Maynard Institute archives

Imus Vows He’ll Earn “Second Chance”

by richard0455

Rebukes Black Comics Who Agreed With Insult

Disgraced radio host Don Imus returned to the airwaves on Monday morning with a pledge that “I will never say anything” that would make the members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgive me. And no one else will say anything on my program that will make anyone else think that I didn’t deserve a second chance.”

 

 

Broadcasting from his new home base, WABC Radio in New York, he also recalled that some suggested a national conversation on race in the wake of his April firing, but if it took place, “I must have missed that.” But Imus said “there isn’t any reason we can’t do that,” noting that he spent “months and months” talking about autism and about death benefits for soldiers. Imus was fired after he had called the Rutgers team “nappy headed ho’s.”

He conceded he deserved to be fired over the remark, saying, “What happened is what should have happened.”

The radio host spent most of his opening remarks recounting his four-hour meeting April 12 with the Rutgers team and their coach at the New Jersey governor’s mansion. He said he felt foolish relating the good things he had done. “I had said, ‘I was a good person who had said a bad thing.’ I thought about how irrelevant that was . . . They didn’t think I was saying they were prostitutes, but they didn’t think it was funny, either.”

He rebuked black comedians Damon Wayans and D.L. Hughley, who had defended and even amplified the insult. “None of us should say it. They should talk to those women at Rutgers if they want to know how they feel about it,” Imus said. “It was demonstrated to these young women that there are consequences to what you say,” Imus said at another point.

Imus’ new cast includes a black woman, Karith Foster, and a black man, Tony Powell. The New York Post on Monday described Foster as his sidekick, “a black Texas Jew with New York roots and an Oxford education.”

Imus had praise for CBS President Les Moonves, who fired him from CBS-owned WFAN Radio in April, contrary to reports in the New York Post’s “Page Six” column, picked up elsewhere, that it was doubtful that Imus would “ever forgive” Moonves. “He could not have been more honorable and more decent,” Imus said of Moonves.

However, Imus did joke later that he signed a five-year contract “because that’s how long it’s going to take to get even with everybody.”

The radio host concluded his opening remarks by saying, “Dick Cheney is still a war criminal; Hillary Clinton is still Satan and I’m back on the radio!” The audience, at New York’s Town Hall for a benefit performance, applauded.

When the show opened, Imus announced his guests would include historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and political strategists James Carville and Mary Matalin. His sidekicks Charles McCord and Bernard McGuirk returned. There were no prominent people of color, nor any journalists. A commercial from Subaru was the first from a national advertiser to air.

WABC programming director Phil Boyce told Journal-isms on Friday that 21 affiliates were lined up for the Monday debut, but he said he could not disclose who they were. The previous show was carried on 61 U.S. radio stations and distributed over the Westwood One radio network.

The National Association of Black Journalists, which had called for Imus’ firing in April, issued a statement Monday afternoon that “NABJ’s leadership spoke to Citadel Broadcasting’s chief executive officer, Farid Suleman, in late October, and he assured the organization that Imus will be held to a higher standard than what he enjoyed at CBS Radio.

“In today’s market, we knew that it would be only a matter of time before Imus would return to the airwaves. We hope he will choose a more positive tone for his work.”

Freelance journalist Philip Nobile, longtime tracker of offensive Imus comments, told Journal-isms he drafted a pledge for Imus to take and passed it out in front of Town Hall. But, he said via e-mail, “I was removed at 6:40, security grabbed my arm and my backpack and shoved me onto street.”

The pledge began with this statement:

“In 2000, embarrassed by his racist and anti-gay quotes reprinted on the New York Times op-ed page, Don Imus invited Clarence Page on the program to cover his ass. Page foiled Imus by presenting him with an anti-bigotry pledge that I had written the night before. Imus recited the pledge on air as dictated by the black columnist.

“Imus promised to cease his popular act smearing the least of the brethren. Specifically, he swore off his routine simian slurs against blacks, the demeaning Amos ‘n’ Andy cuts, minstrel-show parodies, and epithets like ‘homo,’ ‘lesbo,’ ‘load-swallower’ and ‘carpet-muncher’ aimed at public figures like Hillary Clinton, Jodie Foster, Kevin Spacey and Bill Bradley. He also vowed to squelch anti-ethnic comments such as ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘Sambo’ for Indians, ‘eating dirt sandwiches’ for Zimbabweans, and ‘Mogadishu’ metaphors for New York City. Of course, the oath was just more shtick to Imus. He broke it as soon as he hung up on Page.

