Murdoch Cancels O.J. Book, TV Show

“We Are Sorry for Any Pain,” Media Czar Says

“The chairman of News Corporation issued a statement today announcing that it will not broadcast an interview with O.J. Simpson or publish the book he wrote about the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman,” ABC News reported Monday.

“‘I and senior management agree that this was an ill-considered project,’ News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch said in a statement released today. ‘We are sorry for any pain that it has caused the Goldman and Brown families.’

“In an announcement on Fox News, an anchor said that the decision to cancel the TV special to air the interview and to shelve the book was prompted by viewer outrage.”

The Associated Press continued:

“A dozen Fox affiliates had already said they would not air the two-part sweeps month special, planned for next week before the Nov. 30 publication of the book by ReganBooks. The publishing house is a HarperCollins imprint owned—like the Fox network—by News Corp.

“In the projects, Simpson speaks in hypothetical terms about how he would have committed the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Goldman.

“Relatives of the victims have lashed out at the now scuttled publication and broadcast plans.

“‘He destroyed my son and took from my family Ron’s future and life. And for that I’ll hate him always and find him despicable,’ Fred Goldman told ABC last week.

“The industry trade publication Broadcasting & Cable editorialized against the show Monday, saying ‘Fox should cancel this evil sweeps stunt.’

“One of the nation’s largest superstore chains, Borders Group Inc., said last week it would donate any profits on the book to charity.”

• Earl Ofari Hutchinson, syndicated: Why, a Decade After the O.J. Simpson Trial, Does His Name Still Make Tongues Wag?
• Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: O.J. enters a new realm of unreality
• Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: O.J. and Checkbook Journalism
• David Person, Huntsville (Ala.) Times: How will O.J. explain it to his children?

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“NBC Nightly News” Not Covering Richards Remarks

“NBC Nightly News” has no plans to cover the offensive racial remarks made by Michael Richards, who played Cosmo Kramer on NBC’s hugely successful “Seinfeld” sitcom, NBC spokeswoman Barbara Levin told Journal-isms on Monday.

However, it will be discussed on the “Today” show on Tuesday morning, she said.

CBS News spokeswoman Leigh Farris said the story would be on the “CBS Evening News.” Richards taped an apology for CBS’ “Late Show With David Letterman,” according to the CBS News Web site. “I’m not a racist, that’s what’s so insane about this,” Richards said, according to CBS.

“On ‘World News,’ Charles Gibson will report on Michael Richards’ comments, including reaction from Jerry Seinfeld and comedian Paul Rodriguez, who was in the audience,” ABC spokeswoman Natalie J. Raabe told Journal-isms.

Richards’ rant was the topic of the day on the e-mail list of the National Association of Black Journalists.

The Time Warner-owned Web site TMZ.com posted at 8:20 a.m. today this story and video:

“Michael Richards exploded in anger as he performed at a famous L.A. comedy club last Friday, hurling racial epithets that left the crowd gasping, and TMZ has obtained exclusive video of the ugly incident.

“Richards, who played the wacky Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV show ‘Seinfeld,’ appeared onstage at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood. Kyle Doss, an African-American, told TMZ he and some friends were in the cheap seats and he was playfully heckling Richards when suddenly, the comedian lost it.

“The camera started rolling just as Richards began his attack, screaming at one of the men, ‘Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass.’

“Richards continued, ‘You can talk, you can talk, you’re brave now motherf**ker. Throw his ass out. He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! A nigger, look, there’s a nigger!’

“The crowd is visibly and audibly confused and upset. Richards responds by saying, ‘They’re going to arrest me for calling a black man a nigger.’

An Associated Press story said of Richards:

“He refused to comment on-camera when reached by CNN, but the network reported that he said off-camera he felt sorry for what had happened and had made amends.

“Seinfeld issued a statement saying he was ‘sick over this.’

“I’m sure Michael is also sick over this horrible, horrible mistake. It is so extremely offensive. I feel terrible for all the people who have been hurt,” Seinfeld said.

CNN.com and MSNBC.com both featured the video on their Web sites.

TMZ.com is the celebrity gossip blog that exposed Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic ranting to police this year.

“Gibson had held himself up as someone qualified to speak, via his movie ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The revelations of the private Gibson gave credence to critics who thought they detected anti-Semitism in the film,” as Steve Johnson wrote Sunday in the Chicago Tribune.

AP continued: “On Monday, about a half-dozen community activists gathered at the club to denounce Richards’ remarks and demand an apology.

“‘These kind of comments hurt all of us,’ said protester Lita Sister Herron of the Youth Advocacy Coalition. She called Richards’ comments hate speech.

“The protesters also demanded an apology from the Laugh Factory. At a news conference a short time later, club owner Jamie Masada expressed remorse and said Richards will not be back at the club until he says he’s sorry.

