Justice Holds News Media in Contempt

Thomas Writes, “Even for a Journalist, That Was Low”

It’s hardly news that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is no friend of the news media.

But the devil is in the details, and what might be revelatory to readers of his new memoir, released Monday, is that there are journalists whom Thomas admires.

Also, that at St. Benedict the Moor School in Savannah, Ga., “I joined the school paper during my sophomore year, and later I attended a journalism seminar at Savannah State College. I was so impressed by the school that for a time I imagined I might go there and become a newspaperman.”

Alas, it was not to happen. And in promoting “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas is making rare media appearances, in which, among other things, he bashes the media.

“One of the vows I made when I got here was that I would never do this job as poorly as journalists do theirs,” the nation’s second black Supreme Court justice says in an interview scheduled for Monday on ABC-TV’s “Nightline.”

That’s consistent with what Thomas writes in a memoir that goes from his childhood through his 1991 confirmation hearings, which were rocked by charges that Thomas had sexually harassed Anita Hill when both worked at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which Thomas chaired.

Here’s who’s up and who’s down in the media in Thomas’ mind, according to the book:

• Up. Black conservatives Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, both syndicated columnists, and Jay Parker, who heads the Washington-based Abraham Lincoln Foundation for Public Policy Research, are credited with helping to refine Thomas’ views. The three “were all smart, courageous, independent-minded men who came from modest backgrounds. Politics meant nothing to them. All they cared about was truthfully describing urgent social problems, then finding ways to solve them.”
• Down. The Washington Post, which in a story announcing his nomination to head the EEOC quoted a Hispanic critic claiming Thomas had been “insensitive” to Hispanics during his time at the Department of Education. “It was, of course, a fabrication, but there wasn’t anything I could do to disprove it, since the original source of the slander had been some anonymous person who didn’t have the courage to put a name to his claim,” Thomas writes. However, the Post’s front-page story of Feb. 13, 1982, by Herbert H. Denton, did attach a name to the charge: “Arnoldo Torres, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who had led civil rights groups in opposition to Bell’s nomination, said he has found Thomas insensitive to Hispanic problems while in the education job,” the story said. The reference was to previous nominee William Bell, president of Bold Concepts Inc., described as “a one-man Detroit employment agency that placed no clients last year.”
• Down. The New York Times, where reporter Ernest Holsendolph (whose name is consistently misspelled as “Holzendorf”) became the first reporter to be granted an interview with Thomas at the EEOC. “What appeared in the Times was an article consisting mainly of quotes from people who disapproved of my views, none of whom knew me,” Thomas wrote. The agency’s public affairs director, Al Sweeney, “explained that Holzendorf’s editors had told Holzendorf that I was ‘controversial’ and made him rewrite his piece to reflect this supposed fact.”

In 2002, after Thomas raised this story in an interview with Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher of the Washington Post, Holsendolph gave a different recollection to Journal-isms: “I was struck by the irony, that a bright but poor brother should rise to the heights with public and private help and then be so adamant in his opposition to affirmative action policies across the board,” Holsendolph said. “And so I expressed that point. Also I quote expert critics to respond to his arguments against an activist EEOC. I am not sure which of these two aspects of the story irritated most, but we can guess.” He added on Monday, “Of course there was no rewrite. And for the record, the EEOC was my beat even before Thomas showed up, so I wrote from my experience covering the commission activities and did not have to hunt critics of Thomas’s policies.”

• Down. The late columnist Carl T. Rowan, who wrote a piece called “Wrong Man at EEOC” based on Holsendolph’s story. Thomas and Rowan had lunch, Thomas recalled, at which Rowan promised “not to write about me again without contacting me first — a promise he never bothered to keep.”
• Down. The reporters who covered him at EEOC. “I felt no common cause with the black Democratic congressional staffers, or with most of the reporters who wrote about EEOC during my years there. So far as I could tell, we didn’t care about the same things, and sometimes I wondered whether the reporters cared about anything. One reporter told me that good news about civil rights simply wasn’t ‘newsworthy’ during the Reagan years. As far as I was concerned, that said it all.”
• Up. Juan Williams, then of the Washington Post, who provided “my closest relationship with a journalist. . . . I’d come to believe that he was a decent man looking for the truth, and I appreciated the courage that led him to avoid the reflexively accusatory approach of so many of his colleagues. . . . We would speak frequently and frankly throughout the next few years, not merely for professional reasons but also as black men and fathers.”

