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CIA, FBI Recruiting Journalists of Color

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NABJ Had Booted the Government from Its Job Fair

The CIA staffed a booth at the job fair last week at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention in San Jose, and the FBI is planning one at the annual conference of the National Association of Black Journalists in Las Vegas in August.

While the Hispanic journalists apparently had no problem with the CIA’s presence, NABJ had evicted the CIA from its job fair in 1989 and did the same to the FBI in 1991 after members were outraged by being associated with the two agencies. NABJ voted in 1989 to exclude government programs from its job fair, a decision that is not believed to have been rescinded.

“The FBI is not a journalism organization. It’s inappropriate for them to be here,” then-NABJ president Thomas Morgan III said in 1991.

Morgan wrote two years earlier, “Our members believe that the appearance of the CIA could have compromised our position as an independent objective organization of professional journalists who often take an adversarial role with the government in the interests of good citizenship.”

In “Black Journalists: The NABJ Story,” Wayne Dawkins wrote, “Modern-day black journalists feared being labeled or used as spies by the white-majority government, or worse yet, becoming the spy and police agencies of government. NABJ asked the two black women CIA representatives to leave. The intelligence money was returned.”

Executive Director Iván Román of the Hispanic journalists association told Journal-isms the FBI had previously been at the NAHJ convention. He did not indicate that the presence of either agency presented a problem.

Spokesmen for the Asian American Journalists Association and the Native American Journalists Association said neither agency contacted them about a job-fair booth this year.

NABJ President Bryan Monroe, informed Wednesday afternoon that the FBI’s recruiting firm had purchased a booth at the upcoming NABJ convention, said Wednesday night, “We’re looking into it right now.”

Officials with the CIA and FBI said they welcomed the chance to recruit journalists.

Ronald Patrick, chief of diversity hiring programs with the CIA’s Recruitment and Retention Center, said there are “many occupations where writing skills form a central foundation” at the intelligence agency. Recruited journalists might serve as security officers, background investigators or “adjudicators — weighing information against different criteria.”

He said he could not disclose how successful the agency had been at the Hispanic journalists convention because some new recruits might be going undercover and it would not be prudent for the agency to say where its agents had come from.

Patrick said the CIA is about “25 percent diverse” — with blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans, but is also looking for people of specific ethnicities, such as Arab Americans or Korean Americans.

 

 

Patrick responded to concerns that CIA contact with journalists might add to perceptions overseas that journalists work for the CIA by saying, “We’re not employing them as journalists.” Of reporters, he said, “We can’t control what things another person thinks of that journalist. That’s a larger issue.”

Gwendolyn Hubbard, chief of the FBI’s National Recruiting and Marketing Unit, said the FBI was seeking journalists who might want to join the agency as a second career, and hoped at the NABJ convention to “inspire journalists to spread the word about the success stories about African Americans in the FBI.”

“The story is not getting out,” she said, about “the good things we’re doing in the community,” such as partnering with historically black colleges and universities and with fraternities and sororities.

As for the FBI’s history of targeting African American leaders in the COINTELPRO program of the 1960s and early 1970s, Hubbard said, “I tell people, come in and make a difference” to ensure those things don’t happen again, “if that’s what they think.”

The FBI is looking for people 23 to 36 years old for special agent jobs — “that is the gun-toting, briefcase-carrying investigator position,” Hubbard said. While the FBI’s professional staff is 31 percent people of color, she said, the comparable figure for the special-agent population is only 17.5 percent.

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Richard Ramirez of Mercury News Found Dead at 44

 

 

 

“Richard Ramirez, a longtime Mercury News employee who mentored young journalists and served as a key link to the community for the paper, was found dead Wednesday at his home in Livermore,” Sandra Gonzales reported Thursday in the San Jose Mercury News.

“Police are investigating the cause of his death, but did not release any other information.”

Ramirez’s death came a day after the newspaper announced to the newsroom staff it was reducing their numbers by 40 positions through layoffs.

“Ramirez had been active in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and served as chairman of the local planning committee that helped host the group’s annual convention in San Jose last week,” the Mercury News story noted.

“Rich’s death is a tragedy that has stunned all of us,” said Carole Leigh Hutton, Mercury News executive editor, in the story. “He had a gentility about him that made him very easy to work with, but his professionalism and commitment to this newspaper and its community were always clear.”

“Ramirez, 44, came to the Mercury News in 1984 as an intern and went on to hold several positions, including reporter, assistant state editor and his most recent role as assistant to the executive editor,” Gonzales reported.