“Herewith a new and tougher pledge for the allegedly new and softer Imus. If he is not man enough to take it, he is the same old scoundrel who reveled in dirty jokes about black men with big penises having sex with his wife:

“I, Don Imus, renounce my lucrative bigotry of the past.

“I swear that I will never again degrade, nor allow my employees to smear, in, blacks, gays, women, ethnics, the sick, the senile and the handicapped.

“Black men will not be muddied as ‘pimps,’ gays as ‘fruit salads,’ women as ‘skanks,’ Mexicans as ‘leaf-blowers,’ etc., [in] the name of humor.

“Off limits, too, are sexist cracks like asking Ron Insana if he ‘hosed’ Maria Bartiromo,” both of CNBC.

“Finally, I promise to invite critics on my show to counter the constant fawning of my regular political and media courtiers.”

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Two Mikes, Two Opinions on Sean Taylor Speculation

About 3,000 people gathered Monday at the Pharmed Arena on Florida International University’s main campus to remember Sean Taylor, star safety for the Washington Redskins, slain last week during an attempted burglary of his Miami area home, the Miami Herald reported.

And journalists were doing some soul searching over how fair they had been to the slain Taylor in reporting on troubled, but, it turns out, likely irrelevant aspects of his past in connection with the murder. Two black journalists named Mike — Michael Wilbon, Washington Post columnist and ESPN co-host, and Mike McQueen, Associated Press bureau chief for Louisiana and Mississippi — represented opposite points of view.

“Some readers were horrified that two longtime and respected sportswriters and columnists, Leonard Shapiro and Michael Wilbon, quickly brought up problematic parts of Taylor’s life — Wilbon in an online chat Monday after Taylor was shot and Shapiro in an online column a few hours after Taylor died Tuesday morning,” Post ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote on Sunday.

On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, host Howard Kurtz asked Wilbon, “you write that you are angry about Sean Taylor’s murder, but not surprised. Why?”

“Not surprised because he had been involved, Howie, a couple of years ago in some gunplay,” Wilbon replied. “And I hate to use that word, but wound up pleading down from a felony charge to a misdemeanor charge of assault and battery, and had been involved in this particular incident.

“So when you hear this, with his involvement having not been that long ago, I don’t see how people could say they are so shocked. It is a not like he had avoided this kind of thing. Angry because another young, talented person has been lost to violence in urban America.”

Kurtz asked, “But why put those doubts into print based on no concrete evidence immediately after Taylor’s death?

Wilbon replied: “Why say I’m not surprised? Should I lie and say I was surprised about it, shocked? No, I understand that people are upset, Howie. I mean, I have gotten a ton of e-mail, and letters and phone calls. But that is not what reporters and columnists do. I mean, I’m not in the business, necessarily, of hand-holding.

“I mean, sometimes that is necessary, but I think that is a large part of the conversation in Washington, D.C., how surprised or not people were.”

 

McQueen, whose son, Michael McQueen II, was killed in Maryland last year after serving his third tour of duty in Afghanistan, took a different view in a posting Sunday to the National Association of Black Journalists e-mail list:

“The Sean Taylor murder case is far from over even though four people have been arrested in connection with the incident. There could be pretrial motions, legal give-and-take as well as a trial and a sentencing, if the young men are convicted. While the criminal-justice part of the Sean Taylor tragedy plays out, I hope and pray that this young man’s killing makes us rethink how we in the mass media handle tragedies. To cut to the chase, we blew it. We means all of us, not just the sportswriters and news reporters whose reporting was speculative.

“We all share the blame because we’ve allowed a culture of good-enough truths to dominate our news reports and newscasts. The scene in the hit movie ‘Lions for Lambs’ in which Meryl Streep portrays a reporter who knows she is being hoodwinked by a U.S senator but runs with the story anyway isn’t that far from the truth in some of our newsrooms.

“Shame on the sports deskers and news deskers who certainly must have known that the early Taylor stories were unfair and speculative. There was a time when a copy editor would go to the wall with his or her bosses over stories. Is that still the case? Honestly? The larger question is the following: When someone dies, either violently or of natural causes, when are their prior bad acts relevant, in what context are they relevant, is it possible that they are not relevant? A related question: We know that the families of the victims of crimes will be deeply disappointed in us when we bring up prior bad acts, what exactly are our reasons for doing so? Do we think they are relevant because we don’t at that point know if they are irrelevant? If we don’t know, why are we committing it to writing or to broadcast?

“Remember, we’ll never be able to take it back. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. Is the Society of Professional Journalists guideline relevant here — first, do no harm. I was privileged to serve on the committee that crafted NABJ’s first code of ethics, approved by the board on April 24, 2005. Our code addresses the Taylor situation:

“‘NABJ members should treat all subjects of news coverage with respect and dignity, particularly victims of crime and tragedy and their families.’

