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CBS Won’t Deny It’s Bringing Back Imus

richard

Whites Nearly Half This Year’s “Urban” J-Students

N.Y. Station Featured Radio Host’s Old Shows Friday

A spokeswoman for CBS Radio would not confirm or deny a report in the New York Post on Monday that disgraced radio host Don Imus, removed in April from CBS-owned WFAN Radio in New York after racist and sexist banter, might return to the station.

 

 

 

“Imus maybe hitting the FAN again,” Don Kaplan wrote in Monday’s story.

“The radio rumor mill has turned the volume way up on reports that the return of Don Imus to WFAN is just around the corner.

“And WFAN itself is fueling the reports.

“While celebrating the sports station’s 20th anniversary last Friday, Imus pals Mike Francesa and Chris Russo, of ‘Mike and the Mad Dog,’ hinted that a deal to bring the crusty talk-radio cowboy back is in the works.

“‘When we return to our regular schedule this September, I hope the team will once again be complete,’ Francesa said.

CBS Radio spokeswoman Tanisha Douglas told Journal-isms she would have no comment on the Post story, and that she was aware of how a failure to deny the story might be received.

“Tapes from Imus’ show were featured all morning on Friday, an unusual move for any radio station that had so recently fired its star,” the Post story said.

“WFAN program director Mark Chernoff justified the broadcast, saying Imus’ contribution to the station could not be ignored.

“Meanwhile, Imus’ lawyer, Martin Garbus, has reportedly been trying to use his client’s threatened multimillion-dollar lawsuit against CBS Radio as leverage for reinstatement, while CBS has prepared a countersuit that it plans to file the minute Imus starts the legal showdown,” Kaplan wrote.

When CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves announced on April 12 that Imus was fired, he said, “We are now presented with a significant opportunity to expand on our record on issues of diversity, race and gender. We intend to seize that opportunity as we move forward together.”

Meanwhile, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, writing about MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, said in Monday’s editions:

“MSNBC executives have decided that Scarborough is the next Don Imus — not that anyone could replace Imus — and are finalizing the details for ‘Morning Joe’ to permanently take over the 6-to-9 morning slot. The network this week is removing the ‘Scarborough Country’ name from his old 9 p.m. program, now being hosted by MSNBC’s general manager, Dan Abrams. And CBS Radio, which syndicated Imus until his April firing, is negotiating whether some of its stations will carry the ‘Joe’ show, as well.”

MSNBC simulcast the Imus radio show until it decided to pull the plug in April. Asked about the Washington Post report, Jeremy Gaines, an MSNBC spokesman, told Journal-isms, “When we have an announcement, I’ll let you know.”

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31 Laid Off at Mercury News; 15 Others Leaving

The San Jose Mercury News, already reeling from the death of veteran journalist Rich Ramirez, laid off 31 newsroom employees on Monday and accepted 15 “voluntary departures,” Executive Editor Carole Leigh Hutton told Journal-isms.

 

 

Hutton said she expected to have to lay off 40 people, but the volunteers —which include resignations, retirements and transfers to other news organizations — kept the number at 31. The Mercury News, a former Knight Ridder paper, is now the property of the California Newspaper Partnership, a consortium owned by MediaNews, Gannett Co. Inc. and Stephens Media.

The figures include eight people of color who were laid off and four who took voluntary departures, Hutton said. She said she did not have a breakdown by ethnicity, but that the largest group of people of color was Asian American. Before the layoffs, the newsroom was 32 percent people of color, she said; the layoffs were 26 percent people of color.

It was almost in proportion “because we do have diversity and a lot of people of color” throughout the newsroom, she said. “That’s the way” you can avoid a disproportionate number of layoffs of any one group, Hutton said.

She would not disclose names, but said those laid off were at all newsroom levels. “This is not a layoff in which poor performers were cut; when you cut this deeply, you cut good people, good journalists making a good contribution,” Hutton said.

According to a newsroom list, those laid off were:

Peter Allen
Stewart Applin
Jennifer Aquino
Morna Baird
Michele Chandler
Victor Chi
Barbara Egbert
Marilee Enge
Robin Evans
Kate Folmar
Rod Foo
Susanna Frohman
Constance Gove
Brian Griffin
Terri Hart
Brad Kava
Dikran (Greg) Keraghosian
Tony Lioce
Marian Liu
Tom Moore
Raymond Moses
Kim Boatman Nauman
John Orr
Dan Reed
Janice Rombeck
Colin Seymour
Khan T. Weinberg
Nicole Wong
Sara Wykes
Steve Yvaska
Steve Zuckerman

Resignations since the layoffs were announced June 6:

Tim Ball
Margarte Bethel
Roger Cohn
Dave Curtis
Dylan Hernandez
Jeff Hindenach
Elizabeth Howton
Wes Killingbeck
Will McCahill
Glenn Rabinowitz
Akili Ramsess
Elisabeth Rubinfein
Meri Simon
Yomi Wronge
Oie Yeh

As reported June 13, Ramsess, deputy director of photography, is joining the Orlando Sentinel as executive photo editor, starting July 6.

