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“Wolves With Sheep’s Badges”

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Columnist Takes Aim at Cops Accused of Murder

The changeovers in Congress and in state capitals are commanding the big-picture headlines, along with the prospects for a change of course in Iraq. But for many columnists writing about urban America, the day-to-day quest for personal safety, and deadly confrontations with the police, are never far away.

 

 

One place this is playing out is New Orleans. In one of the more shocking fallouts from the great disaster of 2005, “Seven New Orleans police officers were indicted Thursday on an array of murder and attempted-murder charges stemming from a shooting on the Danziger Bridge six days after Hurricane Katrina, which victims have portrayed as an ambush by police that left two dead and four wounded,” as Laura Maggi wrote Dec. 29 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

“The state grand jury refuted the New Orleans Police Department account of what happened on Sept. 4, 2005, which had been portrayed by officers as an appropriate response to reports of both sniper fire and people shooting at police officers near the bridge, on Chef Menteur Highway in eastern New Orleans.”

On Tuesday, Maggi and Brendan McCarthy reported, police colleagues and supporters offered hugs, handshakes and shouts of support as six New Orleans police officers and one former officer walked into Central Lockup to be booked on murder and attempted-murder charges. The four accused of murder were released on bail Friday, but Chief Judge Raymond Bigelow said they must remain under house arrest and may leave home only for a job or to meet with their attorneys, Maggi reported for Saturday’s newspaper.

Editorial writer and columnist Jarvis DeBerry felt no sympathy for the police supporters. A Dec. 31 column was headlined, “Cops Story is Hard to Believe.” Friday’s was called, “Police give us cause to be skeptical.”

“Practically every year a ‘handful’ of New Orleans officers are exposed as wolves with sheep’s badges,” DeBerry said in Friday’s column. “Within the last three years we’ve seen officers booked with crimes that include solicitation of prostitution, shoplifting, multiple counts of extortion, two counts of aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping, public bribery and conspiracy to rob a bank. Since Katrina we’ve had two officers fired (and indicted on charges of 2nd degree battery) for beating a 64-year-old retiree in the French Quarter and another suspended for four months for threatening the cameraman who filmed the beating.

“Considering all those blemishes on the department’s record — not to mention the fact that a former cop is on death row for murdering civilians — you’d think police and their vocal supporters would adopt a more humble tone when wrongdoing is alleged, or at least take the wait-and-see approach. But no.”

Also on New Orleans:

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Disney Said to Threaten Critic of Hate-Speech Radio

“The Walt Disney Company has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the blogger and media critic ‘Spocko,’ effectively closing down his Web site, Spocko’s Brain, after the online muckraker instigated a letter-writing campaign that caused national advertisers including Visa and MasterCard to flee the Bay Area ABC-affiliate radio station KSFO,” Tom Siebert reported Friday on Media Post.

 

 

“KSFO features hard right-wing talk show hosts who endorse torture and mock the tortured, called for the public hangings of New York Times editor Bill Keller and other journalists, and demand that callers mock Islam. They also mock their own advertisers, calling Chevrolet ‘sh!tty’ and recommending that Sears’ Diehard battery be attached to an African-American’s testicles.

“Spocko (a pseudonym for the blogger, who does not want to be identified), recorded the station’s programming and posted audio files on his site, calling attention to the hate speech. He also began sending letters to advertisers on KSFO, including AT&T, Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard and others, pointing out the station’s content and directing them to his blog to hear proof, via his audio files.”

Journal-isms was unable to reach representatives of ABC Radio and KSFO on Friday, but Siebert wrote, “A spokeswoman for ABC Radio declined comment.” [Added Jan. 8: ABC Radio spokeswoman Julie Hoover confirmed Jan. 8 that, “We are not commenting.” KSFO is an ABC owned-and-operated station.]

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Satellite Channel Shows U.S. Troops Blown Up

“Sunni-Shia power politics and U.S.-Egyptian relations are at the center of a dispute over a satellite television station that is the latest weapon in the arsenal of Iraq’s insurgents,” Lawrence Pintak wrote Thursday on the Columbia Journalism Review’s CJR Daily.

“Al-Zawraa, an Iraq-based television version of the jihadi Web sites, is being broadcast across the Arab world by Nilesat, a satellite provider answerable to the Egyptian government. Al-Zawraa features non-stop footage of U.S. troops being picked off by snipers, blown up by roadside bombs and targeted by missiles. ‘We find the channel utterly offensive,’ said one U.S. diplomat in Cairo. Getting the Egyptians to pull the plug is ‘at the top of our agenda.’