During the confirmation hearings, Thomas writes, “the only bright moment came when Senator [Orrin] Hatch mentioned an op-ed column by Juan Williams that had appeared in that morning’s Washington Post. As the senator read it into the record, my heart spilled over with gratitude. I knew that Juan had put his career on the line in order to say what he thought.” Thomas’ book then quotes from the column.

Left unsaid is that the column did alter Williams’ career. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood wrote then:

“On Oct. 1, a woman in the newsroom lodged a formal complaint against Mr. Williams for using ‘offensive’ language. It was the first newsroom case of its kind. In other departments of the paper, such cases ordinarily are disposed of in a day or two. But the Juan Williams affair came to involve multiple charges and, thus, took on a convoluted life of its own. He did not learn of the first accusations against him until Oct. 8 and then in only the most general way. His piece in defense of Clarence Thomas appeared on the 10th and brought a series of invitations for television appearances. New charges against Mr. Williams followed, along with a high level of outrage by women in the newsroom. They identified themselves, one assumes, with Clarence Thomas’s chief accuser, Anita Hill, and found Mr. Williams’s defense of Judge Thomas both self-serving and wrong.”

Williams was disciplined and apologized in an open letter to the Post newsroom for what he called “wrong” and “inappropriate” verbal conduct toward women staffers.

• Down. Hodding Carter, whose family ran the crusading liberal paper the Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times until it was sold in the 1980s. Thomas wrote that he responded in a letter to the editor of Playboy magazine to a piece by Carter, “Reagan and the Revival of Racism.” Carter wrote back, “As a Southerner, Mr. Thomas is surely familiar with those ‘chicken-eating preachers’ who gladly parroted the segregationists’ line in exchange for a few crumbs from the white man’s table. He’s one of the few left in captivity.” Writes Thomas: “Not a single civil rights leader objected to this nakedly racist language. For daring to reject the ideological orthodoxy that was prescribed for blacks by liberal whites, I was branded a traitor to my race — as if anyone, least of all a white journalist, had the right to tell me what beliefs a black man was permitted to hold.”
• Up. The Washington Post editorial page, which took favorable notice of the changes he made at EEOC, “an unexpected switch after so many years of being raked over the coals by the media.”
• Up. Paul Gigot, then Wall Street Journal Washington columnist, who asked for permission to reprint a request from the Senate during Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearing that Thomas considered onerous. The request “entailed an enormous amount of backbreaking labor on my part. . . . I begged him to make clear that he hadn’t gotten the document from me, and he promised to do so,” Thomas wrote. “A lot of reporters had given me similar assurances in the past, but Gigot, unlike them, kept his word.”
• Down. Those who wrote about his family during the confirmation hearings. “The press hounded my ex-wife, publishing stories falsely claiming that I’d beaten her and that our divorce had been protracted and bitter [but] she turned them away. Not all of my relatives in Savannah were so prudent though . . . The way my sister was treated was especially contemptible. Plying her with kind words and a few hundred dollars, they did their best to use her to show that I had been a bad brother, somehow getting her to say that she’d had an abortion, which was both untrue and nobody’s business but hers. Few showed any interest whatsoever in reporting on my family’s real-life struggles with poverty, prejudice and poor education.”

In an anecdote that became widely discussed, Williams reported in the Washington Post on Dec. 16, 1980, that Thomas “has a sister on welfare back in his home state of Georgia, but he feels that he must be opposed to welfare because of the dependency it can breed in a person. ‘She [his sister] gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check,’ he says. ‘That is how dependent she is. What’s worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.'”

