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Debating Duke Coverage

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A Reminder Not to Forget Reports of Racial Insults

As coverage of the Duke lacrosse scandal continued to generate controversy, New York Times Public Editor Barney Calame, assessing his paper’s performance, wrote Sunday that “the paper needs to keep an eye on the allegations and reports about the racial insults voiced by various players, and on the lacrosse team’s seemingly flawed culture.

“If the rape and kidnapping charges do not hold up, the story doesn’t end,” Calame said. “The Times should be prepared to continue covering what is done about the racial-insult allegations, given the prominence of the team and the university.”

After the March 13 party at the Durham, N.C., house rented by three of the four captains of the Duke lacrosse team, neighbor Jason Bissey said he heard one partygoer yell, ”Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.” The two strippers at the party, one of whom charged she was raped, are African American.

The second woman, Kim Roberts, said in Saturday’s New York Daily News: “They called me a damn nigger. She [the accuser] was passed out in the car. She doesn’t know what she was called. I was called that. I can never forget that.”

In this week’s cover story, “Sex, Lies & Duke,” Newsweek magazine publishes time-dated photos from the party that were leaked last week to Dan Abrams of NBC News, who is a Duke graduate. The defense lawyers feel the photos will exonerate their clients of rape charges, Abrams reported.

“How did Abrams get those photos? They were leaked to him by the defense,” media critic Eric Deggans wrote Thursday on his St. Petersburg Times blog. “Why did they leak to him? I haven’t asked them, but it could be because Abrams has been a consistent voice challenging the allegations for some time.”

Before Calame’s piece appeared, Jack Shafer, writing Thursday in the online magazine Slate, also said the Times should have provided more of the unfavorable background on the accuser.

However, Angela Tuck, public editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote Saturday, “I worry that this newspaper and other news outlets take the disclosure of background details too far in these cases. Yes, it’s important to include some information about those involved, but when a person’s background gets more attention than the facts surrounding the case, justice isn’t likely to be served.”

The issue was also debated Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” That show about the news media, which has been criticized for its lack of journalists of color, included in the Duke discussion black journalist Callie Crossley, media commentator and panelist on “Beat the Press” on WGBH-TV in Boston.

Christine Brennan, sports columnist for USA Today, said NBC should not have broadcast the party photos. “For me, as a sports journalist,” she said, “I think that goes a little bit beyond the story. There’s so much here that we can report on, that we have facts on.”

Asked about whether there was a media rush to judgment, Crossley said, “This case seems to inspire people feeling that they know the answer, based on what some of the elements are. I know this is true, because we know about the racial history, for example. That seems to be some of the tone of the reporting.”

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Sheryl Hilliard Tucker Moves Up at Time Inc.

Sheryl Hilliard Tucker, the onetime editor at Black Enterprise magazine who went on to become executive editor of Time Inc.’s Money, on Friday was named one of two executive editors of the Time Inc. stable of 151 magazines.

“In addition to working closely with me, these two will be available to the editors of the magazines,” John Huey, who became editor-in-chief of Time Inc. in January, said in a staff memo.

Tucker, who is now editor at large at Time Inc., has spent the last several months as acting deputy editor of Health magazine. She and Scott Mowbray, editorial director of Time4Media, which publishes Time’s 16 leisure magazines, “will be able to assist in everything from reader research projects to redesigns, restructurings, and launches.

“At times they may be posted to individual titles, on staff, doing everything from substituting for an editor to implementing new approaches. In some cases, they may be doing something as simple as learning the way one magazine does something particularly well and then sharing that information with others.”

At Money, Tucker “managed some of the magazine’s most important franchises, and was one of the key architects of the very successful 2005 redesign,” Huey’s memo said. “In addition, she is Money’s liaison to the NFL, and the keynote speaker at the annual financial boot camp for NFL rookies. Before joining Time Inc., Sheryl was Editor-in-Chief and vice president at Black Enterprise. She has edited several books, including Prime Time: African American Women’s Guide to Midlife Health and Wellness, and she is co-author of the recently published book Tomorrow Begins Today: African American Women as We Age. Sheryl is an outstanding manager with a talent for serious multitasking. She is one of those people who gets things done well and on time and with a minimum of fuss.

“In addition to working at and on magazines in her new position, Sheryl will focus on talent management and will also be responsible for implementing a formal and ongoing audit of content diversity in all of our titles.”

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New Orleans Mayoral Primary a Media Event

“All told, 172 journalists registered with the secretary of state” to cover Saturday’s New Orleans mayoral primary, James Varney reported Sunday in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “a step that was not required and most likely wasn’t followed by scores of other journalists in town during the past several days.”

