC summary continued, “The main analytical programmes on all five major TV channels featured substantial reports on the rise of racism, and highlighted pundits and public figures’ concern that inadequate sentencing for racially motivated crimes sends out the wrong message to neo-Nazis and their potential supporters. Ren TV suggested that the reason why skinheads are treated leniently by the courts is that they have friends in high places.”

In a report on Channel One, “One youth said to camera: ‘I love the white race and I want to kill the black race.’ The report then showed [a] murdered Tajik girl’s father Yunus Sultonov and lawyer Sergey Panteleyev expressing their indignation at the lenient sentences, which reporter Mark Podrabinek believes were seen by local skinheads as ‘evidence that they could act with impunity.’

“Comment on the recent court rulings and attacks suggested that officials are either unwilling or unable to effectively tackle racist crimes in Russia. They also highlighted public indifference towards racism.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

For Campus Reporters, Rape Charge Hits Home

“The story wouldn’t let Kristiana Bennett sleep. Later she would say that she kept stepping out on the landing and staring up at the night sky, past the rain, as if she had lost something.

“In her first semester at the Campus Echo, the student newspaper at North Carolina Central University, she lucked into covering a blockbuster story. A black female student at Central, a historically black school, accused white Duke lacrosse players of raping her at a party in mid March where she and another woman were hired as exotic dancers. The players denied it.”

Thus began a story by Vanessa Gezari today in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times on how the staff of the campus paper wrestled with covering a case that struck emotionally close to home.

Meanwhile, Newsweek ran a piece by Susannah Meadows and Evan Thomas that was skeptical of the woman’s charges, and seemed to give the lacrosse team the benefit of the doubt. It was headlined: “A Troubled Spring at Duke: A lacrosse-team party spawns charges of rape. What really happened that night?”

It barely saw print before today’s development: The Duke lacrosse coach resigned shortly after the unsealing of a warrant related to the police investigation, Lorenzo Perez reported on the Web site of the Raleigh News & Observer.

“Calling the contents of an e-mail included with the warrant ‘sickening and repulsive,’ Duke University president Richard Brodhead announced the cancellation of the remainder of the Blue Devils men’s lacrosse season in a separate statement,” Perez wrote. In the e-mail, according to news reports, player Ryan McFadyen wrote, “i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the[y] walk in and proceding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.”

• Limbaugh called alleged Duke rape victim a “ho[ ]” (MediaMatters)
• David Steele, Baltimore Sun: Lacrosse afflicted by sense of entitlement
• Jason Whitlock, ESPN: Scandal isn’t just about race

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

New Study of Minority Broadcast Ownership Urged

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists asked Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez Monday for “a new study on the state of minority ownership” of the broadcast media “because it is critical for the public to understand the impact of regulatory action on minority owners.

“The last report the agency released was in December 2000,” said the letter from NAHJ President Veronica Villafañe.

“That report, Changes, Challenges, and Charting New Courses: Minority Commercial Broadcast Ownership in the United States, found that people of color made up only 3.8 percent of all broadcast station owners. In contrast, people of color currently make up 35 percent of the U.S. population. That figure is [expected] to increase to 50 percent by 2050.

“In addition, the report found that media consolidation posed a serious threat to the future of minority ownership.

“NAHJ is concerned that the information from the 2000 study is now outdated and that the percentage of minority owners has since declined.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Katrina Coverage Among Peabody Award Winners

Coverage of Hurricane Katrina by television stations in Biloxi, Miss., and New Orleans joined other winners of the 65th Annual Peabody Awards for broadcast excellence, announced today by the University of Georgia`s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“For the second consecutive year Showtime received an award for an original movie,” an announcement said. “‘Edge of America,’ based on real incidents, illuminated two minority cultures with its story of an African-American teacher-coach taking a job at an American Indian-reservation school in Utah.”

“‘P.O.V.: Chisholm `72: Unbought & Unbossed’ recalled the campaign of Shirley Chisholm, our first female presidential contender. ‘Save Our History: Voices of Civil Rights,’ a simple, moving History Channel special, collected ordinary Americans` memories of the struggle.”

