Maynard Institute archives

Juan Williams Blasts Critics

by richard0386

“Why Not Just . . . Call Me an Uncle Tom?”

The op-ed piece by Juan Williams, senior correspondent for National Public Radio and commentator for the Fox News Channel, began:

 

 

 

“Why not just go ahead and call me an Uncle Tom and a sellout? Why bother with trying to put a new coat of paint on the same old personal attacks by saying that I am ‘demeaning black people,’ that I’m the ‘black Ann Coulter‘ and a turncoat against the cause of racial progress for black people in the United States?”

Williams continued in a Los Angeles Times column Thursday:

“That’s a sampling of the nastiness flying at me since I wrote a book that holds today’s civil rights leaders accountable for serious problems inside black America. I’ve suggested that many poor people are capable of helping themselves by graduating high school, keeping a job and having children when they’re married and ready to be parents.”

Williams did not name the critics, but he told Journal-isms he had been the subject of a personal attack Oct. 4 by columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan in the L.A. Times, had been demonized by media personality Tavis Smiley and attacked by two of the people he criticized, the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

However, Williams said, “I didn’t name these people because I spoke to the ideas. . . in my mind what’s important is that you join the argument.”

 

 

In his book, “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It,” published over the summer, Williams “laments what he sees as a black underclass mesmerized by racial hucksters playing ‘old school’ politics: corporate blackmail disguised as boycotts, naked shakedowns leveraged by rhetorical threats and the like,” as a Washington Post Book World review described it.

Columnist Kaplan, asked about Williams’ op-ed piece, told Journal-isms Friday, “Juan Williams is not listening. I never called him a turncoat or a Tom—I said I shared his frustration. What I object to (among other things) is characterizing black failure as some kind of deal with white America that black folk reneged on, specifically the ‘deal’ of Brown vs. Board of Ed. Not only is that simplistic, it sets us up as losers who ‘threw away’ this wonderful opportunity. What I was saying is that everybody let blacks down—including us—and everybody ‘threw away’ opportunities for black advancement. Why can’t there be more nuance like this in the discussion?

“Juan Williams needs to stop making a martyr out of himself. Part of this feels like crass careerism.

“Good grief, it’s not personal,” she said. “I don’t even know him!”

In the New York Daily News, gossip columnist Lloyd Grove wrote on Aug. 8, “Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have had just about enough of Juan Williams.

“‘I think Juan is trying to be the black Ann Coulter with pants,” Sharpton told me yesterday, responding to Williams’ critique of him as a cynical, money-grubbing self-promoter who encourages African-Americans to evade responsibility for problems by blaming others. ‘I have fought for social responsibility in the black community, unlike some of these guys who try to hustle right-wing politics for Fox News.’

“Jackson was equally insulting, accusing Williams of journalistic sins tantamount to plagiarism. ‘If plagiarism is someone taking the work of another and not giving credit, then it’s just as bad to write about somebody without even talking to them,’ Jackson argued. ‘I have had not one interview with him. He’s made no attempt to get any contextual response to anything. Usually writers like to use primary sources.’

“Williams retorted: ‘They’re involved in spin, because the book reveals them for who they are.'”

On Amazon.com, where “Enough” ranks No. 838 in sales, the book’s customers have been some of the same people who bought titles by Coulter, her fellow conservatives Patrick J. Buchanan, John McWhorter and Shelby Steele, and a new book by New York Times sports columnist William C. Rhoden, “Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete,” according to the Web site.

Other columnists of color who have challenged the premise of Williams’ book include Sylvester Brown Jr. of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sam Fulwood of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and political science professor Ron Walters. Columnists who have agreed with it include Kerra Bolton of the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times; Bob Herbert of the New York Times; Gregory Kane of the Baltimore Sun; Stanley Crouch of the New York Daily News, Ruben Navarrette of the San Diego Union-Tribune and Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune.

Williams’ hitting back at critics is not new. In a 1989 piece in the Washington Post, in which Williams also criticized the news media for not being hard enough on Jackson and Sharpton, the then-Post staffer began, “About a month ago, when I appeared on a Howard University TV show to discuss the role of black journalists, a telephone caller suggested on the air that WUSA-TV reporter Bruce Johnson and I (two ‘darlings of the white media,’ in the caller’s words) should ‘censor’ the truth in our reporting whenever it dealt with black people. He wanted the image of blacks, as portrayed in the major media, to be more positive.

“It seems to me that caller knew what he wanted from black journalists: He wanted them to lie.”

