Maynard Institute archives

Legislator Helps Unhappy Journalists

by richard0542

Investigation Promised Into Climate at CBS Station

Past and present journalists of color at WFOR-TV, the CBS-owned station in Miami, have taken their complaints against the station to a member of the Florida Legislature who told Journal-isms he had secured a commitment from the parent CBS TV Stations Group to investigate.

 

 

State Rep. Julio Robaina, R-Miami, said he had been given statements from two people who have been at the station who had assembled anonymous comments from 11 African Americans and Hispanics alleging that since new managers took over, some on-air fortunes changed, with some told they no longer had “the look” the station was seeking.

Some of their comments made it into an anonymous blog item dated Sept. 13 on a site called Newsnetnews and headlined, “CBS practices Racism at WFOR Miami.”

Michael J. Nelson, a spokesman for the CBS TV Stations Group, told Journal-isms Monday night, “We have thoroughly investigated the allegations that appeared recently in anonymous blog postings and have found no wrongdoing whatsoever by the management at WFOR.

“Of course, if credible new allegations are brought to our attention, consistent with CBS policy, we will investigate those allegations as well.”

Daniel Chang reported Thursday in the Miami Herald that two longtime reporters plan to leave the station: Jennifer Santiago, who co-anchors the 10 p.m. news for WFOR sister station My33, and said WFOR did not renew her contract, and general assignment reporter Yusila Ramirez, who has been with the station since 2001. Ramirez said in the story that she was resigning to become assistant director of media relations for Florida International University.

 

 

The blog item in question said, “When Maggie Rodriguez was promoted from WFOR to the Saturday Early Show” on the CBS network “as co-anchor on June 2, 2007, “Joy Purdy naturally assumed she would be promoted to the main anchor job, but when she met with Tom Doerr he informed her, she was not what CBS was looking for.

“Only then did in sink [in] this was the same exact [phrase] used in the firings of Anglia Raye and Dannile Knox, all African American female journalist[s] at the station.

“Tom Doerr and Adrienne Roark two newly hired white Americans fired all the black female staff journalist at WFOR. Their main excuse was this was not the new look they wanted at WFOR. Their treatment of Joy Purdy in particular, was disrespectful, distasteful and reeked of unprofessionalism.”

 

 

Lee Zimmerman, a spokesman for WFOR, told Journal-isms those who left did so of their own accord, and that “allegations are just that— false.” “We’re very diverse. Our newsroom is a veritable melting pot,” with 44 percent people of color, he said. Moreover, the station has hired Nick Bourne, an African American from KTVT-TV in Dallas, as an assistant news director.

Robaina said he called the offices of Sean McManus, president of CBS News, Les Moonves, CBS president and CEO, and Tom Kane, president of the CBS TV Stations Group, when contacted by the employees. A Bell South technician outside of his life in the legislature, Robaina said he knew some of the reporters and felt it his duty to act on their request.

Another CBS executive returned his call. “I asked for an investigation and they’ve agreed to do so,” Robaina told Journal-isms. “All of the employees that are [involved] will have an opportunity to sit with a representative from CBS’ human resources office and they’ll have an opportunity to speak. That will be part of the investigation,” he said.

Two past or present WFOR employees told Journal-isms the blog posting was on the mark but that neither wanted to comment. “Nobody wants to be blackballed,” one said.

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Bush Says He’d Seek Diversity in Next Court Pick

President Bush said Monday he would “obviously seek excellence and diversity” in his next Supreme Court appointment if he gets one before he leaves office in January 2009. Bush made the comments as he discussed the state of race relations with Juan Williams of National Public Radio and Fox News.

 

 

 

NPR declined the interview because the White House asked Williams to interview Bush. The public radio network said Bush should not choose his interviewer, so Williams, senior correspondent for NPR and political analyst for Fox News Channel, did the session for Fox. He told Journal-isms it was not unusual for presidents to decide who they would be interviewed by.

At one point, Williams asked Bush, “You’ve appointed two people to the Supreme Court, both white males. Do you think that there should be greater representation, not only of blacks and Hispanic, but women, on that high court?

Bush replied, “I do. Absolutely. And, as you might remember, [I] put forth a woman who I thought would be a great Supreme Court judge. And she never really got out of the blocks. And it looked like it was going to be —would be impossible for her to get out of the committee. And so she gracefully withdrew her name,” he said, referring to Harriet Miers.

