Ishmael Reed’s Counterpunch

Social Critic Not Through Criticizing Journalists

Novelist and social critic Ishmael Reed, who criticized several leading black journalists last month in a piece that prompted responses from National Public Radio’s Michel Martin and other black journalists, has returned with more.

In a 4,714-word article posted Tuesday on the Web site Counterpunch, Reed said that, “when Ms. Martin says that I am imprisoning black journalists, I would suggest that it’s her employers who are confining African Americans to a few areas of media coverage and that she and her some of her fellow black journalists are the ones who are in jail.

“They can only express tough love toward blacks when the ‘tangle of pathologies’ that exist in some black communities exist in many American ethnic communities.

“. . . Instead of pushing back on me, Ms. Martin and her fellow black journalists might prepare black people for President Giuliani, a leader who promises to make George Bush look like Eleanor Roosevelt,” referring to former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Reed took to task CNN and its reporter Susan Roesgen; Newsweek and its writer Evan Thomas; Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz; NPR’s David Isay; former NPR reporter Ray Suarez; Tim Russert, host of NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press”; New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor and columnist.

The 1998 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient indicted the journalists over coverage of topics ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the Duke lacrosse team rape charges and what he considered their general demonization of African Americans. “Black people are not good at crime,” Reed wrote. “Been here since 1619 and haven’t produced a single Martha Stewart or Ken Lay.”

In one example, Reed dismissed Martin’s mention that Tucker was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary this year.

“That doesn’t amount to beans, lady. They gave a Pulitzer to Janet Cooke for her story about black people being so low down that they injected a child with Heroin,” Reed wrote.

“Maybe Ms. Tucker was nominated because she called the black victims of the Katrina flood, ‘bestial,’ or maybe for one of her recent columns, ‘Idle Black Men, Tragically, Aren’t Just A Stereotype’ an insult to the millions of black men who, like my step Father, worked thirty years at a crummy job so that he could feed his family. The column was about black men in New Orleans who were too lazy to compete with Hispanics for jobs.”

The Katrina reference was to a Tucker column of Sept. 11 in which Tucker wrote, “As the levees breached and public safety mechanisms failed, some of the city’s criminal element descended into anarchy, breaking into stores for TVs and guns, preying on the weak, firing at overwhelmed law enforcement personnel. They were not merely lawless; they were bestial. And they were black.

“But the predators were few in number – a relative handful compared with the many frightened residents desperate for help.”

Tucker, who was named 2006 Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists, declined to comment.

Reed wrote that Suarez “disparaged Bryant Gumbel and Ed Bradley. Called them ‘Showcase blacks.'”

Suarez, who is now a senior correspondent on PBS’ “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” told Journal-isms, “Ishmael Reed and I have disagreed about things in the past, and will likely do so in the future. I have no recollection of the exchange he recounts in his column.”

After the initial item appeared, Joseph Anderson, who described himself as a “sometimes essayist, when so moved,” vigorously supported Reed on the Journal-isms message board in several long postings he initiated. Reed disclosed in Tuesday’s essay that it was Anderson who had called his attention to a Martin piece on “Nightline” that Reed criticized.

Martin declined to comment on Reed’s latest piece, but in a rebuttal to the earlier column that was published online by the Black Commentator, she pleaded for a civil discussion.

“Rudeness is not radical; Civility is radical,” she wrote. “It is radical because it is rooted in love: the transcendent, prophetic love of a Gandhi, or a King. Civility is rooted in strength, not weakness. And as I said before it is rooted in respect for self. Brother Reed, I respect you. And all I ask is that you do the same.”

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Henry Louis Gates Steps Down from Pulitzer Board

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., the academic superstar who is W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities at Harvard, is stepping down as chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, having served the maximum three three-year terms as a board member.

Columbia University announced Monday that Paul E. Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and a vice president at Dow Jones & Co., has been appointed the new chairman of the board, which awards the most prestigious prizes in journalism and honors others in arts and letters. By custom, the most senior member of the board becomes chairman.

Gates, on the board since 1997, became chairman only last year. He said then “he would like to see the board appoint its first Hispanic member soon. He’ll also push for more diversity on the juries that pick finalists in the letters and drama categories,” Joe Strupp wrote at the time in Editor & Publisher.