“Did we, as news organizations, stop and ask ourselves: Are we applying a different standard in this young man’s case because he is a minority and many people are predisposed to think that minorities, particularly African-American men, are generally the victims of homicides because of something they are doing or have done in the past? Before someone accuses me of playing the race card, ask the question in the converse: Are we not attuned to, or willing to ignore, the troubling aspects of a white news subject’s background because it is not relevant? For example, I was surprised to read one sports commentator’s observation: He essentially asked, why is Sean Taylor’s background relevant when we in the sports journalism community do not write much about Brent Favre’s background of being addicted to painkillers?

“For the record, I have no problem whatsoever publishing or broadcasting controversial — perhaps even painful information — about crime victims or other victims of tragedies. If it happened, it happened. Our job is to, on deadline, present our mass audience with the best available version of the truth.

“But this should be done, in high-profile cases, only after top editors and top producers have mulled the consequences of their potential action, have challenged their own prejudgments — if there are any — and have challenged their news gatherers. In some cases, once the decision is made to go with controversial, disturbing information, a note from the top news executive should accompany the information. That note essentially says: We are a responsible news organization; we act only after careful consideration; we have considered this case and think that we will best [meet] our mission of public service by disseminating, rather than [censoring,] certain troubling information.

“Did that happen in this case? If not, why not?”

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Chris Rock Quip Enters Political Coverage

“I wasn’t there, but I’m guessing that Sen. Barack Obama winced uncomfortably over at least one of comedian Chris Rock’s jokes at a fundraiser for Obama in Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater last week,” Clarence Page wrote on Sunday in the Chicago Tribune.

“Rock quipped that his mostly black audience would be ‘real embarrassed’ if Obama won after they had supported New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“‘You’d say, ‘I had that white lady! What was I thinking,’ he said, according to The Associated Press.” The quip was widely picked up.

Explained Page: “That line might well have passed without much notice, had it come amid the usual raunchy fare on late-night cable TV. But race is a particularly sensitive topic in the world of politics. Expect Obama, as we journalists like to say, to ‘distance himself’ from the remarks.”

Meanwhile, at the Brown and Black Forum in Iowa on Saturday, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who is Hispanic, called himself “the only brown member in this debate. Is there any chance we could have civil rights equity and have the brown guy get a little more time?” he asked.

David Wright of ABC News, reporting on that debate for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” closed his report with: “Now, it may be fair to say that the person who is trying to reach out the most to the minority community is the rich white guy from the South. John Edwards has made racial justice and poverty a centerpiece of his campaign.”

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Media Language Hampers Efforts to Bridge Divide

The racial divide persists, “and we’re all probably helping it in some way,” George E. Curry wrote Thursday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in a column about the recent poll on black progress conducted by the Pew Research Center

“The news media surely are. Efforts to bridge the racial divide are often hampered by the media’s frequent use of inflammatory terms when discussing such hot-button issues as affirmative action. Like other polls, the Pew survey found that most Americans favor affirmative-action programs ‘designed to help blacks get better jobs and education.’ Many media outlets, however, have alternated between using the term affirmative action and the term preferences —a misleading term popular with affirmative-action opponents.

“Here’s what the poll found when that substitution is made: ‘Overall, 9 in 10 blacks (89 percent) and about three-quarters of all Hispanics (77 percent) support giving African Americans assistance to further their education or careers. Slightly more than half of all whites (52 percents) also support such minority-assistance programs, while 37 percent oppose.

“‘But if the word preferences is included in the question, support for affirmative action drops by double-digit margins among whites (-13 percentage points). Instead of a majority of whites supporting affirmative action, a 47 percent plurality opposes it, while 39 percent express support’.”

“We have a long way to go in race relations, including learning how to talk about our different perceptions.”

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Afro? Afro-American? African American? Black?

“The Nov. 23 obituary, ‘F. Murphy, publisher of historic paper, dies,’ got it right,” C.B. Hanif, editorial writer and ombudsman at the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, wrote in his Sunday column.

 

 

“The wire service story reported that Frances L. Murphy II was ‘publisher emeritus of the longest-running African-American family-owned newspaper in the United States.’ Ms. Murphy ‘followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, John H. Murphy Sr., a former slave and Civil War veteran who founded the Afro-American (newspaper) in Baltimore in 1892.’

“The story also reported that the paper has a sister edition in Washington, and that Ms. Murphy, like her grandfather and father, ‘presided over the company at a time when black media were indispensable to African-American communities in the United States. The Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers were not only prime news sources but society bulletin boards for communities ignored by white media.’