“But I do believe so. And I hope I have another pick. And, you know, I obviously would seek excellence and diversity.”

The interview was pegged to the 50th anniversary of the 1957 Little Rock school desegregation case, in which federal troops forced the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. Bush touted his initiatives on education, “asset accumulation” and entrepreneurship as part of his administration’s answer to the problems plaguing black America.

Bush said the Justice Department was monitoring the “Jena Six” case in Louisiana, in which six black teenagers were originally accused of attempted murder, and explained why he said he believed Hillary Clinton will defeat Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

He predicted that Congress would take up the immigration issue again when employers pressure members of Congress because they cannot find workers, and said it was all right with him for Columbia University President Lee Bollinger to invite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus, as the Iranian leader did on Monday.

Despite the failure of the front-running Republican candidates for president to accept invitations to debate before African American and Hispanic audiences, Bush said, “I think you’ll see the nominee of the party, whoever he is, will head into the African American community with a positive message and, frankly, a good record, as a result of compassionate conservatism.”

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. . . NPR Says Williams Not Appropriate Choice

National Public Radio said Juan Williams was not the appropriate person to interview President Bush on NPR’s behalf.

Spokeswoman Andi Sporkin gave this statement Monday night to Journal-isms:

“On January 29, 2007, President Bush offered Juan Williams his first interview with NPR News since being elected. That interview reached millions of Americans through our newsmagazine ‘All Things Considered,’ other NPR News radio programming, NPR.org and an NPR podcast. Shortly after, we contacted the White House, in writing, to say that we welcomed future opportunities with the President but that these would be conducted by our show hosts or White House correspondents, as is standard with broadcast media organizations.

“Last weekend, the White House offered an interview to Juan for NPR News, to take place today. Instead, we offered more than a dozen show hosts as well as our two White House correspondents. The White House passed without giving us any reason, so we declined the invitation.

“Freedom of the press starts with the media’s fundamental right to independently determine their assignments. This is our policy with all interviews and we will not change it based on pressure or opportunity. While Juan is a respected, important member of our organization, he was not the appropriate person to be conducting this interview at this time for NPR News. We have no problem with him taking the opportunity to Fox News, which also employs him and which operates under its own standards.”

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“Afro-Sphere” Gets Props for Jena Six Story

“For months, the story of the so-called ‘Jena Six’ unfolded largely out of sight of the mainstream media. But in the emerging ‘Afro-Sphere,’ as some call the loose network of black bloggers, the story of six black teenagers initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate passed from blog to blog, taking on a life of its own. Petitions were signed, money was raised and protests were organized — all online,” Eric Weiner reported Friday on National Public Radio.

“‘I think a lot of people ignored the story but the African-American blogosphere has been on it from early on, and it has really caught steam recently,’ said Shawn Williams, who writes the popular Dallas South blog.

“Thursday’s demonstration, the largest civil-rights protest in years, owes its existence, in part, to the power of the Internet, says Williams. That’s not to say that it couldn’t have happened without the Web, but ‘once something gets out there, the action is immediate — here’s what we’re going to write about, here’s the petition, here’s the protest. It takes place within minutes, hours and days, not weeks or months,’ he says.

“Recently, a group of black bloggers organized a ‘blog-in.’ They agreed to write about the Jena Six case on one day, raising the profile of the story. Within a matter of weeks, African-American bloggers had helped collect 220,000 signatures and raised $130,000 in donations, they say.”

Williams, Steven Holmes, national editor for the Washington Post, and Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute, discussed how “the story simmered on blogs and social networking sites for months, gradually building an online life of its own” on Monday on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Meanwhile, two African American newspaper ombudsmen acknowledged over the weekend that their papers had been behind the curve on the story.

“Reporters may have been slow to cover this story, but it’s important that journalists continue to follow what happens to the teenagers,” Angela Tuck wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “On Friday, a juvenile court judge denied bail for the first student to be tried, 17-year-old Mychal Bell, while his case is appealed.”

In the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, C.B. Hanif wrote, “for weeks cyberspace and talk radio had been buzzing about a story that had received only a single oblique mention in The Post when Patrick Franklin called last Wednesday to express dismay that there was ‘nothing in the newspaper about the Jena Six.’. . . This disservice shows that what appears in the newspaper and on TV can say less about what’s newsworthy than about who’s making the decisions.”

