Maynard Institute archives

Columnists in the Homestretch

by richard0431

Midterms Could Also Affect Media Ownership Issue

 

As Election Day approaches, columnists of color are stepping up their commentary on Tuesday’s midterm elections. Democrats need to pick up 15 seats to win control of the House, and six for the Senate, according to Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Janet Hook, writing Friday in the Los Angeles Times.

The gaffe by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who ventured a joke that seemed to insult U.S. troops in Iraq, provided more fodder. African Americans were particularly watching the Senate races in Maryland and Tennessee, and the gubernatorial contests in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where black candidates are in contention.

A Republican campaign commercial ending with a blonde uttering, “Harold, call me,” prompted a national debate over whether the attack on Rep. Harold Ford Jr., D-Tenn., a single black man and candidate for the U.S. Senate, was racist.

In the Dallas Morning News, columnist Esther Wu, who is also national president of the Asian American Journalists Association, noted that an estimated 50 percent of the Asian American community is not registered.

John Eggerton, discussing the prospect of a Democratic takeover of the House, wrote Monday in Broadcasting & Cable, “According to lobbyists, who unsurprisingly declined to talk on the record, if the issue is media ownership, a new Hill regime could spell trouble for deregulatory-hungry broadcasters.” The National Association of Hispanic Journalists has been on record against media consolidation as harmful to the interests of people of color.

And there are local races and ballot propositions, some on same-sex marriage.

The commentary:

CALIFORNIA

FLORIDA

INDIANA

MARYLAND

MASSACHUSETTS

MICHIGAN

MISSOURI

MONTANA

NEW JERSEY

NEW YORK

OHIO

PENNSYLVANIA

TENNESSEE

 

VIRGINIA

RELATED

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Debating What to Make of Kerry’s Gaffe

“The press dutifully and mindlessly leaped onto the new controversy” over the gaffe by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., that those without education ‘get stuck in Iraq,’ “with no thought to how it shed absolutely no light on any of the issues that actually matter in these midterms,” Gal Beckerman wrote Friday in the Columbia Journalism Review’s CJR Daily.

“There is much to critique about this shameful moment. But to pinpoint one of the more frustrating elements, these journalists did not even have the intellectual honesty to admit that they helped make this story grow.” Kerry said he had flubbed a joke and did not mean to insult the troops.

Another columnist, Rosa Brooks in the Los Angeles Times, wrote that Kerry’s faux pas might have been on target. “If those grunts were half as smart as members of Congress, they’d be on Capitol Hill getting sucked up to by lobbyists instead of sucking up dust in Baghdad’s bloody alleys—right? Most of our current political leaders didn’t waste any time serving in the military,” she wrote.

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Gannett Converting to “Newsroom of the Future”

The Gannett Co. is converting nearly all of its newsrooms to an “information center” that “will let us gather the very local news and information that customers want, then distribute it when, where and how our customers seek it,” Craig Dubow, president and CEO of the nation’s largest newspaper company, told employees on Friday.

“The Information Center, frankly, is the newsroom of the future,” Dubow said in an e-mail. “It will fulfill today’s needs for a more flexible, broader-based approach to the information gathering process. And it will be platform agnostic: News and information will be delivered to the right media—be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented—at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.”

“Plans for the Information Center have been nurtured and developed in the Newspaper Division over the past several months. Pilot projects took place in 11 locations. Three—Des Moines, Sioux Falls and Brevard—were full scale implementations of an Information Center while other sites tested different aspects. . . . What they found is remarkable: Breaking news on the Web and updating for the newspaper draws more people to both those media. Asking the community for help, gets it—and delivers the newspaper into the heart of community conversations once again.

The references were to the Des Moines Register in Iowa, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in South Dakota, and Florida Today in Brevard County, Fla. Gannett publishes USA Today and 89 other dailies.

The Gannett plan, rolled out for Newspaper Division employees in September and October, according to company spokeswoman Tara Connell, appears to be the company’s response to defections throughout the newspaper industry to other media, primarily the Internet.