While the last member to join the board was a non-Latino (Paul Tash, editor of the St. Petersburg Times), about half of the juries considering newspaper prizes are women and more than 20 percent are people of color, Sig Gissler, administrator of the board, told Journal-isms.

“I think Skip was great,” said Greg Moore, editor of the Denver Post and a Pulitzer board member. “It was only my second year on the board, but my sense was Skip openly pushed for and helped achieve greater diversity on the juries and a broadening of the view of the prize, especially in music. The board’s embracing of jazz, especially the award to Thelonious Monk this year, had Skip’s fingerprints all over it. He had a relaxed, engaging style and promoted vigorous, open debate. And he was usually leading the charge. I enjoyed his sense of humor and perspective as an academic. But he respected the views and work of journalists because of his work for The New Yorker. He will be missed as a large personality and intellect by all of us.” The jazz pianist was awarded a rare, posthumous special citation.

Being on the 19-member Pulitzer board, Columbia Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann told Journal-isms, is like being one of the jurors in the film “Twelve Angry Men”: “You get to know people real well.” Members must read the 15 nominated books and the three finalists in the 14 journalism categories, absorb three plays and listen to three musical compositions.

Gates, the third African American to lead the board, “feels that the board meetings are one of the best seminars in America,” Gissler said. “He was a strong contributor in discussions about everything.” Gissler said Gates was able to draw upon his many contacts in academia in finding candidates for the Pulitzer juries, who make their recommendations to the board.

“Journalism and scholarship have been my twin loves,” Gates said in his speech last year welcoming Pulitzer winners, “inextricably intertwined from the beginning of my career. . . . The stories and narratives that journalists coin from the raw material of incidents and events are the stories and narratives that produce a common sense of citizenship, and that’s true on both the national and the regional level, whether you’re talking about the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post or — well, the Piedmont Herald,” the weekly paper he read growing up in West Virginia.

The board elects a replacement at its next meeting in November.

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Latino Immigrants Happy With May 1 Demonstrations

A survey of 504 Latino immigrants finds that 81 percent felt the May 1 “Day Without Immigrants” was a success, according to Garcia Research Associates of Los Angeles, which conducted the telephone poll.

Meanwhile, a new census report released today shows, “Nearly half of the nation’s children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, and the percentage is increasing mainly because the Hispanic population is growing so rapidly,” as D’Vera Cohn and Tara Bahrampour reported in the Washington Post.

“Hispanics are the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority group. They accounted for 49 percent of the country’s growth from 2004 to 2005, the report shows. And the increase in young children is largely a Hispanic story, driving 70 percent of the growth in children younger than 5. Forty-five percent of U.S. children younger than 5 are minorities,” Cohn and Bahrampour wrote.

For CNN’s Lou Dobbs, the immigration debate has been a bonanza, Gail Shister wrote Tuesday in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Tapping into the zeitgeist with a vengeance, Dobbs’ rants against illegal immigration are yielding big ratings for CNN. The 6 p.m. weekday Lou Dobbs Tonight averaged 817,000 total viewers last month – a 46 percent increase over April ’05, according to Nielsen Media Research,” she wrote.

As reported Monday, the conservative media critic L. Brent Bozell III accused the news media of ignoring a survey that said 57 percent of those polled believed the May 1 pro-immigration rallies would hurt their cause.

But according to the Garcia survey, the Latino immigrants thought the protests successful. Sixty-five percent said that they did not attend work on May 1. In the Los Angeles area, the percentage was higher, at 71 percent, as Marisa Trevino noted Tuesday in her Latina Lista blog.

“What is really needed is a second part to this survey where blacks, Anglos, Asians and other communities are asked the all-important question — did you miss or even notice that Latinos were missing from your day?” Trevino wrote.

