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Supreme Court, Black Columnists Agree

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Writers Have Long Questioned Sentencing Disparities

The Supreme Court’s Monday decision that judges may impose lighter sentences for crack cocaine placed the conservative jurists in what could be rare agreement with the bulk of African American columnists, many of whom have long raised questions about a disparity that the Boston Globe’s Derrick Z. Jackson wrote “has come to symbolize racial injustice in criminal justice.”

“In the crack case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it was reasonable for a federal judge in Virginia to impose a lower sentence than one prescribed by the guidelines because of his disagreement with the rule that imposed the same sentence for a crack dealer as for someone selling 100 times as much powder cocaine,” Robert Barnes wrote on the Washington Post Web site. “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said the law did not allow the judge to make such a determination.

“But Ginsburg wrote that ‘the cocaine guidelines, like all other guidelines, are advisory only’ and that the ‘the court of appeals erred in holding the crack/powder disparity effectively mandatory.’

“The disparity has been challenged by civil rights groups because crack is most often used by African Americans, powder cocaine by whites, thus subjecting blacks to the tougher penalties. The court’s decision did not touch on that argument.”

When the Trotter Group of African American columnists met with President Bill Clinton on Nov. 1, 1995, the first question was, “Why did you reject the Federal Sentencing Commission recommendation, and also the opinion of our own attorney general, that sentencing . . . for possession of crack and powder cocaine ought to be equalized?”

Clinton replied that the legislation implementing that recommendation would also have lowered penalties for money laundering, which he opposed, and said that instead of reducing the penalties for crack, “I think they should raise the penalty for trafficking in cocaine.”

“Miffed somewhat by his answers, the columnists nonetheless went away with warm feelings about Clinton,” Newsday columnist Les Payne wrote then.

When Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, met with the Trotter Group in August at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Las Vegas, it was again the first question on the table. Did she think her husband was mistaken? “I agree . . . that it was a Hobson’s choice” he was faced with, she said, adding that she was on record that the disparities should be eliminated. However, she said, “As a matter of practical politics, you might not be able to get from where we are, from 100-to-1, to parity. But we should ought to be able to get to 10-to-1 or something that would move us in the right direction.”

The next day, Jackson posed the question to a second Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama. “Yes, it was a mistake,” Obama said of Bill Clinton’s signing a bill that kept in place the disparate sentences. However, he added, it still is a problem that “our young men are in a situation where they believe the only recourse for them is the drug trade. So there is a balancing act that has to be done in terms of, do we want to spend all our political capital on a very difficult issue that doesn’t get at some of the underlying issues; whether we want to spend more of that political capital getting early childhood education in place, getting after-school programs in place, getting summer school programs in place.”

[In a conference call with black journalists on Tuesday, Obama said he was pleased with the Supreme Court ruling, calling it “a step in the right direction.” However, he said he would have to see the language of the new sentencing guidelines and would be examining whether they could or should apply to those already serving time. Later in the day, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to retroactively reduce the penalties for using and selling crack cocaine, making more than 2,500 federal inmates eligible for early release starting in March.]

Writing Nov. 23 in the Record of Hackensack, N.J., Lawrence Aaron noted that “Federal reforms under consideration could potentially reduce sentences for thousands convicted of crack sales and possession. If applied retroactively, 19,500 prisoners would get their sentences cut. The proposals lower the longest sentences by about a year.

“An advocacy group promoting prison reform estimates that African-American prisoners are 85 percent of those who would benefit from lowering federal crack sentences retroactively.”

Dissenting on Monday were Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

To some commentators who pressed hard on the sentencing disparity issue, supporters of those justices have some explaining to do.

DeWayne Wickham of USA Today, a member of the Trotter Group, noted in a column to be published Tuesday that John Payton, named last week to the top job of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “the advocacy group that has spearheaded the civil rights movements’ legal challenges to racial bias and discrimination for more than half a century,” had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of the “well-qualified” rating the American Bar Association gave Alito.