In an internally distributed list of “frequently asked questions,” the company said:

“The Information Center works by focusing on gathering news and information in multiple media for rapid digital dissemination rather than solely building a newspaper every day. The key is redeploying our resources to gather, process and publish news and information on a multitude of platforms focused on community needs and involvement. Each of the primary jobs of the Information Center represents key information-generating areas important to the emerging media environment. It changes the structure of newsroom to unleash more expansive coverage.

“For example: Formerly we would cover sports to fill a once-a-day sports section in print. Now we concentrate on getting game scores posted online and mobile as fast as possible, providing constantly updated staff blogs and inviting the community to discuss the latest sports news. Each location would tailor the Information Center to fit its particular needs — larger sites would create ‘desks’ or teams to do particular functions while smaller operations would be more likely to incorporate multiple functions into a smaller number of combination desks. But in either case, publishing becomes a 24/7 enterprise using multiple media across diverse digital and print platforms.”

Another question was, “Why is it called the Information Center and not the newsroom?”

The answer: “Increasingly, we are realizing that our customers are interested in much more than news from our products. While news remains our preeminent mission, other information—especially local information—is increasingly in demand. Calendars, recommendations, lifestyle topics as well as neighborhood level stories are all new elements that will have ongoing coverage across platforms. We are also embracing community interactivity in our sites with increased involvement. Changing the name acknowledges this additional responsibility and emphasizes that we are gathering news and information for websites, mobile devices and other products as well as for our daily newspapers.”

While the q-and-a said, “The goal is for all Gannett properties to adopt the concept of the Information Center,” it added, “For USA TODAY and our TV stations, the concept of the Information Center currently is being studied.”

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Columnists Watch Obama “Shooting Star” Take Off

“Barack Obama—delivered feet-first on Oprah’s couch and tickled on Meet the Press and then highly buffed by New Yorker editor David Remnick before the magazine editors of America—has enjoyed the best-orchestrated product reveal since the iPod,” Choire Sicha and John Koblin wrote in a Nov. 6 cover story for the New York Observer.

 

Robert Grossman/New York Observer

“Obama in Orbit” is the Nov. 6 cover story in the New York Observer.

“Now Mr. Obama is the only author with two books among the top 50 sellers on Amazon.com. Two weeks after the release of The Audacity of Hope, it is in its sixth printing, with 725,000 books in print.

“America can’t tell the difference between the book and the candidate. That may be because the book itself is the perfect campaign speech, and is one of the reasons why everyone keeps talking about Mr. Obama and ’08.

“‘Primaries are 13 1/2 and 14 months away, and there are full teams in New Hampshire and Iowa already,’ said pollster John Zogby.”

Columnists of color continue to take his measure:

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2 Held in Mexican Slaying of N.Y. Photographer

Prosecutors in Oaxaca City, Mexico, on Wednesday announced that two people had been detained in connection with the shooting death of U.S. photojournalist Bradley Roland Will during a conflict that intensified five months ago, when protesters demanding the governor’s resignation took over the city, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Will died on Oct. 27 from two bullet wounds.”The state prosecutor’s office said Wednesday that two people were in custody in connection with Will’s death. They were detained after residents identified them as the alleged shooters, and Mayor Manuel Martinez of Santa Lucia del Camino, where Will was killed, said the suspects are officials of the municipality, on the outskirts of Oaxaca City,” the AP story said.

“When the bullets started to fly, New York photojournalist Bradley Will was clutching a camera, doing what he loved most—filming a group of downtrodden people fighting for respect in some forgotten corner of our world,” Juan Gonzalez wrote Wednesday in the New York Daily News.

“This was last Friday, on a narrow street on the outskirts of Oaxaca, Mexico, where Will, 36, a longtime member of New York’s radical IndyMedia Center, had gone in early October to document an amazing story.

“It is one our own national media somehow managed to ignore for five long months.”