Thomas wrote in the book, “Our personal lives were of interest only to the extent that they could be used to smear me. I’d succeeded in escaping the disadvantages of my childhood in Pinpoint, but some of my relatives hadn’t been so fortunate, thus proving that I’d turned my back on them in my ruthless climb to the top of the heap.

“Even for a journalist, that was low.”

Thomas conceded that, “on occasion, I even read news stories that contained encouraging words from half-forgotten people who had passed through my life long ago.”

• Down. Those who wrote about the Anita Hill controversy. “I was struck by the glaring difference in the way the media treated Anita and me. Whereas it was taken for granted that whatever she said had to be true, it was no less automatically assumed that anything I might say in my defense would be untrue.”

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“Nightline,” Tavis Smiley Plan Shows on Thomas

“Tonight on ‘Nightline,’ Jan Crawford Greenburg reports on her candid and poignant interviews with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,” ABC News announced on Monday. “The wide-ranging on-camera interviews lasted nearly seven hours over the course of four days at the Court, at Thomas’ home and at a University of Nebraska football game. Justice Thomas talks frankly about race and growing up in the segregated South, Anita Hill, the media, his confirmation hearings, his personal struggles, and what it is like to be Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.”

Meanwhile, “Tonight on PBS’ ‘Tavis Smiley,’ Tavis convenes a panel to discuss the new book by Justice Clarence Thomas and the ’60 Minutes’ profile that coincided with the release of the book. Guests are Marc Morial, President and CEO of The National Urban League, Princeton professor Cornel West, and Columbia University professor Farah Jasmine Griffin,” PBS said.

The panelists were critical of the “60 Minutes” piece on Thomas on Sunday night. “It was as if Justice Thomas’ public relations people edited the piece,” Morial said. West said that instead of representing opponents of Thomas’ ideas with critical thinkers, the program showed demonstrators. It was a “one-sided history,” Griffin said.

The same point was made Tuesday on the e-mail list of the National Association of Black Journalists. “I’ve now watched the 60 Minutes interview and the Nightline interview. It was like watching the Home Shopping Network,” one said. “You mean to tell me that there was not a single critical commentator on Clarence Thomas’ record? These things could have been on Larry King and no one would have blinked. I’m rarely disgusted, but this was pure journalistic drivel.”

• Monroe Anderson, ebonyjet.com: Here Comes the Judge
• Robert Barnes, Michael A. Fletcher and Kevin Merida, Washington Post: Justice Thomas Lashes Out in Memoir
• Kevin Merida, Washington Post: To Cite a ‘Mockingbird’: Justice Thomas Casts His Ordeal in a Literary Light
• Andrea Seabrook and Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio: Justice Clarence Thomas’ Memoir Unveils Bitterness

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Gannett Reaches 20.4% Managers of Color

“The 2007 All-American Review, which measures the number of people of color and the outreach efforts made by Gannett Information Centers,” formerly newspapers, “shows that the total percentage of minority journalists — 19.5 percent — was flat compared to 2006, which was a record,” Ann Clark, Gannett Co. news executive, reported to Gannett properties.

“The review shows strong progress in two critical areas — the percentage of minority managers and the percentage of minority promotions. For the first time in the 29-year history of the review, the number of people of color in management positions surpassed 20 percent. It hit an all-time high of 20.4 percent, compared to 19.1 percent in 2006.

“The number of people of color who were promoted also showed progress, with 31.2 percent. That compared to 27.8 percent in 2006.

“The number of people of color hired to fill Information Center positions dropped slightly from 28.5 percent in 2006 to 28 percent in 2007. The total number of interns dropped, but a higher percentage of interns (49.3 percent) were people of color, compared to 46.7 percent in 2006.

“For comparison, the 2007 Newsroom Census conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors shows that 13.62 percent of journalists at daily U.S. newspapers were people of color.

“ASNE’s annual census shows that 10.9 percent of all managers in U.S. newsrooms and 27 percent of interns were people of color.

“People of color — Hispanic Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans — comprise about 33 percent of the U.S. population.”