However, the Legal Defense Fund had concluded that Alito “would cause a substantial shift in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on civil rights and that his confirmation would be to the detriment of the nation.”

Payton’s defenders said he was carrying out the wishes of the ABA. While Wickham said he would give Payton the benefit of the doubt, he added, “Civil rights litigation is not the work of those who seek a Faustian bargain.”

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NBC Drew 74,000 More Black Women During Series

The “African-American Women: Where They Stand” series that aired on “NBC Nightly News” from Nov. 26 to Nov. 30 delivered 74,000 more black viewers than usual, and 70,000 of them were women, an NBC spokeswoman told Journal-isms on Monday.

 

 

The five-part series was the subject of an extensive e-mailing and word-of-mouth campaign among African American women.

NBC reached 863,000 African American viewers, which was up 9 percent, or 74,000, from the season-to-date average of 789,000, spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said, quoting Nielsen figures.

Among African American women, NBC reached 535,000 viewers, up 15 percent, or 70,000, from the season-to-date average of 465,000.

Among African American women aged 25 to 54, the network reached 191,000 viewers, up 12 percent, or 21,000, from the season-to-date average of 170,000.

NBC won the November “sweeps,” which ended on Wednesday of that week, but came in second to ABC’s “World News” for the week of the series.

Writing about the series for AdAge.com on the Wednesday of that week, Carol Watson said, “The journalists covering the stories are incredibly talented black women that I am sure had to fight hard to get even these 2-minute segments running for five consecutive days. But the debate on the value and context of the information still creates a storm among black consumers. Blacks continue to demand a positive and solutions-oriented point of view from media.

“For many black women, the complaint about the news series is the constant burden of the negatives with little or no solution or context for the reasons for the disparities. The Monday segment compared black women to white women and . . . black women to black men — a pattern in news media that makes the black consumer cautious and hesitant about the motivations of the media. As Essence Editor Angela Burt-Murray said in an online comment, that segment may make a black woman want to shoot herself in the head.

“Thankfully, the online interviews provide far more context and information than the two-minute segments.”

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GOP Hopefuls Soften Stances in Univision Debate

 

 

“Facing a Spanish-speaking national audience for the first time, the Republican presidential candidates soft-pedaled their hard-line stances on immigration and sidestepped questions about the estimated 12 million undocumented workers already living in the United States,” Beth Reinhard and Laura Figueroa reported Monday in the Miami Herald.

“. . . Sunday’s debate, and a similar forum with the Democratic candidates in September, made history as the first presidential debates on Spanish-language television. The questions were asked in Spanish by Univisión anchors Maria Elena Salinas and Jorge Ramos — household names in the Hispanic community — and simultaneously translated into English for the candidates.

“Coming just 25 days before the first votes are cast in Iowa on Jan. 3, the debate was expected to draw a larger average audience than the 2.2 million who watched the Democratic debate.”

Jim Kuhnhenn of the Associated Press added: “Initially scheduled for September, the debate had to be rescheduled because only Sen. John McCain had agreed to appear on the earlier date. This time, the only candidate who refused to attend was Tom Tancredo, a long-shot candidate who has made a tough immigration stance the centerpiece of his campaign.

“Atonement may have been a factor in their participation. In September, Giuliani, Thompson, McCain and Romney were roundly criticized for failing to attend a debate devoted to minority issues at historically black Morgan State University in Baltimore.” The references were to former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Sen. Fred Thompson and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

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Columnist Has No Patience for Mormon “Bigotry”

 

“Whenever a proselytizing Mormon knocks on my Harlem door, I chase him away as brusquely as I would chase away a Klansman, or an evangelical Christian Republican, and for much the same reason,” Les Payne wrote on Sunday in Newsday.

“I have zero tolerance for racial intolerance.

“Mormon Mitt Romney took pains to assure evangelical Republicans Thursday that they would have nothing to fear should he be elected president.