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Journalists Collaborate in Oral History of Iraq War

For its 45th anniversary issue, the Columbia Journalism Review interviewed 47 journalists who have covered the war in Iraq. “Out of their anecdotes and insights we constructed an oral history—the first of its kind, the magazine said.

“These people are covering the most significant story of our time and doing it under circumstances that nearly defy belief. They have lived and studied the situation closely, some of them for four years or more. This is their story.

The reporters whose interviews were used for “Into the Abyss” are:

Hannah Allam, Christopher Allbritton, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Diyar Al-Omary, Jon Lee Anderson, Jane Arraf, Luke Baker, Anne Barnard, Yousif Mohamed Basil, John Burns.

Also:

Andrew Lee Butters, Thanassis Cambanis, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Patrick Cockburn, Borzou Daragahi, William Darley, Thomas Dworzak, Richard Engel, Ali Fadhil.

Also:

Farnaz Fassihi, Dexter Filkins, Anne Garrels, Patrick Graham, Caroline Hawley, James Hider, Paul Holmes, Chris Hondros, Larry Kaplow, Tom Lasseter.

And:

Peter Maass, Dan Murphy, Elizabeth Palmer, Scott Peterson, Mitch Prothero, Nir Rosen, Alissa Rubin, Anthony Shadid, Liz Sly, Vivenne Walt and Nancy Youssef.

