Maynard Institute archives

Court Victory, but No Job

by richard0491

Prison Writer Factors in Fame, “the Politics of Crime”

The man who became America’s most famous prison journalist, Wilbert Rideau, won a court victory (PDF) late last week: He does not have to pay the $127,000 in court costs that a Louisiana district judge assessed him last year.

 

 

Rideau, 64, is hardly in a position to pay. Nearly 22 months after he became a free man, he has not been able to land a job, despite the journalism prizes and fame.

“I re-entered society knowing a lot of editors, producers, publishers, and even business people—and vice-versa,” Rideau told Journal-isms by e-mail on Monday. “I’ve not had a job offer extended to me in journalism, or any other endeavor. But that’s just an observation, not a complaint. I always knew, given my high-profile and the politics of crime, that I would have to be self-employed. And, I’m working at that. I am writing a book and, yes, I have a publisher. And I’m very optimistic. Stay tuned.”

Mark Saltz put it this way for the Associated Press in January: “Widely honored because of his work as a prison journalist and editor of a magazine about prison life, Rideau attracted supporters from all over the world for his effort to win release.

“He had been locked up since 1961 when he robbed a bank, took three employees hostage, shot all of them and killed one, Julia Ferguson. Prosecutors said Rideau stabbed her and slit her throat as she knelt on a rural road begging for her life. He admitted killing her, but said it was an impulsive lunge with a knife, the unpremeditated act of a confused 19-year-old. The contention that Ferguson’s throat was slashed was refuted by a well-known forensics expert who insisted the cut on her throat was ‘superficial’ in defense testimony at Rideau’s last trial.

“While in prison, Rideau went from an illiterate teenager to a well-read, self-educated man. He edited The Angolite, a prison magazine that won a George Polk Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for exposing prison abuses. He was in demand as a speaker, appeared on television and helped produce and direct an award-winning documentary about Angola called, The Farm.

“In 1993, Life magazine called him ‘the most rehabilitated prisoner in America.'”

Last week, Judge Sylvia R. Cooks, whose biography notes three of her “firsts” as an African American, recalled in a 38-page decision that the courts had agreed that race played a role in Rideau’s treatment by the criminal justice system. Black jurors were systematically excluded from a grand jury, for example.

She also noted that Rideau had appeared twice as a featured speaker before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and that for more than 20 years, he had “traveled the State, with only an unarmed escort, speaking to at-risk teenagers about the dangers of a life of crime and the horrors of prison life.”

Cooks ruled that the district judge, David A. Ritchie, “ordered Mr. Rideau ‘to pay all court costs associated with these proceedings,’ but did not initially detail those costs. . . . so he was unable to properly contest Judge Ritchie’s order and was later denied a fair opportunity to challenge the reasonableness of the charges,” as the Associated Press reported.

The handling of that story indicates how divided some remain on his case. The same Associated Press story that in the New York Times began, “A former prison journalist does not have to pay. . .” began, “Convicted killer Wilbert Rideau doesn?t have to pay . . .” in the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate.

Rideau told Journal-isms he was “still transitioning; still learning. It’s a process. But it’s all good, and is getting better each day. . . . In light of my financial situation at the time of my release, I had to remain in Louisiana for the simple reason that it was the most inexpensive state to live in.

“When my fortunes allow it, I’ll be moving on.”

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Columnists Make Final Comments Before Polls Open

  • Stateline.org state-by-state election coverage

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New L.A. Times Publisher Wants Latino Outreach

“New Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller just sent out a call for change across the paper to deal with plunging circulation and other threats to the future. He stresses the need to build web and local readership, rejects the New York Times national model, and wants to reach more young families, Latinos and potential readers in the outlying region,” Kevin Roderick wrote today in LA Observed.

Roderick quoted from a Hiller memo that said of Latinos:

“There is widespread agreement we need a stronger overall Hispanic strategy. This will require that we resolve the future direction for Hoy (addressing the Spanish speaking part of the market), as well as better defining our strategy in The Times for reaching the English speaking Hispanic audience.”

The memo did not elaborate.

Los Angeles County is 47 percent Latino, and more than 56 percent of its residents speak a language other than English at home, according to census figures. Neighboring Orange County, once known as white and conservative, is now 32 percent Latino. Forty-three percent speak a language other than English, the census figures show.

If the paper does embark on an effort to woo Latinos, it won’t be the first time. In 2001, Rosario Garriga wrote in the American Journalism Review:

“In 1983, a team of reporters and editors at the Los Angeles Times worked for six months to prepare a three-week series on Southern California’s growing Hispanic population. The effort won the Times a Pulitzer Prize, but not a new crop of Hispanic readers.

“Four years later, the paper got serious about boosting its appeal among Latinos: It launched Nuestro Tiempo, a monthly bilingual supplement, which became a weekly and circulated 400,000 copies at its peak. In ’90, another step — the Times bought 50 percent of La Opinion, a Spanish-language daily that had been the leading independent source of news for the area’s Hispanics. Nuestro Tiempo folded in 1992, and in 1998, the paper rolled out yet another plan. The Latino Initiative incorporated 12 Latino beats in the Times’ culture, business, sports, religion, general assignment and photography departments — a move designed to ensure deeper and more frequent coverage of the community.”