“WWL and WLOX, the broadcasters in New Orleans and Biloxi, respectively, were cited for their comprehensive Hurricane Katrina coverage. . . . ‘NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams’ and CNN both were awarded Peabodys for their multifaceted efforts” in covering the disaster.

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

N.O. Mail Moves Again, but Without Periodicals

In an editorial headlined, “Katrina still dominates our lives,” the Biloxi (Miss.) Sun-Herald noted Tuesday that “For the first time since Katrina, the Postal Service began processing mail Monday in New Orleans, a move officials say should eliminate delivery times of a week or more for cross-town mail.”

However, it continued, “An embargo continues for magazines, newspapers, catalogs and other second-class mail.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Martin Luther King III Upsets the Script

On the 38th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. yesterday, CNN’s Tony Harris began an interview with Martin Luther King III by saying, “I lost my dad over a decade ago, and I am still amazed by the way it impacts my life. You were 10 years old at the time. I wonder if it’s the same for you. Are you amazed, surprised, by the different ways the loss of your father has impacted you?

King answered: “I don’t think I’m – maybe I’m surprised because, quite frankly, because we observe anniversaries, it’s almost like he’s not really gone.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

An Indian Perspective on the Immigration Debate

“There was a cartoon floating around Indian Country several years ago of two Indian men crouched on a hill watching the Mayflower dropping anchor in what is now Plymouth Rock,” Tim Giago wrote Monday in his “Notes from Indian Country” column.

“In the cartoon one Indian is saying to the other, ‘Do you think we should start thinking about creating some immigration laws?'”

Giago continued, “I would venture to say that no other segment of the American population was affected by immigration as much as the American Indian.”

Meanwhile, Lini S. Kadaba in the Philadelphia Inquirer and reader representative James T. Campbell in the Houston Chronicle examined the war over terminology in the immigration debate.

• Randal C. Archibold, New York Times: Live, From Burbank, Calif., Hispanic Indignation

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Police Testers, Station in Kansas City Flap

Last Wednesday, this column spotlighted an agency founded by an African American ex-cop that helps the news media expose – and improve – racist and otherwise insensitive police, sometimes by providing “testers.”

The agency is involved in a new controversy, this time in Kansas City.

Aaron Barnhart and Kevin Hoffman reported Friday in the Kansas City Star, referring to nearby Independence, Mo.: “According to Independence police spokesman Tom Gentry, a man entered the station early Saturday and asked for a form to file a complaint against an officer. When the form was not issued, Gentry said, the man grew ‘more aggressive,’ at one point bumping an officer and using offensive language.

“Then, according to Gentry, the man rammed his head into a protective glass that separates police employees from the public, opening a wound.

“Police arrested the man, who identified himself as 22-year-old Gregory Slate of Baltimore, on a charge of disorderly conduct. They discovered a hidden microphone on Slate, which led them outside. There, Gentry said, an officer found a producer and camera person for CBS affiliate KCTV-5, who said Slate was with them.”

“KCTV-5 news director Regent Ducas declined to comment Thursday, except to say that ‘nothing happened this weekend that is stopping us from continuing our work’ on the story.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Wickham Ends Program for “Hardship” Cases

After 10 years, USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham is closing the foundation whose Second Chance program “has helped students with low GPAs – due to extreme hardship such as drug-addicted parents, unexpected deaths of parents, or homelessness – attend college,” as Christina Royster-Hemby wrote today in the Baltimore City Paper.

“Over the 10 years since its founding, Second Chance has helped 36 kids from Maryland, Washington, Delaware, and Virginia attend their first year of college, all expenses paid,” the story said. “In most cases, the program gave students additional help after that first year – including clothes and incidentals.

“‘Our kids were the kids who were being missed,’ Wickham says. ‘They couldn’t get into colleges because of their grades, and they couldn’t get grants and loans because they weren’t academically qualified.'”

But “Wickham says the program has now ‘run out of gas’ due to fading financing.”

Wickham wrote “Woodholme: A Black Man’s Story of Growing Up Alone” decades after both of his parents were killed in a murder/suicide, the piece notes.