Chandler is the wife of Larry Olmstead, Knight Ridder’s vice president/staff development and diversity before the company went out of business last year. Olmstead went on to start Leading Edge Associates, whose “purpose is to help your organization improve its capacity to lead and manage.”

Hutton’s figures did not include Ramirez, who was found dead June 20 at age 44 in his Livermore, Calif., back yard, a possible suicide.

Hutton said previously, “He and I had a conversation in which I told him he was extremely unlikely to be laid off,” and that she had talked with him about moving to a different job in the newsroom because his position as her assistant was likely to be eliminated, according to the Mercury News.

In the July 2 edition of the Hispanic Link News Service report, Edwin Mora quoted Claudia Meléndez, a Monterey (Calif.) Herald reporter who worked for the Mercury News’ Nuevo Mundo tabloid, saying, “He was very despondent about his job situation.”

As in previous layoffs, employees were called at home and scheduled to come in for exit interviews if they were to be laid off. Hutton said she was conducting some of them herself. The San Jose Newspaper Guild assigned five people to accompany employees if they chose, Luther Jackson, Guild executive officer, told Journal-isms. Jackson said the layoffs tended to be “an older group of folks.”

According to the union contract, four factors had to be considered when conducting layoffs: seniority, qualifications, availability to do alternative work and competence, according to Hutton and Jackson.

Under the headline, “Black Monday at the Merc,” the San Jose Guild Web site noted, “Since 2000, the newsroom at the Mercury News has been cut in half from about 400 journalists to 200 full-time positions.

“This bloodletting has to stop,” it said.

Meanwhile, at least two Bay Area columnists wrote about Ramirez over the weekend.

John Diaz, editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote Sunday about Ramirez’s role in coordinating the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ convention the week before he died. “I know what you’re thinking about the Rich Ramirezes who bind the communities in your lives. Don’t wait, don’t assume they know. Tell them,” Diaz wrote.

In the Mercury News, L.A. Chung wrote Saturday that Ramirez’s death caused her “to stop and take stock. Slow down. Remember your family and friends, and what your community means . . . and your place in it.”

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Whites Nearly Half This Year’s “Urban” J-Students

The urban journalism workshop at Virginia Commonwealth University that in February was forced to admit whites under threat of lawsuit completed this year’s program on Friday. Five or six white students were among the dozen who participated, a spokeswoman for the university told Journal-isms.

Among them was Emily Smith, the student who had been accepted in 2006, then rejected one week later after program sponsors learned she was white. That led to a class-action lawsuit by the anti-affirmative action Center for Individual Rights and an out-of-court settlement by which the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, Virginia Commonwealth University and Media General Inc., parent company of the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, agreed to make the urban journalism program “race-neutral.”

 

 

“Similar programs designed to increase diversity in the nation’s newsrooms said they defined themselves so that they could not be accused of discriminating against whites.

University spokeswoman Paula Otto said the students put out a newspaper, with technology as this year’s theme.

Meanwhile, participants in another Dow Jones-funded program, the New England High School Journalism Collaborative, held a 20th Reunion Celebration on Friday at Regis College, in Weston, Mass. More than 100 alumni, journalists, high school principals, teachers and newspaper representatives were present.

Carole Remick, a retired professor from the University of Massachusetts at Boston who directs the program, denied a report in the Boston Globe on Friday that the project was ending or that Dow Jones had ceased funding it because of the Virginia settlement.

“A misunderstanding. Journalists do that, you know,” Remick told Journal-isms. “But it is o.k. He brought attention to the fact that our minority alumni need to help us recruit promising candidates in the urban high schools. It is very important to increase minority AND urban representation in the newsrooms. I have met too many Ivy-educated and suburban types at local media places.”

Remick also said she had raised more than $125 million over the last 10 years of the 20-year-old program. “I am an old white lady who believes in sparking young people to exceed themselves,” she said.

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Navarrette Tells Readers the Question He Didn’t Ask

Ruben Navarrette Jr., columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, told readers Sunday there was one question he didn’t get to ask the Democratic presidential candidates on Thursday as a panelist at Howard University for Tavis Smiley’s “All American Presidential Forum”:

It was about immigration, Navarrette wrote. “It certainly would have been timely, given that earlier in the day the U.S. Senate effectively slammed the coffin shut on reform when a bipartisan compromise bill fell short of the votes necessary for closing debate. In doing so, the Senate sent the message that on the tough issues that might offend people, they’ll hang out a sign that reads: ‘Gone fishing.’