Of the two Latino prime movers in that initiative, Frank del Olmo died in 2004, and Frank Sotomayor took a voluntary buyout this year. He teaches at the University of Southern California and is a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. Staffers say the number of Latinos at the paper has declined.

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NBC Reiterates Commitment to Telemundo News

NBC is denying that its plan to dissolve local news offices of its Spanish-language Telemundo network in San Jose, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, Denver and Dallas, replacing them with a “Telemundo Production Center” based in Dallas, represents a reduction in its commitment to serve Spanish-speaking Latinos.

 

 

“The fact is, this initiative shows just the opposite,” Jay Ireland, president of NBC Universal Television Stations, and Don Browne, president of Telemundo, wrote (PDF) to leaders of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

“The TPC is not eliminating local news, but rather is providing certain Telemundo markets with a high quality, regional and local news product that, in many cases, is produced with greater resources than the stations had before,” the letter read.

The production center will produce three different live newscasts tailored for each of three regions. “Many TPC stations will also produce and air live morning news cut-ins. . . . Some markets will add live/local news. Las Vegas, which previously aired only taped news, will now air a live newscast,” said the letter to NAHJ President Rafael Olmeda and Executive Director Ivan Roman, who had written Oct. 20 to Bob Wright, NBC Universal chairman and CEO.

The companywide cuts are expected to reduce NBC Universal’s annual expenses by $750 million by the end of 2008, the executives said. “Less than 5% of the total Telemundo workforce will be impacted,” though some 700 jobs will be lost across the company, they said.

In an interview with Broadcasting & Cable’s Hispanic Television Update, conducted before the letter was received, Roman said NAHJ had met with some Telemundo executives. “They tried to spin it in different ways but they didn’t convince us that what we were stating was not correct,” he said.

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N.C. Papers Produce Section on Anti-Black Riot

“North Carolina’s two largest daily newspapers have produced a 16-page special section on the 1898 race riot and state-labeled ‘coup d’etat’ that drove hundreds of Wilmington’s black residents from the coastal city, and are offering the section to newspapers statewide,” the Associated Press reported on Sunday.

As reported in June, a 600-page report on the riots recommended that newspapers—particularly the News & Observer in Raleigh, the Charlotte Observer and the Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News—help make amends for their role in inciting the violence.

“Tim Tyson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of a book on the Wilmington riot, is the lead writer for the section produced by The News & Observer of Raleigh with help from The Charlotte Observer,” the Associated Press story continued.

“It’s such a powerful story,” Melanie Sill, executive editor of the News & Observer, told Journal-isms. “I would hope it would affect people. It’s about a part of history that has not been really trumpeted in North Carolina.”

“The section, to be published in the two papers as a tabloid on Nov. 17, will include photos, graphics and an examination of newspapers’ role in fanning white discontent in advance of the 1898 elections,” according to the Associated Press story.

“The full section and a one-page summary designed for smaller papers are being offered to all members of the North Carolina Press Association for same-day publication. The material may be downloaded beginning Thursday; users must pay only their own printing costs.”

Sill said the 12,000-word project will also be on the Web on the 17th.

She said she and Publisher Orage Quarles III began discussing the idea over the summer.

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Melba Sweets, Editor and Columnist, Dies at 97

“Melba Sweets, an editor and columnist at the St. Louis American for 50 years, died Saturday of infirmities at Barnes-Jewish Extended Care Center in Clayton. She was 97 and had lived in St. Louis,” Tim O’Neil reported Sunday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

 

 

 

“Mrs. Sweets worked at the weekly newspaper with her late husband, Nathaniel A. Sweets Sr., who in 1933 bought the five-year-old American. Among her duties was co-writing a column with the late Thelma Dickerson, entitled ‘We’re Tellin,’ which chronicled events, weddings and other social news in St. Louis’ black community.

“‘She wanted the American to be a literate voice for the black community, and she didn’t like crime-laden coverage,’ said her daughter, Ellen Sweets, a food writer at the Denver Post. ‘The column was a very middle-class kind of thing, but you have to remember that, into the 1960s, nobody else paid any attention to what was going on in the black community.’

“The Sweets family sold the newspaper in 1981 to a group that included Donald M. Suggs, now publisher of the American. She continued writing the column for a few more years. Her husband died in 1988.

“. . . Mrs. Sweets was a longtime friend of poet and writer Langston Hughes and edited some of his newspaper columns. She also hosted parties for Hughes when he visited St. Louis.

“. . . Among her proudest moments as a journalist was conducting an interview in 1947 with the late Paul Robeson, a black singer who became outspoken in his admiration for Communism after World War II.