In 2002, the National Association of Black Journalists gave him its Community Service Award for creating the Woodholme Foundation. Wickham was NABJ president from 1987 to 1989.

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Perkins Feels Free from “Mainstream” Constraints

Ken Parish Perkins, the former television critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who plans to write a weekly TV column for the redesigned Chicago Defender, says his new column will “deal with a lot of issues I couldn’t deal with in a mainstream publication.

“At the Star-Telegram, as was the case at the Trib in Chicago and the Morning News in Dallas, my editors always got a little nervous when I wrote back-to-back columns or stories dealing with issues more sensitive to black folks,” Perkins told Journal-isms.

“In Fort Worth, letters would pour in calling me a racist and calls would fill up my voicemail, with almost all of them coming between 10 p.m. and midnight. Calling when I wasn’t there (sometimes I was; I’m a 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. writer) it was obvious they didn’t want to actually debate anything on an intellectual level. They just wanted to call me nigger and get on with their lives. Still, my editors often feared for my safety.

“Writing for the black press, I’ve always found, is liberating in many ways.

“So I hope this column can morph into something special, where I’ll get [to] cut through the B.S. to write about the real deal when it comes to race and television, as well as be the space where underappreciated performers in front and behind the camera can get their due,” said Perkins, who resigned from the Star-Telegram in November over plagiarism charges.

“I know that what I’m trying to do is frowned upon by some (should we let him back in?) but, as I’ve told you before, I love and respect the craft,” he continued. “I made a serious mistake. I just want to do what I love to do. I’m still writing quite a bit for the in-flight mags Spirit (I’m doing an essay on Chicago . . . my hometown) and American Way. I’ve written for Emmy since November. I’m also writing film criticism for the Dallas Weekly, a black alternative weekly.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

New Yorker Accused of Racial Double Standard

“What is Carl Icahn’s race? What is the race of his wife, Gail Golden?” Linda Williams, a black journalist who is deputy managing editor of the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, wrote in an unpublished letter to the New Yorker magazine.

“If I had never heard of either, I would still know that each is white. This is because writer Ken Auletta demonstrates in his March 20 piece on Icahn’s unsuccessful raid on Time Warner the racial double standard employed so often by white journalists when writing on any subject where a black person is involved.

“Whiteness is ‘normal’ thus a white person’s race need not be mentioned. But blackness is the ‘other, extraordinary,’ thus must always be noted.

“In the lengthy article the writer never mentions the race of Icahn, nor the race of most other persons mentioned in the article. Again, I can safely assume that they are all white.

“However, in the first paragraph Auletta informs the reader that Time Warner C.E.O. Richard Parsons is black. Moreover, he notes that Parsons’ wife, Laura Bush, is white. Auletta demonstrates the exception to the rule about white people. Race is not relevant unless the white person is out of the proper context, i.e. a white woman married to a black man.

“The article makes no showing that race is relevant to the subject of the article. The rationale that Parsons ‘does not fit the C.E.O. stereotype’ is quite flimsy. In addition, the article does not demonstrate that whether Parsons fits any so-called C.E.O. stereotype had any bearing whatsoever on Parsons’ action in handling Icahn. And what is the relevance of the race of Parsons’ wife. When journalists drop race into a story without explanation, is the reader supposed to fill in the relevancy question, or read some coded language. Richard Parsons has a white wife! Hint. Hint. Wink. Wink.

“Auletta takes pains to paint a full picture of Icahn, accounting for what he does 24 hours a day, even telling the reader about his ‘huge, huge’ bath tub. And about Parsons, the bio provided is quite sketchy. Apparently, Auletta believes that Parsons’ race tells all.

“This not the first time the New Yorker has demonstrated the racial double standard. In writing about the Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times, again your article noted the race of only the black editors and writers involved in the affair at the New York Times. In doing so, your magazine suggested that black people’s actions can never be separated from their race, but white people always make race neutral decisions.

“Thoughtful people in journalism have been trying to educate and sensitize journalists on this issue of racial relevance for years. I gather that some people just don’t get it. Certainly, it doesn’t help that magazine journalism in this country is so overwhelming white.”