“Although it was the first newspaper for which I worked (barely old enough to deliver it), this isn’t a column about The Afro, as it still is affectionately known by some. I cite Ms. Murphy’s obituary to point out its precise and almost seamless use of the terms African-American, Afro-American and black.

“In contrast is the rare reader, such as John Bowen of Hobe Sound, who reports having ‘trouble with the term African-American.’ He asks: ‘When and who coined the phrase? What does the phrase mean?’ In my view, the coinage clearly derives from the heritage of the people it describes. His latter question was addressed here in a 1990 column, ‘”African-American’ preferred.”‘ The points haven’t changed.

“To review some of them, ‘More and more, African-American has become the preferred term used by American blacks to identify themselves.’ The column reported that, reflecting the increasingly common use of the term interchangeably with black, The Post’s Opinion section also had begun using it, usually on first reference, in cases where blacks’ race has been an issue. ‘The point is that African-American is nothing new,’ I wrote. ‘It’s just that the larger American community — and that includes news organizations— is only now catching up.'”

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Evan Jenkins Dies at 72, Helped Diversify N.Y. Times

“Evan Jenkins, a retired editor at The New York Times who was an authority on the linguistic bugbears — ‘gantlet’ versus ‘gauntlet,’ ‘flaunt’ versus ‘flout’ — that keep reporters, editors and many others awake at night, died yesterday at his home in Huntington, N.Y. He was 72,” Margalit Fox reported Saturday in the Times.

Among Jenkins’ other achievements, in the mid-1980s, as an assistant news editor, he created and ran a training program at the paper for minority copy editors, the obituary said.

“The minority copy editor program of the 1980’s was a traditional affirmative-action program that charted new ground in the newsroom — we always had hired copy editors from large publications until then — and brought in some wonderful editors who still are with The Times today,” Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told Journal-isms. “It also increased the diversity of the copy desks. The program was succeeded by our copy editing internship program and, now a generation later, a new copy editor training program that builds on Ev’s legacy.”

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Short Takes

  • “A southern African radio correspondent has been receiving a flood of text messages and cell phone calls— some from offended listeners and readers,” Joseph J. Schatz reported Friday for the Associated Press. “All because Kennedy Gondwe chose to get circumcised to protect himself from AIDS, and took the British Broadcasting Corp.’s radio and Web audience through the procedure with him Friday. A prominent Zambian journalist, Mildred Mpundu, died in November after going public with her HIV-positive status earlier this year and urging her fellow journalists to get tested.”
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Manny Medrano
  • “For the past three years, Manny Medrano has been the ABC network news correspondent covering the U.S. Supreme Court. But he said good-bye to the nation’s capital last month, to return to Los Angeles. He is now a KTLA-5 news reporter,” Veronica Villafañe reported Friday on her Media Moves blog. Mendrano is a former trial lawyer and former vice president of broadcast for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
  • “Ron Stodghill, who has been a writer for the Sunday business section at the New York Times, is leaving the paper to become editorial director of six magazines published by the Charlotte Observer, according to a memo from Sunday business editor Tim O’Brien,” Chris Roush wrote on Monday on his Talking Biz News blog for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Stodghill, former editor-in-chief of the late Savoy magazine, came to the Times in 2006 from Fortune Small Business, where he was a senior editor.
  • “Employees celebrated by eating tres leches cake at KDTV, a Spanish-language news station in San Francisco,” Joe Garofoli wrote Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle. “For the first time, the station’s 6 p.m. newscast was the Bay Area’s highest rated — including those on English-language stations— among 25- to 54-year-olds during November, a key ratings period for advertising sales.”
  • The comic strip “Non Sequitur” showed a farmer next to a chicken coop, talking to a woman who was staring quizzically at a chicken wearing a KKK hood. “It only lays egg whites,” the farmer was saying. “Predictably, this attempt at humor left some readers cold, Ted Diadiun, reader representative at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote on Sunday. “We can stipulate that the comic wasn’t all that funny. . . . But most of the people who objected did so on the grounds that the strip was racist, and I don’t see that,” he wrote. Debra Adams Simmons, the managing editor, who is African American, agreed.
  • “Reporters Without Borders today voiced deep dismay after Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) ruled narrowly that there was ‘no serious violation of the individual rights’ of freelance journalist Lydia Cacho when she was arrested and held in December 2005 on the orders of governor of Pueblo state, Mario Marín,” the organization said on Friday.
  • Quote of the day, from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the Kennedy Center honors, reported by the Washington Post’s Roxanne Roberts: “I didn’t just love Diana Ross,” said Rice. “I wanted to be Diana Ross.”

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