• Phil Currie, Gannett Co.: Diversity is a key part of our future; we’re doing well, but we’ll need to do better
• Gannett Co.: These Information Centers meet or exceed percentage of people of color in their communities

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Tight Handcuffs Part of “Reporting While Black”

“Last month, while talking to a group of young black men standing on a sidewalk in Salisbury, N.C., about harsh antigang law enforcement tactics some states are using, I had discovered the main challenge to such measures: the police have great difficulty determining who is, and who is not, a gangster,” Solomon Moore, who joined the New York Times from the Los Angeles Times in June, wrote on Sunday.

“My reporting, however, was going well. I had gone to Salisbury to find someone who had firsthand experience with North Carolina’s tough antigang stance, and I had found that someone: me.

“. . . A tall white police officer got out of his car and ordered me toward him. Two other police officers, a white woman and a black man, stood outside of their cars nearby. I complied. Without so much as a question, the officer shoved my face down on the sheet metal and cuffed me so tightly that my fingertips tingled.

“‘They’re on too tight!’ I protested.

“‘They’re not meant for comfort,’ he replied.

“While it is true that I, like many of today’s gang members, shave my head bald, in my case it’s less about urban style and more about letting nature take its course. Apart from my complexion, the only thing I had in common with the young men watching me smooch the hood of the black-and-white was that they too had been in that position – some of them, they would tell me later, with just as little provocation.”

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Reader Rep on O’Reilly: Let’s Go to the Tape

“I don’t blame the Plain Dealer editor who selected the wire story that ran Thursday, but I wish the AP reporter who wrote the story had been a bit more skeptical of the information he got from a Web site that has a clear anti-conservative agenda,” Ted Diadiun, reader representative at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, told readers on Sunday.

He was discussing the statement by Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly, first reported by the group Media Matters for America, that “I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. It was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks [and has a] primarily black patronship. There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea!'”

Diadiun said, “the reporter, AP television writer David Bauder, said he listened to about 10 minutes of the audio clip provided by Media Matters. I listened to the entire 35-minute segment of the broadcast, and I wish he had done the same. Reasonable people can interpret the context differently, but I don’t know how anyone listening to the whole thing could believe that O’Reilly was surprised by the scene at Sylvia’s.

“But you don’t have to take my word for it, or even that of Juan Williams, who was on the show. You can listen to the entire segment and judge for yourself here.”

Williams, meanwhile, wrote an essay for Time magazine on Friday, “What Bill O’Reilly Really Told Me,” challenging an effort to take what O’Reilly “said totally out of context in an attempt to brand him a racist by a liberal group that disagrees with much of his politics. . . .The out-of-context attacks on O’Reilly picked up speed and ended up on CNN, where one commentator branded me a ‘Happy Negro’ for allowing O’Reilly to get by with making racist comments without objection.

“This is so far from the truth of the conversation on the radio that it is beyond a matter of words being taken out of context. This is a pathetic cowardly, personal attack against me intended to damage my credibility and invalidate any support I offer to O’Reilly against the charges that he is a racist,” Williams said.

In another development, “In a phone interview on 3WT radio Friday morning, Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi claimed that Bill O’Reilly ‘secretly taped me’ and played his phone interview with the Fox News commentator on Thursday’s ‘The O’Reilly Factor’ without Farhi’s consent,” according to Dave Hughes‘ Web site on Washington area broadcasting, dcrtv. “Farhi was heard telling O’Reilly: ‘Please don’t repeat this… You’re getting so dragged into something you don’t deserve,’ regarding O’Reilly’s latest racial controversy, which Farhi reported about in Wednesday’s Post. Farhi revealed to 3WT morning man David Burd that, in retrospect, he shouldn’t have divulged his personal opinions on the O’Reilly controversy in his phone interview with O’Reilly. On Thursday afternoon, via 3WT’s airwaves, O’Reilly said he was mounting a charge against ‘corrupt media coverage’ and singled out Farhi.”

• Errol Louis, New York Daily News: Bill O’Reilly deserves applause
• Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Bill O’Reilly’s ‘race problem’ — and ours
• Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: Giving soft bigotry a break

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James Campbell Leaving Houston Chronicle for P.R.