The New Yorker did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Short Takes

• The University of Alabama Knight Community Journalism Fellows is accepting applications for its 12-month master’s degree program, in which all tuition and fees are paid. Students also receive a monthly stipend of $1,250 per month for 12 months to pay for food and lodging. Graduates receive up to $1,500 at year’s end to conduct a job search and another $1,500 stipend for relocation to employment as a community journalist. The program, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is conducted at the Anniston (Ala.) Star. For more details, see http://comj.ua.edu/.
• Alerted by an aide that Penthouse and Playboy magazines, partially clad in brown paper covers, were placed beside newsmagazines and close to candy, nuts, and stuffed animals at two State Department newsstands, Condoleezza Rice, then-secretary-designate, said, “I want them out,” Paul Bedard wrote in his “Washington Whispers” column in U.S. News & World Report. “A few weeks later, when she took over from Colin Powell, the eviction began.”
• “Derek Roche has resigned as market editor of VIBE magazine to be personal stylist for Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs, and Hope Wright is the new copy chief at VIBE. She worked previously at Essence,” according to the MediaBistro Web site.
• Sandy Sugawara, deputy assistant managing editor for business at the Washington Post, on Tuesday was named the newspaper’s immigration editor, responsible for coordinating coverage across desks. “More than two dozen reporters working largely independently on staffs across the newsroom focus in some way on immigration,” an announcement said.
• Hillery Shay has been named photo director of the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, having been in the role in an acting capacity since February. She “brings a keen eye for news and an appreciation for storytelling,” Editor Thom Fladung said.
• Former Denver Broncos fullback Reggie Rivers has joined the KCNC-TV weekend anchor team in Denver and will cover sports alongside Anchors Alan Gionet and Kathy Walsh, the station announced Friday.
• American Media Inc. announced it will immediately fold the year-old fashion and Hollywood lifestyle magazine Celebrity Living, Shape en Español and automotive title MPH. The company will move National Enquirer back to its home in Boca Raton, Fla., with one of its former editors at the helm, Stephanie D. Smith reported Tuesday in Mediaweek.
• “Riders of nearly 2,200 Metro buses in Los Angeles will be able to read the Spanish-language daily La Opinion on board by this summer,” Editor & Publisher reported Tuesday. “Under a partnership with Transit Television Network, La Opinion will be the only Spanish-language newspaper providing television news feeds to TV monitors installed currently in 1,750 Los Angeles Metro buses.”
• “Programming executives at Mexico City-based Grupo Televisa and TV Azteca met late last month with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the Movemos organization of Mexico City in an effort to increase the number of fair and inclusive media representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities,” Marketing y Medios reported Tuesday. “It is no secret that Latin American TV shows, from telenovelas to sitcoms, stereotypically portray gays and lesbians.”
• Virgil L. Smith, president and publisher of the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times, was elected to a two-year term on the board of directors of the Newspaper Association of America, and James A. Moss, chairman, Times Herald-Record, Middletown, N.Y., was re-elected, NAA announced on Saturday. Moss was a member of the advisory committee to the Maynard Institute’s Management Training Center.
• Andrew Olivera, previously managing director of Rumbo de Austin, will become managing director of Rumbo de San Antonio in a series of changes at the Spanish-language chain, Editor & Publisher reported Monday.
• Dozens of Mexican newspapers frustrated by fruitless police probes of slain and missing journalists simultaneously published the first in a series of reports on the cases Monday, the Associated Press reported.
• “The former co-host of BET’s popular ‘106 & Park’ show blasts what he calls the destructive messages of many of the show’s most popular music videos,” the Associated Press reported on Sunday. “A.J. Calloway co-hosted the show for five years with Free, whose given name is Marie Wright. Both left the show in July.”
• “Anita and Sheldon Drobny, two of the founders of Air America Radio, are taking the next step to ensure that liberal programming stays on the air: obtaining radio stations,” the New York Times reported Monday.
• “Residents of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, heard their first independent radio broadcast on Tuesday morning, after authorities issued licences to the East African nation’s first two privately owned radio stations,” the UN Integrated Regional Information Networks reported on Tuesday.