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Short Takes

  • Leonard Sparks, correspondent for the Afro-American newspapers of Baltimore and Washington, has started filing reports from Iraq. The Afro is the only black U.S. newspaper reporting from the country. “With the political debate about the U.S. occupation of Iraq competing with violence-wracked Baghdad for the attention of the American public, some soldiers deployed here complain that their work in the country is being overshadowed,” an Oct. 30 story began.
  • The roommate of Michael McQueen, 22, a U.S. Army Ranger who was the son of Mike McQueen, New Orleans bureau chief of the Associated Press, has been charged with first-degree murder in young McQueen’s September shooting death in Gaithersburg, Md., Ernesto Londoño reported Friday in the Washington Post. “Obviously, I can’t say I’m happy,” McQueen told the Post. “I’m pleased that the Montgomery County Police Department went over all the evidence very carefully and determined that my son was murdered in cold blood.” Arrested was Gary James Smith, 24, who served with young McQueen in the 75th Ranger Regiment.
  • Ken Rodriguez, columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, wrote Wednesday that his city suffered by not documenting crime committed by those who arrived there fleeing Hurricane Katrina. “Because police did not bother to document crimes committed by evacuees, hard, statistical evidence is lacking. But there’s other evidence of Katrina crime, and it’s staggering,” he wrote. “Houston police documented Katrina-related murders, and received millions of dollars in federal funding.”
  • “You’ve got to hand it to USA Today. Its editorial board made a big noise Wednesday when it implied that anybody rebuilding a flooded home in New Orleans is mentally deficient,” columnist Jarvis DeBerry wrote Sunday in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “Oh, it tried to be a little less sweeping with the generalization, but the board’s message was unambiguous: We who rebuild are fools, and American taxpayers are fools to allow us.” DeBerry disagreed.
  • “Remember Initiative 200? The [1998] measure essentially banned affirmative action on Washington’s college campuses,” Mark Trahant wrote for Sunday in his Seattle Post-Intelligencer column. Passage of the initiative caused some to urge moving the Unity ’99 convention from Seattle. Trahant wrote, “A draft report by the Higher Education Coordinating Board shows that African Americans, Hispanic and American Indian students ‘were not participating — nor were they achieving academically — at rates comparable to statewide averages.’. . . I-200 misread the future badly. Now we have an urgency to educate the fastest-growing segments of our population. . . . This time it’s not about fairness at all; it’s self-preservation.”
  • TV One is offering the world television premiere of the award-winning documentary “American Blackout” on Sunday from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time. “The provocative and powerful film, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006, chronicles a disturbing pattern of minority disenfranchisement efforts that took place from 2000-2004, in two presidential elections and in the 2002 midterm elections,” a news release said. The film, directed by Ian Inaba, founder of the Guerilla News Network, re-airs at midnight on Nov. 5, noon on Nov. 6 and 3 p.m. on Nov. 12.
  • “Patrice King Brown was expected to return to KDKA-TV last night at 6 p.m. after a monthlong absence following complications that resulted from a minor surgery,” Rob Owen reported Friday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “‘They put a tube down my throat to intubate my lungs and it gave me paralysis in one vocal cord and compressed the nerve,’ Brown said yesterday afternoon. ‘I woke up sounding like Minnie Mouse. I’d get the real high or real low voice.'”
  • Bonita Gooch, editor of the Community Voice newspaper in Wichita, Kan., “said she has relied in the past on college students, who happened to be white, to write for the weekly newspaper that explores African-American and other minority issues,” Christina M. Woods reported Thursday in the Wichita Eagle. Gooch, who is black, was making the point that people can be taught aspects of other cultures to be able to tell diverse stories, Woods wrote. Gooch was a panelist at “True Colors: How Does Race Influence Media Coverage in Wichita,” a forum that the Kansas Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists helped coordinate as a way to implement the national organization’s emphasis on diversity, the story said.
  • Cindy George, reporter at the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer and president of the Triangle Association of Black Journalists from 2002 to 2005, is leaving Nov. 1 to become the federal courts reporter at The Houston Chronicle. “We raised thousands of dollars for college students, advocated on behalf of black journalists, fought for fairness in reporting and we brought professional development to the lives of our members and the community,” she told colleagues.
  • Sonsyrea Tate, who wrote the 1997 book, “Little X,” about her experiences in the Nation of Islam, wrote Thursday about the death of longtime leader Elijah Muhammad in the Washington Informer, which she now edits. Elijah Muhammad’s son, W.D. Muhammad, tried to integrate the organization into the mainstream Muslim community. “Going from the shelter of our all-Black Nation of Islam into the mainstream Black community resulted in culture shock for many and teenagers suffered the most,” Tate wrote. “Elijah Muhammad had been sick a long time before his death, but we lived those years in denial about his impending death. As the Nation of Islam faces another major transition, its leaders should consider the last one and prepare to lead the transition more effectively.” The current leader, Louis Farrakhan, is ill.
  • George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., has launched Vox Pop, which it describes as “one of the first diversity-oriented university magazines in the nation. “After we found out that the Princeton Review ranked Mason among the most diverse universities in the nation, we wanted to delve into that richness of differences,” VoxPop Editor Tonka Dobreva said in a news release. The publication runs 40 pages.
  • “Listeners in the area of East Chicago, Ind., say they’ve been hearing an unlicensed radio station broadcasting uncensored gangsta rap music at 90.5 FM,” Robert Feder wrote Tuesday in his Chicago Sun-Times column. “Their complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, which is mandated with shutting down such pirate stations, have not resulted in any action so far. The X-rated station airs without identification or announcers.”
  • “As a reporter who has written for a major newspaper, a wire service and most recently, a leading Hip-Hop web site, I believe I can offer a uniquely original perspective on the business side of the burgeoning field that is Hip-Hop journalism, whether in print or online (occasionally, TV and cable, but those are not my areas of expertise),” Slav Kandyba wrote Friday, introducing his ProHipHop.com Web site. He is a former staff reporter at the Orange County (Calif.) Register and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal.
  • “The Committee to Protect Journalists urges an immediate, high-level investigation into today’s murder of Mohammad Ismail, Islamabad bureau chief for Pakistan Press International (PPI),” the organization said Wednesday. “Ismail’s body was found this morning near his home in Islamabad with ‘his head completely smashed with some hard blunt object’ according to Mazhar Abbas, secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists. The Associated Press reported that a police investigator said an iron bar may have been used as a weapon.”

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