James T. Campbell, reader representative at the Houston Chronicle since 2002 and a staffer at the newspaper since 1985, is leaving to become senior vice president in the Houston office of the Fleishman Hilliard public relations agency, he told Journal-isms. He wrote a final column on Monday.

“It was a great opportunity that I couldn’t pass up,” Campbell told Journal-isms. “As you know, after you’ve been in this business for a while you get to a point where you wonder what you’re going to do for the rest of your life (career). I hope this is it. I confess that I’m a little scared because I’m leaving my cocoon of more than 20 years. But I’m looking forward to the challenge.”

He told readers, “I’ve spent the better and best part of my career at the Chronicle, doing various assignments: day police reporter, general assignments, City Hall, editorial writer/columnist, assistant Outlook editor and finally Readers’ Representative (the assignment I enjoyed most because I learned what readers really think about what we do as a newspaper and as journalists).” He also is a former board member of the National Association of Black Journalists.

On diversity at the paper, “We’ve lost three black staffers in last three week, Zharmer Hardimon (left without a job), Kristen Mack (left to join the Washington Post to cover politics in its Manassas, Virginia, bureau), and me. We recently hired Leslie Casimir from the Daily News to cover a diversity beat. But we still do not have a regular Metro front or editorial page columnist who is black or Hispanic in a city that is majority-minority,” Campbell told Journal-isms.

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Juan Williams Reaffirms “Integrity” of NPR Managers

Last week, Juan Williams said he was “stunned” by National Public Radio’s decision to forgo an interview with President Bush because the White House, not NPR, had chosen the interviewer, Howard Kurtz reported in the Washington Post. “It makes no sense to me. President Bush has never given an interview in which he focused on race. . . . I was stunned by the decision to turn their backs on him and to turn their backs on me,” Kurtz quoted Williams, senior correspondent for NPR, as saying. Williams went on to do the interview for Fox News, where he is a commentator.

On Monday, Ellen Weiss, vice president of NPR News, returning from a public broadcasting convention, wrote a note to staffers explaining NPR’s policy and saying, “Juan and I have spoken at length about this situation and he offered me the following to share:

“‘I respect NPR and as a member of the NPR news staff I know first-hand my colleagues’ commitment to world-class journalism. I respect NPR’s management. They have the right to refuse any interview opportunity. The integrity of NPR management is without question and the process for making decisions reflects their principled stand on journalistic independence. While I strongly disagree with NPR’s decision on this matter, I understand their need to make such decisions. Further, if my comments left the impression that NPR, as a news organization, disrespects this President —or any President —that was not my intent.'”

Weiss also reminded staffers, “any media requests that come to you for interviews about NPR, our activities or decisions must be forwarded to the Communications division to handle.” Williams’ speaking to the news media was a violation of the policy, she said.

On National Public Radio’s “On the Media,” Williams was criticized for asking Bush what host Bob Garfield considered “softball” questions. “If anyone in the White House Press Office fretted about exposing the President to the leftist rantings of Radio Moscow, they needn’t have been concerned,” he said.

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GOP Front-Runners? What Front-Runners?

“The Republican presidential debate at Morgan State University ended around 10:30ish Thursday night when I rose from my seat in the Carl Murphy Auditorium and announced to no one in particular, ‘Boy! That certainly was more fun than skydiving!'” Gregory Kane wrote Saturday in his Baltimore Sun column.

“I trust you will forgive me for that bit of hyperbole. But the debate among the six Republican candidates considered to have little or no chance at the presidential nomination did have moments both entertaining and informative, so much so I’m inclined to hand out some awards.

“Really,” Kane said of the four front-runners who didn’t show, “did anybody actually miss any of these guys?”

• Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post: Pink Panic in the GOP
• George Diaz, Orlando Sentinel: Latinos, blacks to GOP: Hasta la vista, baby, in 2008
• Bob Herbert, New York Times: The Ugly Side of the G.O.P.
• Roland S. Martin, Creators Syndicate: Why Is the GOP Scared of Black Voters?