• Jim Clingman, National Newspaper Publishers Association: When is the March for Black Folks?
• Dina M. Horwedel, Diverse: For Illegal College Students, An Uncertain Future
• Allen H. Johnson, Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record: Painting immigration issue with broad brush
• Michael Powell, Washington Post: U.S. Immigration Debate Is a Road Well Traveled
• Penny Brown Roberts, Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate: Hispanic workers likely to affect N.O. culture

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Immigration Reform Proposal Helps Win Nieman

Gina Acosta, an editorial-page copy editor at the Washington Post, has won a Nieman Fellowship, her Post colleagues have been told. Acosta, a former board member of the National Associaton of Hispanic Journalists, said she had proposed to study “immigration reform in a post-9/11 world.”

The next class of Nieman fellows, who study at Harvard University, is to be announced later this month.

Meanwhile, Dwight Oestricher of Dow Jones Newswires, who is African American, and Pang Ruifeng, senior business reporter for Southern Weekend, the largest circulation weekly newspaper in China, are among 10 Knight-Bagehot Fellows in economics and business journalism named by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for the 2006-2007 academic year, Columbia announced Monday.

Ruifeng is on temporary leave to study English at New York University.

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UPN’s Black Sitcoms Facing the Ax

“As the new CW network prepares to unveil its fall lineup next week, the way that African-Americans are portrayed on TV hangs in the balance,” David Zurawik wrote today in the Baltimore Sun.

“The fledgling network, formed by the merger of the struggling WB and UPN broadcast operations, is expected to announce a fall season aimed at young viewers and anchored by series such as WB’s Gilmore Girls and UPN’s Veronica Mars.

“Unlikely to be on the roster, industry insiders say, are several of UPN’s eight African-American-themed sitcoms, including shows such as One on One and Half & Half, which now dominate the network’s prime-time viewing hours on Monday and Thursday evenings.”

“For the black audience, something will be missing with the cancellation of such shows,” Donald Bogle, a New York University professor and author of “Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television,” said in the story.

“Even with the distortion in some of these sitcoms, audiences could still go and see some semblance of an African-American community, as well as African-American cultural references. And that would be terrible if it just goes away.”

In the Boston Globe, Suzanne C. Ryan quoted Jannette Dates, dean of the School of Communications at Howard University, calling the potential cancellations a ”travesty” because the black middle class already isn’t represented much on television.

”Sure, some of those shows were silly sitcom fare, but at least they tried to dive into issues that other shows never touched. ‘All of Us’ just had a [black] male character confronted with the fact that his son wanted to use the ‘n’ word. They explored why that was such a moment of tension for everybody,” Dates told Ryan.

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Paper Begins 22-Part Series on Katrina Hospitals

“On May 7, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution began publishing ‘Through Hell and High Water,’ by Jane O. Hansen, a 22-part series revealing what happened inside two hospitals, one public and one private, during the days after the levees broke in New Orleans,” the Atlanta newspaper said in an announcement.

“Charity Hospital is one of the nation’s oldest continuously operating hospitals, the place where New Orleans’ poor and uninsured got health care. Across the street from Charity is Tulane University Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility owned by the Hospital Corporation of America, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital company.

“After Hurricane Katrina, when the levees broke, both hospitals lost backup emergency power. Medical professionals faced unprecedented conditions and worked feverishly to keep their most critical patients alive while awaiting rescue. The public hospital was told repeatedly that the government was on the way. HCA mounted its own rescue of Tulane, creating a makeshift helipad on the roof of its parking garage.

“No one disagrees that Tulane University Hospital helped evacuate Charity’s most critical patients. But there is heated debate about whether the private hospital put its able-bodied employees on helicopters in front of sick Charity patients. We believe this is the first story to get to the bottom of what actually did happen – and why there are such different perceptions.”

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Native Journalists Set 5-Year Plan, Need $7,000

The Native American Journalists Association said Monday it had released a five-year strategic plan that included developing an outreach plan to tribal colleges and lobbying news organizations to carry Native opinion writers and adding to the NAJA staff.

“NAJA is nearly at 550-members. We’re a tiny staff – I only have one full-time employee, an executive assistant, and a part-time student,” Executive Director Kim Baca told Journal-isms today. “We’re also trying to hire an education director to help us with our students. Students make up nearly 50 percent of our organization now, thanks to the Freedom Forum, which buys memberships for students who participate in their programs, the annual journalism career workshop at Crazy Horse and the American Indian Journalism Institute.”

The plan also includes creating a fundraising development plan to increase NAJA’s annual operational budget.

