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EEOC Plans Inquiry on Media Diversity

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U.S. Agency Working With Unity on Public Meeting

As the news media fail to measure up to their stated hopes for progress on diversity and the industry copes with turmoil prompted by changing technology, the U.S. Equal Employment Commission and Unity: Journalists of Color are planning a public meeting to discuss diversity in the news media.

The move hearkens back to the government activity that took place in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Kerner Commission’s report on the urban riots prompted questions about the media’s racial composition and other government bodies followed up with their own inquiries and reports.

Unity, the coalition of the four journalist of color organizations, and the EEOC , which helps enforce federal civil rights laws, had planned a session for May 9.

But commission spokesman Mark Wong told Journal-isms this week the meeting will be rescheduled. “Due to scheduling and other issues which have surfaced, the Commission meeting on Diversity in the Media, originally scheduled to be held on May 9, in Washington, DC, has now been postponed for (at least) 4-6 weeks,” he said.

The meeting is to be informational. “The idea was, we wanted to hear all sides on what is going on in the media, with respect to the volatility” involving readership changes, online technology and other factors, and how those factors are affecting diversity, Wong said. The commission does not have subpoena power. But members want to hear from business leaders and glean “what might be effective strategies,” Wong continued. The meeting is to be public and recorded, and a transcript made available.

Unity’s five-year strategic plan, adopted last year, calls for the coalition to “participate in national policy debates involving journalism before federal and state regulators, and other institutions, in collaboration with other media organizations when appropriate.”

“Without a doubt, both sides believe that the partnership can and will yield results. But we all understood that two weeks is too little time to make it happen as we believe it can and should. Thus, the mutual decision to postpone,” Herbert Lowe, immediate past president of the National Association of Black Journalists and a point person for Unity on the issue, told Journal-isms.

After the urban riots, the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, said in 1968, “Along with the community as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s” eyes and a white perspective. This is no longer good enough. The painful process of readjustment that is required of the American news media must begin now. They must make a reality of integration in both their product and personnel . . .” Members of the Congressional Black Caucus followed with hearings or statements in the 1970s.

As Tom Jacobs recounted in this space in 2004, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission weighed in in 1977, updating in 1979, with a report on broadcasting that called people of color little more than “window dressing on the set,” which was also the title of the report.

“‘Window Dressing on the Set’ also raised questions about the presence of women and minorities on network news programs,” Lee Thornton wrote in the book “Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media.” “The study examined a composite week of ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcasts randomly selected from March 1974 to February 1975. It found that white males outnumbered minority and female correspondents by almost nine to one and noted that minority and female correspondents rarely covered crucial national stories but tended to cover issues related to minorities’ and women’s interests.”

Since then, government actions on media diversity have chiefly involved ownership issues, via the Federal Communications Commission, and individual and class-action allegations of discrimination, taken up by the EEOC.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors, meeting in Seattle this week, reported Tuesday that, “the industry is falling further behind benchmark targets set by ASNE six years ago to chart performance toward a goal of newsroom parity with the U.S. minority population by 2025.”

Outgoing ASNE President Rick Rodriguez told the group Tuesday he had heard the talk that “newspapers are dying,” but said, “We are living through a period of transformation and transition like none before. We have a great opportunity to prove the skeptics wrong.”

Unity linked the financial worries with diversity, saying in a news release, “UNITY: Journalists of Color contends that if the bottom line is what matters, then most companies are poised to fail because they have not kept pace with the changing racial makeup of . . . readers.”

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MediaNews to Acquire 4 Knight Ridder Papers

“McClatchy announced today that the Mercury News and three other Knight Ridder papers will be acquired by Denver-based MediaNews in a complicated deal valued at $1 billion, with backing from Hearst, the owner of the San Francisco Chronicle,” Pete Carey reported late today on the San Jose Mercury News Web site.

“MediaNews will purchase the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times, and Hearst will acquire the Monterey County Herald and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Under a separate agreement between Hearst and MediaNews, Hearst has agreed to contribute the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Monterey Herald to MediaNews in return for an equity investment in the non-San Francisco Bay Area assets of MediaNews.

“If the deal is blocked by regulators, MediaNews has agreed to acquire the Pioneer Press and the Monterey County Herald from Hearst.”

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Group Skewers CNN Over Immigration Coverage

“CNN anchor Lou Dobbs has been a high-profile voice in the immigration debate, using his show to rail against the country’s ‘broken borders’ virtually every evening on Lou Dobbs Tonight, the liberal media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting said on Monday. “His openly crusading advocacy journalism has raised eyebrows and put CNN president Jonathan Klein on the defensive; as Klein told the New York Times (3/29/06), ‘Lou’s show is not a harbinger of things to come at CNN. He is sui generis, one of a kind.’ But a closer look at CNN programming indicates that Dobbs’ slanted journalism is not as unusual at the network as Klein suggests.”

“Longtime CNN anchor Jack Cafferty provides daily commentary on the afternoon show The Situation Room, where he has attacked and belittled immigrants’ rights protesters while ignoring or dismissing their concerns several times in recent weeks. . . .