“But the Egyptian government insists it’s all just business. ‘For us, it means nothing,’ the Egyptian Information Minister, Anas el-Fiki, told me. ‘It is a channel that reserved an allocation on Nilesat. They had a contract, paid the fees. There is nothing political for Nilesat. It’s pure business. We have no concern what the channel is doing.’

“But, as is often the case in the Middle East, much more is going on beneath the surface.”

Pintak is director of the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at the American University in Cairo and author of “Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas.”

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Ford Called Patron of Vietnamese Americans

“Over 1.4 million Asian Pacific Americans today represent the largest viet kieu, or overseas Vietnamese community outside Vietnam,” the publication Asian Week editorialized Friday, discussing the late former president Gerald R. Ford. “They can trace a common lineage to Ford’s brief interregnum that admitted 130,000 refugees fleeing regime changes in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia.

“It was this country’s 38th president who gave a damn for the hopes and dreams of abandoned Vietnamese and . . . Asian Americans among 2,700 orphans he airlifted in ‘Operation Babylift.’ They were among the thousands of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees rescued after Congress had refused his requests for military aid to stall the demise of the South Vietnamese government in the waning days of Vietnam’s long civil war.

“. . . And as a poll of that time indicated, Ford’s admission of them through the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Act was not popular with an isolationist America concerned with rising domestic unemployment and inflation. The law was unpopular as his presidential pardon of Richard Nixon, which contributed to Ford’s close presidential defeat in the 1976 election.”

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Artist Sees No Problem With James Brown Cartoon

“Did anyone else see —and reject—the cartoon of [James] Brown saying to St. Peter, ‘Turns out, I didn’t feel so good’?” an opinion page editor asked on the listserve of the National Conference of Editorial Writers.

“My God.”

“Saw it, and rejected it without a second thought,” another editor replied.

For some, Gary McCoy’s contrast of Brown’s signature line “I Feel Good” with his death from heart failure brought on by pneumonia might qualify as tasteless, but McCoy said a couple of editors told him they liked it. “I like James Brown’s music,” McCoy told Journal-isms. It was supposed to be “a funny take on the song.”

McCoy’s work is syndicated by the Daryl Cagle editorial cartoon service, and his cartoons appear in the Illinois Business Journal and the Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis. This one did not, and he said he did not know if anyone actually ran his cartoon.

Meanwhile, columnists of color continued to write about Brown, who died on Christmas day at age 73:

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Fox Cancels Syndicated “Geraldo at Large”

Fox will cease production on Twentieth Television’s syndicated “Geraldo at Large” in mid-January, with a weekend version of the show, “At Large with Geraldo Rivera,” returning to Fox News Channel, Jim Benson reported Thursday in Broadcasting & Cable.

“. . . The series marked the first syndicated entry for Roger Ailes, chairman-CEO of Fox News, after adding duties as chairman of the Fox Television Stations. Ailes noted that in addition to hosting his signature program, Rivera will continue to make guest appearances on The O’Reilly Factor and serve as a correspondent at large during major breaking news events.

“Geraldo is a great talent and did a tremendous job for us in syndication,” Ailes said. “His ratings were climbing in several markets, including New York. However, with the soft ad marketplace, the lack of an early news lead-in for his show in several cities and the timeline for financial success, I’ve asked him to come back to Fox News Channel. We look forward to bringing his special journalistic skills back to FNC.”

“Added Rivera, ‘I’m proud to work for Roger and I’m a team player. Fox News Channel is the best outfit in the business and the new deal allows me to cover breaking news and work with one of the most talented group of reporters in the world. Roger and I go back decades and I want to thank him for another great opportunity.'”

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Winfrey’s Comparison of U.S., S. Africa Debated

Oprah Winfrey is spending $40 million for a new state-of-the-art school for 150 female students in South Africa. But comments she made about why she did so, in an interview with Newsweek’s Allison Samuels, sparked a spirited discussion on the e-mail list of the National Association of Black Journalists.

“Say what you will about the American educational system—it does work,” she said, according to Samuels’ piece. “‘If you are a child in the United States, you can get an education.’ And she doesn’t think that American students— who, unlike Africans, go to school free of charge— appreciate what they have,” Samuels wrote. “‘I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there,’ she says. ‘If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.'”

The journalists debated whether it was a fair comparison. Others wrote columns about it:

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