He went on to quote poet Langston Hughes, writing in 1926: “If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temple for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

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Gannett Papers Record 19.5% Journalists of Color

The Gannett Co., the newspaper company judged to have the best overall record on diversity, reported Friday that, “Staffing information submitted by Gannett newspapers in the 2006 All-American diversity-employment survey shows that a record 19.5 percent of journalists in Gannett newsrooms were people of color.

“The previous record, 19.4 percent, was set last year.

“. . . According to the 2006 Newsroom Census conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 13.87 percent of journalists at daily U.S. newspapers were people of color.

“The percent of managers of color in Gannett newsrooms was 19.1 percent, compared with a record 19.2 percent in 2005.

In other categories, 28.5 percent of newsroom hires were people of color, compared with a record 34.2 last year; 27.8 percent of promotions went to people of color, compared with a record 33.9 percent in 2005; and 46.7 percent of interns were people of color, compared with 52.1 percent last year.

“ASNE’s census . . . showed that 11.2 percent of managers in U.S. newsrooms and 30.8 percent of interns were people of color. People of color—Hispanic Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans—comprise about 33 percent of the U.S. population.”

In an accompanying column, Phil Currie, Gannett’s senior vice president for news, said, “Normally, a media company would celebrate the percentages of minority hires, promotions and interns that our newspaper newsrooms had in 2006. (They are 28.5 percent, 27.8 percent and 46.7 percent.) But since they fell below the totals of a year ago, enthusiasm here is mild at best. We know we can do better—because we have in the past—and editors will need to focus on that in the year ahead.”

The company also listed the 39 Gannett newspaper staffs that met or exceeded the percentage of people of color in the community’s Metropolitan Statistical Area or home county/counties, the 36 newspapers with news-management staffs that met or exceeded the MSA benchmark and the 50 that met or exceeded the MSA benchmark for newsroom hiring.

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Fox Sportscaster Fired Over Game Comments

“Fox baseball broadcaster Steve Lyons has been fired for making a racially insensitive comment directed at colleague Lou Piniella’s Hispanic heritage on the air during Game 3 of the American League championship series,” Janie McCauley reported Saturday for the Associated Press.

“The network confirmed Saturday that Lyons was dismissed after Friday’s comments. He has been replaced for the remainder of the series by Los Angeles Angels announcer Jose Mota.

“‘Steve Lyons has been relieved of his Fox Sports duties for making comments on air that the company found inappropriate,’ network spokesman Dan Bell said.”

Bell would not tell Journal-isms what the comments were, but sports columnist Roy S. Johnson wrote Saturday in his “Pass the Word” blog:

“In the second inning, Lyons’ broadcast partner, Lou Piniella, who’s part Latino, noted the success of light-hitting A’s infielder Marco Scutaro in the first round of the playoffs, He said the player’s surprise production and the need for him continue hitting well during the series was like ‘finding a wallet on a Friday night and looking for one on Sunday and Monday, too.’

“Later, Piniella said the A’s needed slugger Frank Thomas and teammate Eric Chavez to get ‘en fuego’ because his hitting was ‘frio.’ The third man in the booth, Thom Brennaman (who’s made his own share of miscues during the series, praised Piniella for being bilingual. Then Lyons piped in . . .

“‘Lou’s habla-ing some Español there, and I’m still looking for my wallet. I don’t understand him and I don’t want to sit close to him now.’ The three men laughed.”

“Piniella, approached before Saturday’s Game 4, declined to comment on the situation except to say: ‘No, he’s not here today.'”

Lyons, 46, previously served as studio analyst, a position in which he earned an Emmy Award, was a nighttime host at WMVP SportsRadio in Chicago and an on-air personality on WEEI in Boston, according to a Fox bio. He began his career with the Boston Red Sox and remains the only player in the team’s history to play every position except designated hitter, it said.

The New York Times and Associated Press later noted that, two years ago, Lyons “was suspended without pay for making light of Shawn Green’s decision, when he was with the Dodgers, not to play on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar,” as the Times said. [Added Oct. 14.]

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Activist Says Media Should Have “Outed” Foley

“The finger-pointing in the Mark Foley scandal has curiously not focused on one particularly powerful player complicit in allowing the Florida Republican to continue his detrimental behavior for years: the American media,” according to Michelangelo Signorile, the gay activist who is considered to have invented the practice of “outing” closeted gays.

“By not reporting on Foley’s deceitful life for more than 15 years—during which he portrayed himself as a heterosexual politician—the media enabled a man overwhelmed by the destructiveness of the closet to ultimately implode in the halls of Congress,” Signorile wrote Friday in the Los Angeles Times.

“By looking the other way on something that made them uncomfortable—reporting on closeted gay public figures, particularly those who are hypocrites—and by deluding themselves that it’s a privacy issue, reporters, producers and editors took part in perpetuating a fiction, one that may well have led to an ugly outcome.”