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Short Takes

• “Los Angeles television newscaster Mirthala Salinas, whose

• affair with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa prompted her transfer to Riverside, failed to show up for her first day of work Monday after a two-month suspension,” Meg James and Duke Helfand reported on Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times. “A few hours later, Salinas’ employer, the Spanish-language Telemundo network, announced that she would not be returning. Telemundo’s KVEA-TV Channel 52 and Salinas ‘have mutually agreed to end our employment relationship,’ the network said in a statement.” The affair came to light in July.
• “Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America’s public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year,” Howard Witt reported Sept. 25 in the Chicago Tribune. “In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population.”
• “The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged by the apparently deliberate fatal shooting of Japanese cameraman Kenji Nagai by a Burmese soldier on Thursday. Video footage shown on Japan’s Fuji News Network reveals that Nagai, who was filming near a group of demonstrators in Yangon, was pushed to the ground and shot at near point-blank range,” the Committee said http://www.cpj.org/on Friday. In England, the Daily Mail published photographs of Nagai’s last moments.
•  

• “After seven years of crafting columns, it’s time for something else. Why? Why not?” L.A. Chung wrote Saturday in the San Jose Mercury News. “I’ll be starting a feature all about the many faces in our valley. . . . Each week, the feature will focus on a different local character, someone just like you, doing things that tell us a lot about the way we live here in the Bay Area.”
• At the Washington Post, Keith B. Richburg and Michael A. Fletcher, who both have jobs performed by few other black journalists, are changing assignments. Richburg, the Post’s foreign editor, the No. 2 foreign-news job, is becoming New York bureau chief. Fletcher, who covers the White House, will become national economics reporter, the paper announced last week.
• After five years, this columnist is relinquishing the editorship of Black College Wire, an online news service founded in 2002, effective Oct. 1.
• “Barbara Ciara urged Hampton University students to ‘run faster and jump higher’ in the competitive 21st century, but also remember that racial battles linger,” Wayne Dawkins, who teaches at Hampton, told Journal-isms on Sunday. “The Norfolk, Va., anchorwoman,” Hampton graduate and president of the National Association of Black Journalists “said when people on the street ask her ‘What’s new,’ her responses might be: Bill O’Reilly just learned that black people can order iced tea in a restaurant without saying ‘m—– f—–,’ Don Imus, Jena 6 case, overcoverage of the Michael Vick dogfighting case, undercoverage of the black woman who was sexually assaulted and tortured in West Virginia.” She spoke for 14 minutes at Hampton’s 65th opening convocation.
• “Democratic Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps set a high bar Thursday for approval of three media mergers before the agency as he questioned whether the proposed deals were in the public interest,” Corey Boles wrote Thursday in the Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Copps said he isn’t convinced the proposed merger of satellite-radio companies Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. should be allowed to proceed. About Sam Zell’s purchase of Tribune Co., Mr. Copps said he felt strongly that the new owner couldn’t expect to automatically win renewal of several existing exemptions from FCC rules on media ownership.”
• Samson Wong, who was removed as editor-in-chief of the weekly AsianWeek after publishing “Why I Hate Blacks” by Kenneth Eng earlier in the year, is a senior editorial consultant at the publication. He had a column in the Sept. 17 edition.
• “Mark López, publisher of AOL Latino, has resigned from his position. He will remain at the bilingual Web portal for a transition period, though a replacement has not been named, confirmed an AOL representative. López has held that position since 2005,” Nancy Ayala reported Friday for Marketing y Medios.
• “The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has launched year two of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news,” according to a foundation news release. “The foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news experiments. A simple online entry form is available at www.newschallenge.org. The web site will accept applications through Oct. 15. Winners should be announced by the spring of 2008.”
• “Journalists staged rallies across Pakistan, marking Sunday as a ‘black day’ to condemn police beatings during opposition protests against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s pursuit of another five-year term,” the Associated Press reported on Saturday. “Journalists decried the beatings as ‘shameful tactics’ by a government that has claimed to promote press freedoms, said Mushtaq Minhas, president of the press club in Islamabad.”