“‘This is one thing we don’t tolerate. . . . I personally apologize. I apologize from my heart,’ Masada said Monday.

“Richards did appear at the club Saturday, without incident, but that was because he had told the club he intended to apologize, according to a Laugh Factory statement Monday.

“Rodriguez, also at the news conference, said: ‘I kept expecting a punch line. It didn’t come.'”

• Jabari Asim, washingtonpost.com:The Sting of Slurs
• Nikki Finke blog, LA Weekly: Kramer Apologized On Dave Tonight With Seinfeld’s Help; Behind The Meltdown: Comedy Clubs Are Cesspools Of Hate

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C-SPAN to Air, Stream Ed Bradley Service

The service for CBS News’ “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley will air live on C-SPAN Tuesday from New York’s Riverside Church starting at 10:30 a.m. ET, C-SPAN announced Monday. The service is expected to last until approximately 1 p.m. ET, and stream from C-SPAN’s Web site at www.c-span.org.

Bradley, who died Nov. 9 of leukemia, is to be celebrated with a service that has echoes of New Orleans. It will be open to the public.

“It will be a celebration featuring some of the great music and people he loved,” his longtime friend, veteran journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, told Journal-isms last week.

• Peter Johnson, USA Today: Cable ‘picking up slack’ to air documentaries
• Brenda Payton, Oakland Tribune: Ed Bradley had a familiar face
• DeWayne Wickham, USA Today: Bradley easily straddled ‘duality’ of his roles

Miami Herald Faulted on Handling of Story on Itself

The Miami Herald’s handling of a story about 10 Miami journalists taking money from the U.S. government “was so heavy-handed and one-sided that it amounted to a missed opportunity to explore the issue with the sensitivity it demanded,” Clark Hoyt, former head of news for the defunct Knight Ridder Inc., reported to Herald readers on Sunday.

“Minds can be changed when issues are treated with fairness, balance and understanding. People lock into hard positions when they feel harshly attacked,” he wrote.

As Herald publisher David Landsberg explained to readers, “I commissioned an analysis of the news-gathering process that led to The Miami Herald’s publication, on Friday, Sept. 8, of an article headlined ’10 Miami journalists take U.S. pay.’

“The article described payments by Radio and TV Marti, which are operated by the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting, to journalists who were employed by or writing for other South Florida media outlets at the same time. The publication of the article set in motion a series of events that led to the firing, and later reinstatement, of two El Nuevo Herald staff reporters and a freelancer.”

Hoyt concluded that, “In the end, The Miami Herald story was flawed in a number of respects.

• “Its placement at the top of Page One, its hard and accusatory tone and the large and breathless headline suggested something more sinister than the story actually reported. . . .
• “The story failed to note that The Miami Herald had already reported in 2002 that one of the journalists on the list of 10, a freelance writer for El Nuevo Herald, was on the Radio Marti payroll . . .
• “The story lacked cultural context. . . .
• “The story failed to distinguish between different types of journalists and to acknowledge the possibility that different types of media companies might adopt different ethical standards.
• “The story said two ethics experts, who were not named, compared taking money from Radio and TV Marti to the 2005 Armstrong Williams case. The comparison is a stretch . . .

“Perhaps the Radio and TV Martí ³tory’s biggest flaw is that it was rushed into print before the reporter and his editors had time to pursue every relevant angle, to get comment from several key figures and to reflect on how best to present a set of facts at once simple yet complex in nuance and meaning,” Hoyt said.

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Herald Reports Waste in Anti-Castro Schemes

“Cubans love pork,” Miami Herald columnist Ana Menendez wrote on Sunday. “But who would have guessed that the juiciest lechon asado is served up by the USAID?

“More than $55 million since 1996 to promote democracy in Cuba. And the best part: much of the cash stays right here in Miami. Now, that’s delicious. The godfather of this free lunch is former President Bill Clinton, and next time he comes to Versailles, they’re going to serve him his very own sucker sandwich.

In a marvelous two-part series last week, The Miami Herald’s Oscar Corral reported the lengths to which U.S. government-funded groups have gone to promote change on the island. First step: Arm the opposition with electro massagers, water guns and Hello Kitty coloring books. . . . Anybody with a brain has long suspected these anti-Castro schemes are little more than slush funds to reward the loyal and pacify the rabid. Unfortunately, they’ve also helped subsidize intransigence by keeping it well-clothed and fed.”

• Ralph De La Cruz, South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Sure, we’ll return to Cuba, but unconditionally? We’ll see
• Albor Ruiz, New York Daily News: Now’s time to lift Cuba ‘bloqueo’

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Philly Anchor’s Husband Declares for Mayor

“NBC10 anchor Renee Chenault-Fattah plans to stay on the air while her husband runs for mayor,” Gail Shister reported Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, her 11 p.m. coanchor, Tim Lake, will handle any stories involving the mayoral race or City Hall, Chenault-Fattah says. The rest will be business as usual.