Other perspectives on the Foley scandal:

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Iraqi Body Count Is Latest Point of Contention

“When war is waged to improve the lives of a country’s people, the body count—the number of those killed as a result of the war itself—cannot help but be wrapped up in politics,” Gal Beckerman wrote Thursday for the Columbia Journalism Review.

“No one who has been trumpeting the American presence in Iraq as a liberating force wants to hear that so far 654,965 Iraqis have died due to the fighting, sectarian and otherwise.

“But those were the results of an academic study released yesterday and published in the Lancet, the well-regarded British medical journal.

“The Bush administration immediately discounted the findings, throwing doubt on the accuracy of the results. The president himself, at a press conference yesterday, said the report was not ‘credible’ and that ‘the methodology is pretty well discredited.’ Newspapers paid attention but also offered plenty of dissenting voices to counterbalance the surprisingly high number.

“But should we be so skeptical?”

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Rosenhause, Guam Paper Win Diversity Awards

Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and the Pacific Daily News on Guam have been named winners of the fifth annual Robert G. McGruder Awards for Diversity Leadership, it was announced on Friday.

The awards, which recognize leadership in news content and in recruiting, developing and retaining journalists of color, are to be presented at the Associated Press Managing Editors association convention Oct. 26 in New Orleans.

“The honors are given by APME and the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in partnership with the Freedom Forum, which provides the funding. Each honoree receives $2,500 and a sculpture representing leadership,” a news release said.

“At the Sun-Sentinel, the efforts of Sharon Rosenhause, who won in the over-75,000 circulation category, have helped increase the percentage of minority newsroom employees from 19% to more than 29%. Rosenhause, who attends many conventions and events sponsored by minority journalists’ organizations, ‘has created programs in the newsroom ranging from mentoring to specialized training for minorities who have demonstrated an ability to lead and assume additional responsibilities,’ Earl Maucker, Sun-Sentinel editor, wrote in his nomination.

“The western Pacific island of Guam is home to the indigenous Chamorros and a melting pot of ethnicities. While diversity has been an opportunity for the Pacific Daily News, recruiting has been a logistical challenge for the newspaper more than 6,000 miles from the U.S. mainland.

“The newspaper has faced the challenges with high school and college internship programs and a ‘grow our own’ program.”

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L.A. Times Hopes to “Act Fast” to Protect Future

Two journalists of color—Michelle Maltais, a multimedia producer who is African American, and reporter David Pierson, a Chinese-American—will be among the members of a Los Angeles Times committee charged with searching out and investigating promising innovations across the country and abroad, Times Editor Dean Baquet told his staff today.

Other members are Michalene Busico, Julie Bowles, Marilyn Thompson, Vernon Loeb, Patrick Goldstein, Richard Rushfield and Aaron Curtiss. They will be assisted by three reporters, T, Christian Miller, Chris Gaither and Glenn Bunting. Marc Duvoisin will help guide the effort, Baquet said.

As Katharine Q. Seelye reported Thursday in the New York Times, “The Los Angeles project sprang from recent turmoil at the paper, when Mr. Baquet and the previous publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, said in the pages of the newspaper that they would not go along with cuts ordered by the corporate parent, the Tribune Company. Tribune has cut more than 20 percent of the 1,200 newsroom employees since it bought the paper in 2000.

“The company dismissed Mr. Johnson last week. Mr. Baquet said he agreed to stay because he was convinced he would have the chance to make a new case for shoring up both his staff and his budget.

“Those involved in the project said they did not want to be passive by-standers as their paper, like many metro dailies, struggled to transform itself in the Internet age.

“‘We shouldn’t be waiting for corporate headquarters or a think tank or a consultant to come up with ideas to secure our future,’ said Marc Duvoisin, an assistant managing editor who will direct the investigation.

“We realized we had to act fast or we wouldn’t have anything to act for,’ said Loeb, the paper’s California investigations editor who helped originate the idea, in the story.

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Iowa—Yes, Iowa—Could Be Half “Minority” by 2030

“However the immigrants get here, rural America, which makes up 75 percent of the landmass of the United States, is up for grabs as tens of thousands of pioneers, almost all Hispanic, arrive each month,” according to Stephen G. Bloom, writing for the Wilson Quarterly in an essay posted today on the Nieman Watchdog Web site.

The 2000 census counted 82,500 Hispanics in Iowa but there may be almost twice as many today, and by 2030, many believe, half of Iowa’s population of 3 million will belong to minority groups, the piece says.