“. . . I rather suspect, however, that white evangelicals have little to fear from Romney. It is not so clear for the rest of us, especially those the Mormons libel as bearing ‘the curse of Cain,’ who killed his Biblical brother Abel. I refer, of course, to Brigham Young’s interpreted Mormon doctrine that ‘the Lord’ cursed Cain’s descendants with ‘a flat nose and dark skin.’ Many old-line church apostles still consider blacks as inferiors.

“Such segregation differs from other religions mainly in that the Mormon nonsense is homegrown, allegedly ‘revealed’ in upstate New York and transported to Utah. Not until 1978 did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints allow black men to enter the priesthood. This revised ‘revelation’ from the heavens came amid growing protests from African-Americans as college sports teams refused to compete against Brigham Young and other church colleges.

“What exactly is the shelf life of God-inspired bigotry? Mitt Romney grew into adulthood under a Mormon doctrine instructing members that Negroes could not enter heaven or the priesthood because they were cursed by God, and inferior. Laying aside the Mormon hocus-pocus, Romney is no different in such racial conditioning than his comparable, evangelical white Christian, to say nothing of the secular crowd.”

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Oprah Stumps for Obama; Media Weigh Effect

“Oprah Winfrey may be just what Barack Obama needs to push him over the top in South Carolina,” Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell wrote Sunday from Columbia, S.C.

“People along the black beauty and barbershop belt appear to trust the Queen of Talk a lot more than they trust the politicians. Obama’s aggressive campaign targeting this treasure trove of black voters apparently has helped get him within two percentage points of Hillary Clinton, according to a recent poll released by the Obama campaign.

“The latest Rasmussen Poll shows that Obama was the top choice of 34 percent of the state’s likely voters —two points shy of Hillary Clinton’s 36 percent. A month ago, Clinton had a 10-percentage-point lead. Obviously, Oprah’s influence isn’t being underestimated. Former President Bill Clinton added Charleston, S.C., to his schedule and promoted his wife’s health care plan there Saturday.”

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World Opinion Split on Importance of Press Freedom

“World opinion is divided on the importance of press freedom, according to a BBC World Service poll of 11,344 people across 14 countries,” the BBC announced on Monday.

“While an average of 56% across all countries think that freedom of the press is very important to ensure a free society, 40% believe that social harmony and peace are more important, even if it means controlling what is reported for the greater good.

“56% of people in the 14 countries polled think the press and media in their country is free to report the news accurately without bias. Only 19% say there is little or no media freedom in their country.

“Of the countries where press freedom is most highly valued, Western developed countries are more critical of how honestly and accurately the news is reported, including Germany (28% average rating for good performance of public and private media), Great Britain (29%), and the USA (29%) whereas Venezuela (44%), South Africa (49%), Nigeria (58%), and Kenya (61%) rate the media performance more positively.

“In countries where social stability is more highly valued, those surveyed in India (61% good performance) and the UAE (52%) believe the news is being reported honestly, contrasting with a more negative view of press performance in Russia (27%), Mexico (28%), Brazil (31%) and Singapore (37%).” The reference is to the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, “Sketching Human Rights,” a collection of thought-provoking cartoons from leading international cartoonists illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, opened Monday, Human Rights Day, at the United Nations. The exhibition is to travel to locations around the world throughout 2008, as Editor & Publisher noted.

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Latina Magazine Shoots for High-End Advertisers

With the March issue, Latina magazine will shed its service-heavy tone for a more aspirational one, Lucia Moses reported on Monday for MediaWeek.

“Fashion and beauty will move up in the book and double in pages, while entertainment and food content will shrink. The style pages, now featuring moderately priced items, will start to showcase luxury pieces.”

To carry out the makeover, Mimi Valdés Ryan, who became editorial director at Latina and its brand extensions in November, “tapped fellow former Vibe staffers Florian Bachleda and George Pitts as creative director and photography director, respectively. They worked together at the hip-hop title, where Valdés Ryan was editor until July 2006,” Moses said.

The magazine hopes the editorial shift will help Latina grow its share of spending by cosmetics companies and give it entrée to high-end fashion advertisers, Moses wrote.

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Short Takes

 

 

 

 
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