“‘I’ll sit there and do what I do every single day—read the stories in front of me,’ says Chenault-Fattah, who married U.S. Rep. Chakah Fattah in 2001. ‘If and when, more likely when, a negative story about [Fattah] comes down the pike, the station will be all over it, as well it should be.'”

Shister wrote that “People in similar situations have taken leaves of absence, according to Deborah Potter, president of NewsLab in Washington, an online resource for local TV newsrooms. Maria Shriver took a leave from NBC’s Dateline in 2003 when her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, ran for governor of California.”

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Fox Accused of Glossing Over Lott’s Past

“Several discussions on Fox News about Sen. Trent Lott’s candidacy for Senate minority whip have glossed over or omitted any explanation of exactly why Lott stepped down from his Senate leadership post in 2002—specifically, that Lott was forced to resign after praising Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 1948 pro-segregationist presidential campaign,” according to the group Media Matters for America, which describes itself as “a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”

“Multiple discussions on Fox News’ Fox & Friends and Special Report with Brit Hume about Sen. Trent Lott’s (R-MS) candidacy for Senate minority whip have glossed over or left out any explanation of exactly why Lott stepped down from his Senate leadership post in 2002,” its report said.

• Shanna Flowers, Roanoke Times: Another man’s slip may reveal Allen’s lot
• Stebbins Jefferson, Palm Beach Post: Lott’s back, but is it the same Lott?
• Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com: With Trent Lott’s Vote Back into GOP Leadership, the Jig is Up On the Party’s ‘Inclusion’

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Short Takes

• An investigation by the Belleville, (Ill.) News-Democrat into children who died while under the watch of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services found at least three examples in which state workers altered records in an apparent attempt to cover up mistakes or minimize department blame, George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer reported in the News-Democrat on Monday.
• “WNBC/Ch. 4’s decision to lay off medical correspondent Dr. Max Gomez last week doesn’t mean the station is dropping medical coverage altogether. But what could be different in some cases is where the coverage originates,” Richard Huff reported Monday in the New York Daily News. “NBC Universal, which has been sharing news stories among its own stations for some time, is creating a ‘Center for Excellence’ to better utilize reports being produced at its outlets.”
• Former KSTP, Ch. 5, morning/midday anchor Angela Davis has joined the morning news team at WCCO, Ch. 4 as a reporter, the CBS station announced Friday, Deborah Caulfield Rybak reported in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.
• “La Raza, the ImpreMedia-owned Spanish-language weekly in Chicago, is partnering with broadcast veteran Jose Lamas to produce a morning drive-time radio newscast,” Editor & Publisher reported on Thursday. “‘Buenos Dias, Chicago—Noticias Al Dia de La Raza’ (‘Good Morning, Chicago. La Raza’s News Today’) kicked off Monday on WSBC, an AM station that brokers time for ethnic programming.”
• “She was just another aspiring television reporter, seemingly destined to try to claw her way to the U.S. networks from a small market in the boonies,” Ben Stocking wrote in an Associated Press dispatch that appeared today. “Then Washington native Louisa Huynh Thanh Thuan took a detour to Hanoi—and skyrocketed to stardom. Saturday night, she emceed a gala dinner attended by U.S. President George W. Bush and other leaders attending the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Hanoi. Huynh, whose parents were born in Vietnam, has been getting plenty of face time on VTV, the state-owned television network, where she anchors the English-language newscast and hosts a show called ‘Talk Vietnam.'”
• Asian Pacific Americans were the key factor in Jim Webb’s stunning victory against incumbent Virginia Senator George Allen on Nov. 7, which resulted in a historic change in Senate leadership from the Republicans to the Democrats, Phil Tajitsu Nash wrote from Washington Friday for Asian Week. “In addition, this election will mark the turning point where APAs stopped being victims and bit players in American electoral history, and started asserting themselves as a force to be contended with on a nationwide basis.”
• Correspondent Christopher Serlom Adzivor of the Independent thrice-weekly independent newspaper in Accra, Ghana, was violently attacked and detained by police on Nov. 11, the Media Foundation for West Africa reported Friday. The journalist alleged that an officer “ordered the inmates in the police cells to ‘teach him a lesson,’ following which the inmates kicked him, attempted to force him to drink urine, and handled his genitals.”

“Reporters Without Borders has protested against the harassment and intimidation of numbers of local and foreign journalists covering a demonstration against the sexual harassment of women in the capital, Cairo,” on Nov. 14, the organization said on Friday. “It is disturbing that in Egypt physical assaults on journalists have become systematic during this type of public demonstration.”