“. . . The question would have gone something like this:

“‘Ted Hayes, a black activist in Los Angeles, has often said that ‘illegal immigration is the greatest threat to black America since slavery.’ You also see community groups such as “Choose Black America” likewise voicing concern that illegal immigration has helped displace African-American workers.

“‘What do you make of this aspect of the debate? And, if African-Americans are being pushed out of the economy by illegal immigrants, many of whom have less than a grade-school education and speak no English, what does that say — about illegal immigrants and the African-Americans they’re supposedly displacing?'”

Meanwhile, at a candidates forum at Walt Disney’s Contemporary Resort in Florida, attended by journalists from more than 50 English and Spanish-language media outlets, portions of which were broadcast on Univision, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico said the media unfairly depict immigrants as law-breakers.

”How about the American media covering the people who break their backs bringing agriculture to this country?” Richardson, the only Hispanic candidate, demanded, according to Beth Reinhard, writing in the Miami Herald. “How about the American media covering the people who work gallantly to clean the toilets in the hotels where we all stay? How about the American media covering the Latino who has died for this country?”

Asian Americans Urge Race-Conscious School Plans

“Some would argue that race-conscious school assignment plans harm Asian Pacific Americans, but this is false,” Khin Mai Aung of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Christina Wong of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a civil rights organization in San Francisco, wrote on Monday in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece. They were commenting on last week’s Supreme Court decision invalidating school desegregation plans.

“Asian-American students, like all others, benefit from diverse learning environments. The court’s decisions leave room for school districts to address the very concerns described in our amicus brief in these cases, where we show that Asian-American parents greatly value racially integrated schools. They know integrated schools will prepare their children to succeed in a diverse society. Further, immigrant Asian Pacific American students feel racial integration decreases harassment in the long run by fostering cross-racial dialogue and friendship. Finally, racial segregation impedes the social and educational development of students, including in particular those who are linguistically isolated.

“These decisions create both a challenge and an opportunity for school districts seeking diverse, integrated classrooms. Desegregation law — and many integration plans still in effect — were fashioned in an earlier era, when ‘race’ meant black or white. This is no longer true, and school districts can still adjust their plans to reflect today’s reality. For example, in San Francisco, about half of all students are Asian Pacific American, while 22.4 percent are Latino, 13 percent are African American and 9.3 percent are white.

“. . . San Francisco already uses race-neutral factors such as extreme poverty, socioeconomic status, home language, academic rank of the school and student academic achievement. San Francisco should explore ways to add race to these factors within the confines of the court’s decision.”

Inez Baskin Dies; Montgomery Bus Boycott Figure

 

 

 

“Prominent civil rights figure Inez J. Baskin was remembered Thursday as a ‘spunky’ but compassionate woman who had a great impact on the community and beyond,” Robyn Bradley Litchfield and Darryn Simmons wrote Friday in the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser.

“Baskin, a Montgomery Advertiser reporter of the 1950s and ’60s, died Thursday in a Montgomery hospital. She was 91.

“‘The importance of what she did in helping create documentation of everything that was going on here when it was one of the most important cities anywhere can’t be overstated,’ said Alabama Department of Archives and History director Ed Bridges.

“During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Baskin was on the front lines, both as a supporter of the cause and as a journalist. When Montgomery’s buses were finally desegregated, she boarded a bus and sat right in front of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an image that has become a famous photo.

“Baskin began her Advertiser career as a typist and worked her way up to reporter for the newspaper’s ‘Negro News.’ Her stories about the black community replaced the stock market pages in papers for black readers. But in 1955, when Rosa L. Parks was arrested and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was organized, Bob Johnson of Jet magazine hired Baskin to cover the boycott for his publication, as well as the American Negro Press” wire service.

Natives to Thomas Sowell: “Bozo, Cut It Out!”

“Sometimes someone pops out something so ignorant about Native peoples that you have to set aside your priorities and say, ‘Hey, bozo, cut it out!’ Suzan Shown Harjo wrote Thursday in Indian Country Today.

“Thomas Sowell provided just such a jolt with his column ‘Cultural Heritages.’ He’s an author/economist who became the darling of the wingnuts when they discovered he was both African-American and opposed to affirmative action.

“. . . What Sowell doesn’t get is that we don’t have cultures that are ‘preserved like museum exhibits.’ We have actual relatives who are actually museum exhibits, and we have family obligations to do something about that. So, every so often, we just need to stop what we’re doing and say, ”Hey, bozo, cut it out!”

Writing separately in his “Notes From Indian Country,” Tim Giago said of Sowell, “I hope that in the future you take the time to learn about a people before you write condescendingly and disparagingly about them. And please accept this as constructive criticism.”

Short Takes

 

 
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