“Two of the couple’s three children followed them into journalism. In addition to Ellen Sweets, a son, Fred Sweets of Reston, Va., was a photographer and editor at several publications, including the Post-Dispatch and Washington Post.” Fred Sweets is also known for his recruiting and training work at the Associated Press. “Another son, Nathaniel Sweets Jr. of Florissant, worked for the St. Louis County Juvenile Court.”

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Columnist Finds Message in Kerry’s Gaffe

After bashing Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., for being “stuck on stupid” over his statement that students should “study hard . . . and make an effort to be smart” or “get stuck in Iraq”—a botched joke, Kerry said—columnist Ruben Navarrette wrote in the San Diego Union-Tribune that in the end, “there was something valuable in Kerry’s remarks.

“At the core, he was talking about something young people need to hear a lot more about: How people make choices as they go through life, and how those choices sometimes have dire consequences,” Navarrette wrote on Sunday. “His sermon was about personal responsibility and how we shape our own destinies. He was reminding a generation that is in danger of getting sucked into the new American creed of blaming others for your woes that there is no point in seeing yourself at the mercy of powerful and sinister forces beyond your control. And, however clumsily, he issued a blunt warning that those who don’t dig into their studies may wind up with fewer options in life.

“It reminds me of when anti-immigrant activists go around arguing that unskilled immigrants depress wages for high school dropouts, then they jump to the conclusion that the answer is to limit immigration,” Navarrette continued. “When the real moral to the story is this: Don’t drop out of school unless you want to suffer the humiliation of competing with—and possibly losing a job to—a low-skilled immigrant with a sixth-grade education who can’t even speak English.”

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Crouch Questions Obama’s Black American Heritage

 

“If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic nominee for President in 2008, a feat he says he may attempt, a much more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be upon us for the very first time,” Stanley Crouch wrote Thursday in the New York Daily News.

“Obama’s mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not—does not—share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves,” Crouch wrote, echoing a point made by black Republican Alan Keyes when Keyes ran unsuccessfully against Obama for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.

Discussing Crouch’s column Monday on National Public Radio’s “News & Notes,” Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, professor of globalization and education at New York University, said, “This is, moving forward, going to be a transforming issue given the growth of the immigrant origin, African and Afro-Caribbean population in the United States. In the state of New York now roughly two-thirds of all blacks have an immigrant origin, and we see a continued growth in the African/Afro-Caribbean immigrant origin population of the United States.

“So this will transform fundamental questions about what it means to be black as the immigrant origin population blends their own experiences to that of the traditional African American population.”

Short Takes

  • Solomon B. Watson IV, senior vice president and chief legal officer of the New York Times Co., plans to retire at the end of the year, the company announced on Monday. Watson, 62, perhaps the highest ranking African American on an American newspaper’s legal staff, told interviewer Barry Beckham in 2001: “Over the years, I have observed an increasing number of minority lawyers coming into the media law field. It is my hope that this growth continues, with minority lawyers practicing in all aspects of the field, from First Amendment to telecommunications.”
  • A study of job skills needed in online newsrooms released by the Online News Association found the most important skills or qualities not to be related to technology or the Web. “They are things like attention to detail, news judgment, grammar and style, multitasking skills, communication skills and ability to work under time pressure,” Rich Gordon wrote Wednesday for the Poynter Institute.
  • The San Jose Mercury News will become the 25th media outlet in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Parity Project, NAHJ announced on Friday. Created in 2003, NAHJ’s Parity Project works with English-language media companies serving large Latino populations to increase their Latino newsroom representation and to improve news coverage of the Latino community, in NAHJ’s words. The Mercury News, a former Knight Ridder paper, is owned by MediaNews Group Inc., which also owns the Salt Lake Tribune and the Los Angeles Daily News.
  • “Black man, it is time to get married. No more pathetic excuses about not being ready, or not being able to get along, or not having a good enough career,” Mary Mitchell wrote Thursday in her Chicago Sun-Times column. “It is a black woman’s plea. We are tired of seeing our daughters travail in such sorrow. We are tired of watching our grandchildren cling to fragile family ties.” Mitchell followed up on Sunday with the perspectives of a black couple who have not yet tied the knot.
  • Alison Stewart, MSNBC daytime news anchor and host of “The Most,” and Bill Wolff, vice president for prime-time programming, were married Saturday, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
  • CNN’s Zain Verjee becomes the network’s new State Department correspondent effective immediately, CNN announced on Friday. Verjee, who was born and raised in Kenya and educated in Canada, has reported on international affairs for CNN/U.S., most recently as a contributor to “The Situation Room” and previously as co-anchor for CNN’s “Your World Today,” the network’s international newscast simulcast globally at noon Eastern time.
  • Harold Reynolds, who is suing ESPN over his firing on a charge of sexual harassment, found support Monday from Seattle Times columnist Steve Kelley. Kelley wrote, “I’ve known Reynolds for more than 20 years. I covered him when he was with the Mariners from 1983-1992. He is one of the kindest, smartest, most sensitive athletes I’ve ever met. . . . He deserves better than this.” Reynolds played second base for the Seattle team before becoming an ESPN analyst.

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