Mayor Ray Nagin won 38 percent of the vote to 29 percent for Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, putting the two men in a May 20 runoff. “New Orleans voters picked their way through a voting landscape torn apart almost eight months ago by Hurricane Katrina,” as Bruce Nolan and Gwen Filosa wrote in the paper.

Varney wrote that in the past week, “Nagin had crews from Black Entertainment Television follow him, and spoke with reporters from Japan, Germany, England and France, according to staffers and some photographers covering his campaign.

“. . . While the foreign press presence was noted, most of the throngs were national. After covering Katrina through its Houston bureau, The Los Angeles Times now has a reporter stationed in New Orleans. The New York Times and USA Today also have writers living in the city, while The Washington Post regularly flies in staffers from its Miami bureau.

“And, like the television stations, the regular staff out-of-town media keep here has swollen a bit. One- and two-person operations are now three- or four-person operations, and some of the affiliates and network bureaus have seen their staffs double. The New York Times, for example, brought in a staff photographer and a staff videographer who is doing work for the paper’s Web site.”

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“Black Journalism Institute” from a “Fraud?”

The publisher of the Westside Gazette, a black weekly newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., won approval last week to build a two-story “Black Journalism Institute” on city land. But a staffer for the alternative Broward-Palm Beach New Times calls the Gazette a “fraud . . that coddles governments in exchange for their business.”

As reported Wednesday by Brittany Wallman in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, publisher Bobby Henry’s “offer includes the promise to pay the city $88,792, the amount the city paid for the land.” Community Redevelopment Agency “Director Al Battle said that might change in negotiations. An appraisal from last summer put the value of the land at $156,400.

“The 11,000-square-foot building, which would cost an estimated $1.4 million, is to be built by African-American developer Bob Young and designed by African-American architect Ken Hawkins. Ground would be broken in 2008, Hawkins said.”

Staff writer Bob Norman said Wednesday in his New Times blog, “You may not know about the Westside Gazette. Few do. It’s a tiny black newspaper that has demonstrably lied about its circulation figures to pump up advertising rates with local governments. . . . At the same time, Bobby Henry writes rambling and usually ridiculous screeds about the plight of black people that appeals more to ignorance than anything else. While he parrots government press releases and works insider land deals, he pretends to be the second-coming of MLK. It’s obscene.”

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Quake Commemorations Recall Battle Over Chinese

Last week’s commemoration of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 gave Dallas Morning News columnist Esther Wu an opportunity to compare the current immigration battle with that involving Chinese immigrants a century ago.

“The earthquake took place 24 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which stemmed the flow of Chinese into this country to a trickle of teachers, students and, later, merchants,” Wu wrote Thursday.

But after the earthquake destroyed birth records in San Francisco, many Chinese immigrants seized the opportunity to claim they were either born in the U.S. or were children of U.S. citizens, which would allow them entry, wrote Wu, who is also national president of the Asian American Journalists Association.

“Chinese immigrants were accused of taking away jobs from Americans and providing cheap labor to hold down the wage scale. Much of the same is being said of illegal Hispanic immigrants today,” Wu wrote.

She quoted Erika Lee, associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities: “Besides the economic argument, there is also a cultural anxiety. It is not as explicit now after the civil rights movement. But back then, it was often said that the Chinese were inassimilable, that they were an inferior race.”

Meanwhile, Kenneth J. Cooper, the former national editor of the Boston Globe who is researching black-Latino relations as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, made a proposal to ease friction between some African Americans and Latinos over immigration.

“The North American Free Trade Agreement authorized funding for training and other transitional assistance for workers whose jobs literally went south, to Mexico,” Cooper wrote Thursday in Boston’s weekly Bay State Banner. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., “should insist the Senate’s immigration legislation do the same for Americans who lose their jobs to undocumented workers from the south.

“Kennedy could insist the legislation requires the trainees to reflect the racial-ethnic composition of the nation’s low-skill workforce and target grants to areas of the country with the largest influx of undocumented immigrants or highest unemployment rates,” wrote Cooper, who is at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.

The Los Angeles Times, through its news service, distributed a column by Nicolaus Mills, a Sarah Lawrence professor, that also addressed black-Latino relations. It began by quoting abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ concerns about white immigrants during his era.

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Short Takes

Tyler Perry’s first book, “Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings: Madea’s Uninhibited Commentaries on Love and Life,” will debut atop the New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list on April 30, it was announced on Thursday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on Thursday. As reported March 6, Perry’s last two movies became box-office smashes despite the mainstream media’s failure, by and large, to recognize their appeal.

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