Bloom, a journalism teacher at the University of Iowa, co-creator of two oral history projects: The Iowa Journalists Oral History Project, the world’s first video-streaming archive of journalists; and The Oxford Project, which spans two decades in the lives of residents of a rural Iowa town.

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Short Takes

  • “Air America Radio, a liberal talk and news radio network that features the comedian Al Franken, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a network official told The AP,” Seth Sutel of the Associated Press reported on Friday. Air America spokeswoman Jaime Horn said the network will stay on the air while it resolves issues with its creditors.
  • Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” featured a skit Thursday in which Stewart, as President Bush, flirted with a White House correspondent named “Suzanne” at a press conference. “I’m just saying I think you’re doable,” the faux president said. “I’m just saying under different circumstances (if) I weren’t married, I would perhaps woo you with a down home country mix. Wild flowers and date rape. You know what I’m saying.” Suzanne Malveaux covers the White House for CNN.
  • The board of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists recently affirmed and strengthened its statement concerning media concentration, “and NAHJ Vice President Cindy Rodriguez joined me, our deputy director Joseph Torres, and two representatives of Free Press,” an advocacy group, “to discuss the issue in Washington, D.C. with aides of eight members of Congress,” NAHJ President Rafael Olmeda told members on Wednesday. NAHJ opposes increased media concentration because it means less minority ownership, he said.
  • “His recently published book on life inside the ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad has earned Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post one of the coveted five finalists spots for a National Book Award for nonfiction, it was announced Wednesday,” Editor & Publisher noted Thursday. “Chandrasekaran was the Post’s bureau chief in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004 and is now assistant managing editor for continuous news. His book is ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.'”
  • The Committee to Protect Journalists will honor journalists Jesus Abad Colorado of Colombia, Jamal Amer of Yemen and Madi Ceesay of the Gambia with 2006 International Press Freedom Awards in November, CPJ announced on Thursday. CPJ also plans to posthumously honor Atwar Bahjat, correspondent for Al-Arabiya satellite television and former Al-Jazeera reporter who was gunned down while covering a bombing near Samarra, Iraq, in February. Hodding Carter III, the former editor of Mississippi’s Delta Democrat-Times and former president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is to receive CPJâ??s Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for lifetime achievement.
  • CBS News’ Russ Mitchell moderated the final debate between Sen. George Allen, R-Va., and his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, Monday night in Richmond. Mitchell pressed Allen on whether he had ever used the well-known racial epithet directed at blacks, according to Kali Schumitz of the Times Community Newspapers of suburban Washington. Allen responded, “What I’m saying is that I don’t recall using that word.”
  • “Doris McMillon isn’t an anchorwoman anymore—but she plays one on TV,” Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts wrote Thursday in the Washington Post’s “Reliable Source” column. “A broadcaster with WJLA and BET through the 1980s, McMillon gave up the news biz to try acting. . . . This week she popped up on HBO’s ‘The Wire,’ as the anchor glimpsed on a TV set announcing a breaking scandal in the Baltimore Police Department.” McMillon also runs a media-training firm.
  • Sia Kio Nyorkor, an associate producer for New Jersey Public Television, has co-produced the half-hour documentary “Liberian Democracy: A Journey Back Home,” the National Association of Black Journalists reported. The documentary highlights a trip to Liberia and takes a look at Liberian communities in New Jersey. It airs on NJN Public Television Oct. 17 and 20.
  • The South African government has backed down after protests of proposals to introduce tough censorship laws for the print and broadcasting media, Linda Ensor reported Thursday for Business Day in Johannesburg.
  • “The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) wants the Indian government to provide a strategic vision of the future of the country’s media in the face of what it describes as a ‘growing and profound’ crisis within Indian journalism. . . .The IFJ’s affiliates in India—the National Union of Journalists (India), the Indian Journalists’ Union and the All India Newspaper Employees’ Federation—warn that media working conditions are deteriorating and thousands of journalists exist in perilous employment conditions,” the Indo-Asian News Service said on Thursday.
  • A court in Gambia unconditionally released Malick Mboob, a journalist and former staff member of the Daily Observer, a pro-government newspaper, on Monday after 139 days in illegal detention for allegedly sending damaging information to the online US-based Freedom Newspaper, the Media Foundation for West Africa reported on Thursday.
  • “Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement wants to impose tough curbs on the media, barring ‘un-Islamic’ reporting and drawing criticism from press freedom groups, officials said on Wednesday,” South Africa’s IOL Web site reported on Thursday.

Clarification: An item in the Oct. 6 column said the National Association of Hispanic Journalists raised more than $75,000 at its 21st annual awards gala. That figure referred to the organization’s net intake. Before expenses, NAHJ took in about $143,000, according to Ivan Roman, executive director.

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