Original posting Aug. 7, 2007
Sen. Hillary Clinton is flanked by Richard Prince, left, and C.B. Hanif, editorial columnist and ombudsman at the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, as Robin Washington, editorial page editor of the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune, at right, and other members of the Trotter Group listen. (Credit: Julia Cheng)
Presidential Candidate Tackles “Black” Issues
Hillary Clinton invoked the killing of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey and Sunday’s schoolyard slayings of college students in Newark, N.J., in a speech before the National Association of Black Journalists on Thursday. She discussed “a crisis of the 1.4 million young men of color between 16 and 24 without jobs and out of work, and too often, without hope.”
“One out of three young African Americans ends up losing their lives,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in the Grand Ballroom of Bally’s hotel on the Las Vegas strip, not far from a lobby filled with slot machines and flashing neon lights. “You know it because you’re covering these stories.”
It was a topic that resonated with many in the audience, who have complained among themselves about the lack of coverage given in many media outlets to black-on-black violence.
A Chicago group called the Black Star Project, for example, has been marching to call attention to “the deadly violence that has caused 32 mostly Black and Latino children in Chicago to be killed in the past 10 months.” And on Thursday, the Justice Department released a study showing that nearly half the nation’s murder victims in 2005 were black, and the number of black men who were slain is on the rise.
Clinton discussed her program to deal with problems facing African Americans, particularly children, and answered questions ranging from whether she was “black enough” to why she spoke out about radio host Don Imus’s slur last April against the Rutgers women’s basketball team. She also took a question about diversity in the press corps.
One moment most galvanized the audience — and Clinton. Kiara Ashani of Orlando, Fla., who later described himself as a freelance writer but was identified elsewhere as a Republican blogger, asked why she was advocating socialized medicine. The candidate said her position had been mischaracterized as such by the right wing for 15 years.
She defended Medicare and recited the numbers of Americans without health insurance. When Ashani persisted in his characterization, and denigrated other countries with subsidized health care, Clinton told him she would gladly arrange for him to meet with her staff, “if you’re interested in being educated instead of being rhetorical.”
Hartford Courant columnist Stan Simpson called it a “defining moment. It made her look more presidential,” he told Journal-isms. He said the exchange created a contrast between Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, who is scheduled to address the group on Friday. “For me, the Obama campaign is so mundane. He tries to play it safe,” Simpson said.
On the advice of Newsday columnist Les Payne, who participated in a panel discussion immediately preceding Clinton’s speech, moderator Suzanne Malveaux of CNN asked Clinton if she were “black enough,” a question lobbed by some at Obama, the only African American in the presidential race. Malveaux also asked the senator why black voters should view her as favorably as they do her husband, former president Bill Clinton.
The candidate replied that it was a good thing to have a woman, an African American and a Hispanic, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, in the race, and that she hoped to be judged on her record and the case she is making for her election. As the most qualified Democrat, Clinton said, she is in the best position to beat the Republican in the fall election.
Later, in a session with the Trotter Group of African American columnists, she quipped, “I’m in an interracial marriage” — a reference to novelist Toni Morrison’s famous line about Bill Clinton being the first black president.
On young African American men, Clinton said in her speech that she rejects “the conversation that paints them with a broad brush as a threat, headache or lost cause. It’s time we had a shift in the conversation,” she said. Those men should be viewed as “1.4 million future husbands, fathers and role models. That’s the conversation I want to have,” she said.
The former first lady returned to the subject of Bailey, again deploring the violence that resulted in a killing of “an investigative journalist doing his job” and saying the criminal justice system has produced a revolving door. She said she wants to spend $200 million over the next five years on community partnerships aimed at helping ex-offenders re-enter the job market.
Clinton mentioned her own partnership with 100 Black Men in New York that created a charter school in the Bronx, the Eagle Academy, and said, “if we invest in kindergarten, we would close the achievement gap between gap and white by 50 percent by high school.”
She began her speech by noting the arrest Thursday of a suspect in connection with the execution-style slayings of three college students in a Newark schoolyard.
On the Imus case, Clinton said, “words matter. If they didn’t, why would you do the work you do?” She applauded the NAACP’s symbolic burial of “the N word” at its Detroit convention in July and said the society was becoming desensitized to words demeaning women and people of color, but that through peer pressure and other cultural messages that trend might be reversed.
Cheryl Smith, an NABJ presidential candidate, asked what Clinton might do to persuade media executives to increase diversity in the news media. Clinton replied she would “make a strong use of the bully pulpit in dealing with media executives and make it clear that you really want to be diverse in that press room and on that press plane.”
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New Ground Plowed, from Media Ownership to Iraq
“You’re the first person who has asked me that,” Hillary Clinton told Newsday columnist Les Payne, when he sought the Democratic presidential candidate’s views on whether tax incentives designed to spur minority ownership of broadcast stations, abolished in the mid-1990s, should be reinstated.
The occasion was a session with the Trotter Group of African American columnists that took place Thursday after Clinton’s speech at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Las Vegas.