“I just saw him on Sunday and I said, `goodbye,’ and thanked him for being such a great leader. I’m just speechless,” said Veronica Villafañe, former president of the NAHJ and co-chair of this year’s convention.”

More than 100 co-workers, community members and Mercury News alumni gathered for a vigil outside the Mercury News building Thursday afternoon to remember Ramirez, Peter Delevett, an assistant city editor, told Journal-isms.

“It was just an opportunity for us to come together and remember Rich. His death hit us really hard. Yesterday we were kind of reeling and trying to get deadline done,” he said.

Co-workers brought in photos and mementos, including photographs Ramirez had taken, Delevett said. “He was remembered as a dedicated journalist who was always happy, worked very hard and always had a good word for everyone,” said Delevett. [Added June 21]

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Curry Turns Down Editorship of NAACP Magazine

After weeks of negotiations, George E. Curry, editor of the late Emerge magazine, has turned down an offer to edit the Crisis, the NAACP magazine founded in 1910 by activist-scholar W.E.B. DuBois.

 

 

“I can confirm that I was offered the editorship of The Crisis and I had assembled a team of journalists willing to quit their jobs and go with me, but unfortunately things just didn’t work out,” Curry told Journal-isms on Wednesday. “I am going to limit what I say about this whole process because I have nothing but respect for the editorial board of The Crisis and I am not interested in doing anything that might reflect adversely on the NAACP.”

Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP board, told Journal-isms Wednesday night, “The next step is to move on and try to find somebody who is a good fit. I don’t want to say anything more than what George has said himself.”

Curry, 60, resigned in March as editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, where he brought increased credibility and visibility to the black press. A one-time reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Curry was editor of Emerge magazine for seven years, from 1993 until its demise in 2000. He was the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year in 2003.

Victoria L. Valentine announced in December she was stepping down as Crisis editor after six years. Phil W. Petrie has been interim editor.

While there were as many as 30 candidates to succeed Valentine, Curry became the favorite once he left the black press service.

“I was as sure as late as last week that we’d work out our differences,” Curry told Journal-isms.

“In fact, Mary Frances Berry had already agreed to write a piece for my first issue on the impending Supreme Court desegregation decision and as late as Friday I called Michael Wotorson, the NAACP education director, and asked him for a transcript of the panel session I moderated May 18 at the Daisy Bates Education Summit in Little Rock. I had planned to run an edited version of that session along with Berry’s deseg piece in my first issue.”

Curry declined to share a copy of the letter he wrote to Roger Wilkins, chair of the Crisis editorial board, but he agreed to read one sentence from the letter summing up his reasons for not taking the job: ” . . . I have regretfully concluded that I will have neither the unqualified editorial freedom, the needed management authority, nor the necessary financial and staff resources to produce a first-rate, profitable publication,” the letter said.

On June 7, the NAACP announced it was cutting about 40 percent of the staff positions at its Baltimore headquarters and planned to temporarily close its seven regional offices to cover three years of budget shortfalls, as Kelly Brewington reported in the Baltimore Sun.

Reginald Stuart, a veteran journalist who freelances for the Crisis, said of Curry, “I was hoping he would get it,” because the Crisis reported on issues of substance to America, “and the firepower that George brought to a news organization could really have sent the Crisis into an even-higher orbit. It would have been win-win; for the moment it’s a lose-lose. We’ll see who they come up with as their permanent selection.”

Bond told Journal-isms that the Crisis would continue the “noble tradition” started by DuBois. “We want the magazine to prosper and continue to be the kind of fighting magazine that it is. It’s an advocacy magazine, and that’s what we want it to be.”

Curry said he would keep working as a professional speaker and media coach.

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FBI Probes White Supremacist Threats to Pitts

“The FBI is investigating threats against Leonard Pitts Jr. , a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald, after a column he wrote about black-on-white crime triggered a furor on white supremacist websites,” Greg Gordon reported Thursday in the Miami Herald.

“Days after The Miami Herald published Pitts’ column, Overthrow.com posted his address, his home phone number and his wife’s name. Several other white supremacist Internet sites followed suit, and one gave directions to his house along with a satellite image of the neighborhood.

“Pitts said that none of the threats was specific and that ‘nobody has come to the house.’ However, he said, someone leafleted his neighborhood with a flier attacking him for the column.