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Activists Underwhelmed by Burns Compromise

Ken Burns’ miniseries “The War” made its debut Sunday night after months of skirmishing with Latino activists over whether Latinos would be included in the public television documentary. The finished product did not satisfy some of those activists.

“I was looking for two things,” Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told Journal-isms via e-mail.

 

Pete Arias

“1. was it meaningful and about the Latino experience? The two Latinos they got were excellent — eloquent, speaking from the heart, poignant. Burns almost included the Latino experience, touched on it, but didn’t delve in. So it was meaningful, but perhaps the later episode, in which they will again be featured will include [Bill] Lansford and [Pete] Arias again — I’ll be looking for it.

“2. was it incorporated seamlessly, as Burns said he would do back in April? not even close. the lighting, of course, was consistent. But it was very evident that the two interviews were patched on to the episode. That was very disappointing, but not unexpected, as I had read a couple of reviews, and this was what those reviewers said would happen.

“Funny thing is, Burns still doesn’t seem to get it— in some interviews, he compares Latinos to martians and in another one to mangos.”

On National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More,” Angelo Falcon, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy, said, “We were very dissatisfied. I mean, our feeling was and our concern from the beginning is that we simply wouldn’t be tacked on to this series as some sort of political expediency on the part of PBS and Ken Burns. And that’s exactly what they did. Unfortunately, it’s at the very — it’s tacked on to the very end, and even the credits, the Latino producer, Hector Galan, was also tacked on to the very end of the credits.

“And one of the things that was, to me, most disheartening was the fact that that section — that Latino section — was actually excellent. And it just illustrated how much of a lost opportunity, I think, Ken Burns and PBS had by not seriously including Latinos in the series.”

Lionel Sosa, CEO of Mexicans and Americans Thinking Together Foundation, Inc., called it, “a wakeup call for Ken Burns. . . . a lot of good things are going to be happening because of this controversy. That doesn’t mean that Ken must change his product and — or be forced to change his product by any group that doesn’t like his product. If I were a painter of Western art and I had a lot of paintings up in a museum or in an art show and I show the American cowboy and I didn’t show the Mexican vaquero, which was the original American cowboy, a group couldn’t force me to repaint that painting.

“I paint my painting according to the way that I want to paint it. And if anybody wants to paint a vaquero, then they have the right to do that. And I think that this is a lovely opportunity for more Latinos to be able to come forth and tell the Latino story. Is it the responsibility of Ken Burns to tell the Latino story?

“Maybe, maybe not.”

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Sacramento Bee Reconsiders Policy on Racial IDs

The Sacramento Bee is reconsidering the “high standard” it has used on using race to identify crime suspects, public editor Armando Acuna wrote on Sunday.

“The paper has set a high standard, allowing the use of race only when it is accompanied by a detailed physical description or when reporting a serial crime or when using police sketches of suspects,” Acuna said.

But, citing a recent case, Editor Rich Rodriguez “said he is well aware that, from a practical standpoint, The Bee found itself isolated in its initial reporting by not including racial descriptions while everyone else, from media competitors to readers, had the information.

“So, Rodriguez asked, what’s the point of holding out?

“‘We’re supposed to be giving all the information available,’ he said.

“Is it enough to stay the course for the noble purpose of avoiding racial stereotypes, which is at the core of the current policy?

“‘Have we succeeded? I don’t know,’ said Rodriguez. In this Internet age, he said, you can’t pretend readers are clueless about finding information.”

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3 Call for Minority Media Ownership Task Force

“A trio of minority members of Congress’ political majority has called for the creation of a minority media-ownership task force, referring to the ‘disgracefully low levels of media ownership by people of color,'” John Eggerton wrote Monday for Broadcasting & Cable.

“The call, in letters to Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin, came only a few days after the FCC got an earful at a media-ownership hearing in Chicago on the impact of media consolidation on diversity and only a few days before the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters holds its annual convention in Washington, D.C.

“Making that call were Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Hilda Solis (D-Calif.), with backing by anti-consolidation group Free Press.”

Meanwhile, Ira Teinowitz reported Friday in TV Week that, “Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama is throwing out more hints that the Federal Communications Commission would have a somewhat different focus if he wins the election.

“At Thursday night’s FCC media ownership hearing in Chicago, an aide read a statement in which the Illinois senator complimented the FCC for holding the hearing but questioned some of the FCC’s past focus on easing ownership rules.

“Sen. Obama said the FCC should reduce the length of TV station licenses and get more input, more often, on how well stations are serving community needs.”