“Recent CNN Headline News hire Glenn Beck promises to add another xenophobic voice to the CNN family’s chorus when he begins hosting his own program in May. As Media Matters for America documented (3/27/06), Beck recently slurred Mexican immigrants on his radio show (3/27/06), saying Mexico ‘is a country that has been overtaken by lawbreakers from the bottom to the top. And now, what you’re protesting for is to have lawbreakers come here.’

“Even some of CNN’s generally more restrained journalists have slanted the immigration issue. Reliable Sources host [Howard] Kurtz described the rallies (4/16/06) as ‘drawing heavy media coverage that served as a megaphone for their stand against tougher border control and enforcement against those who broke the law in coming to America.'” The report also criticized CNN senior analyst Jeff Greenfield.

Meanwhile, as a proposed May 1 boycott of work, school and businesses approaches, designed to draw attention to immigration issues, columnists of color produced more commentary:

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TV Week’s “10 Most Powerful People in TV News”

On Monday, TV Week produced its annual list of the 10 most powerful people in TV news, and none is a person of color.

They are: Roger Ailes, chairman, Fox News and Fox Television Stations; Steve Capus, president, NBC News; Sean McManus, president, CBS News and Sports; Tim Russert, managing editor and moderator, NBC’s “Meet the Press”; Jon Stewart, anchor, Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart”; David Westin, president, ABC News.

Also, Katie Couric, co-anchor, NBC’s “Today,” and Alan Berger, her agent; N.S. Bienstock, a talent agency owned and run by husband and wife Richard Leibner and Carole Cooper; Matt Lauer, co-anchor, NBC’s “Today,” and Meredith Vieira, co-host, ABC’s “The View” (and Lauer’s future co-anchor); and the team of Jim Walton, president of the CNN News Group, Jonathan Klein, president, CNN/U.S., and Ken Jautz, executive VP, CNN News Group.

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Columnists Publicize Effort to Help Kids in Uganda

At least two African American columnists are calling attention to efforts to help war-torn children in Uganda.

In the Orlando Sentinel, David Porter wrote Saturday about “‘Invisible Children : Rough Cut,’ a documentary by three young guys from California who went to investigate the result of 20 years of fighting in Uganda – Africa’s longest running war.

“The rebels torture and kill kids in front of the abducted children. Then rebels tell the abducted children they will get the same treatment unless they pick up AK-47s and start slaughtering people,” Porter wrote.

“Children in northern Uganda don’t want anything to do with the rebels. So every day before the sun sets, more than 20,000 children leave their villages and walk to larger towns to avoid being abducted when rebels sweep through after dark. Children crowd into bus stations and other buildings for protection while they sleep. The next morning, they return home. That’s why they are called ‘night commuters.’ . . .

“Orlando is playing a key role as one of 130 cities selected to host a ‘global night commute,'” Porter continued. “City leaders are letting organizers hold it at Trotters Park, formerly known as Ben White Raceway. . . . Participants will spend the time writing letters to Washington leaders and creating artwork that expresses American values of freedom and the significance of the ‘global night commute.’

“What these young people are planning to do is important work. By standing up for this cause, they will help make the world safer for us and African children who are hunted down by monsters.

“It’s noteworthy that mostly white kids are driving this movement, and they deserve credit. Black kids cannot afford to relax on the sidelines. We’re talking about Africa here.”

Errol Louis wrote in the New York Daily News on Tuesday about another film on the subject, “War Dance.”

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Five Common Misconceptions About Darfur

“Heard all you need to know about Darfur?” Emily Wax wrote Sunday in the Washington Post.

“Think again. Three years after a government-backed militia began fighting rebels and residents in this region of western Sudan, much of the conventional wisdom surrounding the conflict – including the religious, ethnic and economic factors that drive it – fails to match the realities on the ground. Tens of thousands have died and some 2.5 million have been displaced, with no end to the conflict in sight.”

She listed “five truths to challenge the most common misconceptions about Darfur.”

They are:

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Ellen Hume on Mission to Help Ethnic Media

Ellen Hume, formerly of the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, and now director of the two-year-old Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, today “is focused on uniting, galvanizing and empowering some of the area’s smallest and most resource-strapped news outlets – the ethnic press,” media writer Mark Jurkowitz reported April 20 on his Boston Phoenix blog.

“Working with a handful of volunteers and with the help of a $10,000 planning grant from the Boston Foundation, the center has embarked on several projects. (‘We used up the $10,000 – everybody’s been working on fumes,’ admits Hume.)

“The most basic program is the center’s ethnic media data base featuring information on roughly 100 outlets ranging from the Jamaica Plain-based Somali paper RAJO Newsletter to the Lowell-based Cambodia Today paper.

“There’s also an effort underway to create a New England regional version of a Pulitzer Prize for ethnic media journalism and plans to try to create an internship program with several local universities that would place students inside ethnic outlets. A more ambitious venture would be the creation of an ethnic media wire service to generate regional community stories that could go national.”

In a related development, the American Society of Newspaper Editors announced April 18 it had joined with New America Media “to bring together ethnic newspapers and mainstream newspapers to work on stories of mutual interest.

“Purpose: To show how such collaborations would improve the coverage of the historic demographic change now occurring in communities from coast-to-coast.

“The project envisioned three joint stories. Two have been published. Sandy Close, head of New America Media, who spearheaded the project, reports:

“‘The collaboration’s stories are published by each participant as well as posted on a newly-created New America Media webpage called ‘Collaborations.'”

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