“Pitts has received dozens of hostile phone calls at his home and about 400 e-mails, said Dave Wilson, The Miami Herald’s managing editor for news.

“‘An unsettling number of those were threats,’ Wilson said. The messages, which ranged widely in gravity, included death threats, he said.

“Wilson said he had tried to prevent the incident from escalating by sending an e-mail to Bill White, editor for the site, asking him to delete Pitts’ address and phone number.

“He said White replied: ‘We have no intention of removing Mr. Pitts’ personal information. Frankly, if some loony took the info and killed him, I wouldn’t shed a tear. That also goes for your whole newsroom.”

Asked about precautions he had taken, Pitts told Journal-isms on Wednesday, “Actually, I can’t get into any of the security aspect of this.” [Added June 21]

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Philly Man Blames Fox News After Being Shot At

“It was just a case of mistaken identity, the kind of mix-up most of us shrug off every day. Until someone started shooting at him,” columnist Elmer Smith wrote Tuesday in the Philadelphia Daily News.

“That’s when James Barner, a popular Germantown barber known as J-Fresh, learned that being mistaken for someone else in this town could be dangerous.

“. . . Barner hadn’t watched the news that morning. He’d had just enough time to shower and head to work. But by the end of the day, news footage identifying him” as a murder suspect “had been shown on Fox’s midday, early-evening and 10 p.m. newscasts.

“Even then, he was inclined to shrug it off, until later that night when he and his wife were leaving a birthday party some friends had given him.

“‘My wife was already in the truck when I saw a guy pull a gun from under his shirt and fire in my direction. He hit the truck.”

“‘I called police. They were slow coming, so my wife and I drove to the 35th Precinct to report it. That’s when I called my lawyer. I felt that Fox had put my life in danger without realizing it.’

“. . . Fox corrected the error in its newscasts the following day. But it doesn’t go far enough to satisfy Barner or his lawyer, Margaret Flores,” Smith wrote.

“‘They didn’t use my picture when they said it wasn’t me,’ Barner said. ‘Without that, it’s still not clear that I’m not that guy.'”

A spokeswoman for the Fox station, WTXF-TV, gave Journal-isms this statement Wednesday night:

“Upon finding out that the footage of James Barner’s arrest was incorrect we ran a correction on June 7th during ‘FOX 29 News at Five’ and ‘FOX 29 Ten O’clock News.'”

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Congress Makes Immigration Story No. 1 Again

The changing arc of the immigration debate helped make it the biggest story the week of June 10-15, filling 10 percent of the overall newshole, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index. (It was the leading subject in the cable (15%) and radio (11%) sectors.) The week marked the first time in 2007 that immigration was a No. 1 story.

“For much of the year, immigration was a backburner subject. But since Senators worked out a compromise bill on May 17, the topic has finished among the top-five stories each week,” Mark Jurkowitz of the project staff reported on Tuesday.

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Spanish-Language Media Lash Out at Arnold

“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comments at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Convention this week that Latinos should turn off their Spanish-language televisions and learn English sparked strong reactions in the state’s Spanish-language media,” according to Univision Radio, reporting on June 15.

“DJs on Univision’s radio station La Kalle 105.7 FM in San Francisco said Thursday that Latinos should watch Spanish-language television and English-language television. In a state where Latinos are now becoming the majority, they added, Gov. Schwarzenegger should learn Spanish and learn more about Latino culture. Being bilingual is a benefit in California, they said, where companies seek employees who speak more than one language.”

The newspaper L’Opinion said “the governor used the false argument that Latino immigrants don’t want to learn English,” New American Media reported. “In fact, the editorial notes, there aren’t enough adult English classes to meet immigrants’ demand for them.”

DA Nifong Didn’t “Know When to Hold ‘Em”

In the wake of the disbarment of District Attorney Mike Nifong over his mishandling of the Duke lacrosse case, on Tuesday Barry Saunders of the Raleigh News & Observer http://www.newsobserver.com/134/story/608994.htmloffered this “free advice for North Carolina prosecutors,” sung to the tune of Kenny Rogers‘ “The Gambler”:

Every DA knows that the secret to survivin’

Is knowing which case to prosecute and knowing which one to flee.

You never try those cases where the families all have money

Or you’ll find it’s your behind that gets stuck up in a tree. . . .

You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to scold ’em,

Know when to let ’em walk and know when to run.

‘Cause you’ll find it’s a whole new ballgame, yes indeedy

When you start out prosecutin’ on a rich man’s son.

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