It was one of a number of times that Clinton pointed to stories or issues she considered important but that had been underplayed in the news media or that she hadn’t been asked about by other reporters.
On minority ownership, Clinton said she had not thought the issue through and did not want to be glib, but she decried the “decimation” of the Small Business Administration. “I’m concerned about media consolidation across the board and the loss of diverse voices,” she added. “You go around the country” and you hardly ever hear “people who live in the community” on local radio stations, she said.
Of course, “if you had an FCC that would give smaller media outlets a chance to flourish, that would make a difference,” she said, referring to the Federal Communications Commission.
A study published in 2000 by the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Association found that minorities owned 3 percent of the existing TV and radio facilities in 1995 and saw that number drop in 1996-97, the year the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and implemented.
In 1996, after Congress repealed its tax incentive programs for minority ownership, and relaxed station ownership limits in the Telecommunications Act, the number of minority-owned stations dropped by 28, the study said.
There were also questions for the candidate involving Iraq and China where Clinton cited what she called little-covered developments.
She noted a “little-reported story” about a lower-ranking Chinese official who spoke against a bill in Congress concerning sanctions on Sudan over the genocide in Darfur. He reportedly said, “we can always sell your dollars,” Clinton told questioner Wayne Dawkins of Hampton University, making the point that China is heavily invested in Sudan and, more important for the United States, “we have mortgaged ourselves” to the Chinese: China is second to Japan as the largest holder of U.S. debt.
“How do you get tough on your banker?” Clinton said. A sale by China of large amounts of American dollars would negatively affect the U.S. economy.
When the discussion turned to Iraq, the senator from New York told Elmer Smith of the Philadelphia Daily News that in a little-noticed story from the BBC, two lower-ranking Iranian officials were asked whether they wanted to see the United States leave Iraq, “and they did not say yes.”
The reason, Clinton said, is that the Iranians are funding more than one side in Iraq’s civil war, and if the United States pulled out, Iran would have to choose among them.
She complimented Smith on a question asking whether the vote commonly described as authorizing war with Iraq actually did so. “I voted for diplomacy and inspection,” she said. “People don’t usually put it in that larger context, as what many of us thought we were voting for and what Bush did with the vote he was given. At the time, I said my vote was not a vote for pre-emptive war.” Antiwar Democrats who oppose Clinton have seized on that authorization vote.
In another example, this one from her NABJ speech, Clinton cited a study that showed that white males with criminal records were favored in the job market over blacks with no such record. That study, by Princeton sociologist Devah Pager, did not receive much attention when it was released in June, though it was discussed Tuesday on Michel Martin’s “Tell Me More” on National Public Radio.
Looking on at the Trotter Group meeting were four Clinton campaign aides and Mary Wilson, an original member of the Supremes, who lives in Las Vegas. Wilson said she supports Clinton but that that was no knock on Obama. She noted that she, like Clinton, is a woman.
- Stopbigmedia.com: The One Campaign Issue Ignored by Big Media? Themselves
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4 Journalism Groups Join to Continue Bailey’s Work
Four journalism organizations — the National Association of Black Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and the Center for Investigative Reporting — are teaming up to continue the journalism of slain Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey, NABJ President Bryan Monroe announced at the NABJ convention in Las Vegas on Thursday.
Bailey was slain on Aug. 2 by a suspect who police said told them he killed the Oakland Post editor because he was angry over stories the journalist had written about the bakery, its employees and leaders. Investigators said Devaughndre Broussard also was concerned about stories that he thought Bailey might be working on.
The idea for the four organizations to team up was inspired by the example set after the murder of Don Bolles of the Arizona Republic by a car bomb in 1976. Bolles’ death prompted a 23-part series that set out “to show organized crime leaders that killing a journalist would not stop reportage about them; it would increase it 100-fold,” as Investigative Reporters and Editors notes on its Web site.
Freelance journalist Kenneth Cooper, former national editor of the Boston Globe and an NABJ member, proposed the idea on Tuesday on the Journal-isms message board.
A member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, retired reporter Mary Fricker, had already urged her group to take action. The four organizations quickly agreed Tuesday to discuss how they could work together to continue Bailey’s work.
Interested journalists may contact this columnist or Cooper, or may e-mail nabj@nabj.org, Monroe announced.
Bailey’s publisher, Paul Cobb, vowed at Bailey’s funeral Wednesday that Bailey’s final story will be told, according to an account by Henry K. Lee Thursday in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Bailey ‘dared and cared to tell it like it was’ and liked to call himself the ‘Barry Bonds of journalism — the best and most disliked,'” Lee reported.
“‘It ain’t over. This community will know what Chauncey Bailey and I were working on,’ said Cobb, prompting a standing ovation by the standing-room-only crowd. ‘I want us to make his untimely, forced exodus our genesis, our genesis of renewed advocacy for investigative journalism,'” Lee wrote.
On Tuesday, police said that Broussard went looking for Bailey twice at his home before ambushing and killing him with shotgun blasts — some fired as he lay dying on a downtown street, Harry Harris and Martin G. Reynolds reported in the Oakland Tribune.
- Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: An editor murdered, free speech assaulted