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Short Takes:

  • “The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit in federal court Wednesday against local television station KOKH-25, alleging racial and gender discrimination against one of its on-air reporters,” Paul Monies reported Thursday in the Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. “The lawsuit accuses KOKH LLC and parent company Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. of paying crime reporter Phyllis Williams a lower salary than comparable white female reporters and male reporters of all races. Williams, who is black, has worked at the Fox affiliate since it began news operations in 1996.”
  • A two-year investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed that of Georgia’s 132 most heinous murderers over a recent 10-year span, only 29 of them landed on death row; 50 of the worst killers avoided death by pleading guilty. In addition, some got life sentences and will be eligible for parole, and a killer’s chances of facing the death penalty increased when the victim was white. “It’s not just black criminal defendants who are treated unfairly. So are black victims, whose lives and losses are often undervalued,” columnist Cynthia Tucker wrote on Sunday.

 

Tim Giago
  • Veteran columnist Tim Giago will become the first Native American ever inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame on Nov. 10, Dave Bordewyk, director of the South Dakota Newspaper Association, told Journal-isms. The Hall has inducted 95 others since it began in the 1930s. “His work in newspapering in the state opened the door for many, many journalists,” Bordewyk said of Giago. “He was at the forefront and leading the way” for Native journalists.
  • Adamma Ince, deputy managing editor of the Village Voice and its only African American masthead editor, is leaving the publication. “Since I’m in the process of hiring a replacement for Adamma, who doesn’t leave for a few more weeks, I think I’m going to hold off commenting at the moment,” Editor-in-chief Tony Ortega told Journal-isms.
  • Mimi Valdés Ryan has been appointed editorial director of Latina Media Ventures, effective Nov. 5. She is a senior contributing editor of Latina magazine and former editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine.
  • Devaughndre Broussard, the Your Black Muslim Bakery handyman accused of killing Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey, failed to enter a plea on Thursday as his attorney asked for more time to investigate the case, Paul T. Rosynsky wrote in the Oakland Tribune. “ LaRue Grim, Broussard’s attorney, said he wants [the] case to proceed slowly because it has been full of surprises that might prove his client’s innocence.”
  • Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly met the Rev. Al Sharpton in Sylvia’s, the Harlem, N.Y., restaurant, and was amazed, Steve Benen wrote on his Talking Points Web site. “O’Reilly was describing his experience to NPR’s Juan Williams. ‘There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, “M-Fer, I want more iced tea,”‘ O’Reilly said, adding, ‘You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.'”
  • The 2007 Black Weblog Awards Winners List “exposes to the world a look into the minds, interests and passions of a dramatically varied group of Black folk who have been smart enough to seize the inherent power of a global self-publishing tool and tell their own stories, in their own way, without apology,” Eric Easter wrote on ebonyjet.com. He then listed the winners.
  • In England, more than 70 editors, executives and senior newsroom staff were to meet journalists from black and minority ethnic backgrounds last Friday as part of an initiative to promote diversity in TV and radio news, Paul McNally reported for the Press Gazette.
  • Courtenay Edelhart, a biracial reporter at the Indianapolis Star, traced her ancestry through DNA testing and wrote on Sept. 17 about what she learned.
  • Ashanti Blaize, a general assignment reporter at KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, has been hired as anchor/reporter at KXAS-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth, effective Oct. 15.
  • Reporter Mai Martinez “was promoted over at least five other capable insiders to anchor Saturday and Sunday night newscasts at Channel 2,” WBBM-TV, in Chicago, Robert Feder reported in the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday. “Martinez, who is half Cuban and half Vietnamese, was the only Hispanic in the running,” wrote Feder, who wondered, “Did pressure to promote ethnic diversity trump merit and experience in the naming of a weekend news anchor at WBBM-Channel 2?”
  • “New York radio personality Egypt, an entertainment reporter for BET’s The Black Carpet, is joining ‘Maury’ as a special correspondent,” John Eggerton reported last week for Broadcasting & Cable. “She will report on pop culture both in-studio and in the field.”
  • “The secretary of state has always been considered a prize catch for the Sunday talk shows,” Howard Kurtz wrote Monday in the Washington Post. “But when the White House offered Condoleezza Rice for appearances eight days ago, after a week focused on Iraq, two programs took the unusual step of turning her down. Executives at CBS and NBC say Rice no longer seems to be a key player on the war and that her cautious style makes her a frustrating guest.”

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