Baca added: “We’re almost at our goal for our Challenge fund,” under which it received $25,000. “We’ve got until July 1st to raise the remaining $7,000 . . . We’ve had phenomenal growth in the past three years and we’re sending two students to an internship at CBS for the very first time. Next year, NAJA is going to partner with the Radio-Television News Directors Foundation for a radio camp for Native high school students since we recognize broadcast is an area we’re lacking. We need all the financial help we can get.”

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Short Takes

• In Iraq, “News of the slaying of correspondent Laith Dulaimi, 29, and technician Muazaz Ahmed, 28, whose bodies were found at a sewage plant Monday, brings to 95 the number of journalists and support staffers, the vast majority of them Iraqi, killed since the war began three years ago,” James Rainey reported today in the Los Angeles Times.
• A 14-page photo essay on Antarctica by veteran Brazilian photographer Sabastião Salgado won a National Magazine Award for Rolling Stone magazine Tuesday night. “‘The Edge of the World,’ takes readers on a journey to the solitary reaches of Antarctica and Patagonia where his passionate plea for the environment resulted in black and white images of startling drama,” the American Society of Magazine Editors said.
• “Strini Moodley, 60, one of the founders of the Black Consciousness Movement during South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, died Thursday in Durban after a brief illness,” the Los Angeles Times reported May 1. “He later became a journalist and was the deputy news editor at the Natal Witness, a daily in Pietermaritzburg.”
• Tavis Smiley’s best-selling “Covenant With Black America” was the subject of a front-page (PDF) story in the Philadelphia Inquirer today by Dwayne Campbell, with a photo by Michael Bryant that dominated the page.
• “Passamaquoddy documents and meetings about a proposed $500 million liquefied natural gas terminal on tribal land in Washington County need not be open to the public, Maine’s highest court ruled Monday,” the Bangor News reported Tuesday.
• Telemundo, NBC Universal’s Spanish-language TV network, is teaming with Internet giant Yahoo “to shake up the Hispanic online market with a new co-branded Web site called Yahoo Telemundo (telemundo.yahoo.com). Yahoo and Telemundo are joining forces to create a Hispanic Web portal,” Advertising Age reported today.
• In a dispatch that recalled the uproar in 1994 when Time magazine darkened the face of O.J. Simpson, Reuters reported, “The more ‘black looking’ an African-American man charged with murdering a white victim, the more likely he is to be sentenced to death, a Stanford University researcher said on Tuesday.”
• “The eighth class of six journalism fellows has graduated from the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, a training program at Vanderbilt University for people of color who want to become journalists but have had little or no formal journalism training,” the Freedom Forum reported Monday.
• Producer Melissa Cornick of the ABC News program “20/20” won the $5,000 Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting on the News – Electronic Division, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University announced April 27. Cornick won for a story showing that local news reports often mischaracterized animal rescue groups’ efforts to take animals from owners accused of cruelty as heroic rescues, when owners’ “due process” rights often were violated.
• “Advertising agencies remain segregated remnants of the 1950s, in effect casting multicultural agencies aside in virtual ‘Negro leagues,’ said Richard Wayner, CEO of the True Agency, during a heated question-and-answer session after a panel discussion at the Los Angeles Association of Advertising Agencies on May 6,” Alice Z. Cuneo reported Monday in Advertising Age.
• “Propelled by a new generation of young consumers, widening literacy and a spurting economy, India’s print media are booming, even as newspapers and magazines in most developed countries struggle to maintain profits and compete with the Internet and television,” John Larkin reported Friday in the Wall Street Journal.
• Disgraced former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair is “in a ‘holding pattern’, where he sells new and used books on Amazon to raise cash. . . . his book business now occupies most of his time, and his daily routine consists of short car hops between chores along Centreville’s grim four-lane roads,” Ed Caesar reported May 4 in the London Independent, referencing Centreville, Va., outside Washington.
• Members of the National Association of Black Journalists on a 15-day United Nations-sponsored trip to Tanzania have created a blog chronicling their travels. The 10 members, headed by NABJ President Bryan Monroe, went to the region as part of a media delegation to cover malaria, HIV/AIDS and other African health issues.