Site icon journal-isms.com

Columnists Jab at Steroid Report

richard

Some Call It a Milestone, Others See Holes

Sports columnists of color greeted former senator George Mitchell’s long-awaited report on steroid use in Major League Baseball with both praise and disappointment, with some raising the issue of race in recalling the censure heaped on Barry Bonds, the steroid-using holder of the sport’s home-run record.

“Somewhere, Barry Bonds is smiling,” Phil Taylor wrote for Sports Illustrated. “The names in the Mitchell report confirm what Bonds’ defenders have been saying all along, that if he did use performance-enhancing drugs, he had plenty of company, and that it’s unfair to single out his accomplishments as tainted when so many of his fellow ballplayers also were users.

“Today, feeling the weight of those 80-plus names, it’s hard to argue that point. It won’t help him with his perjury charges for allegedly lying before a grand jury, but wherever he is today, Bonds must be feeling a bit of vindication, if not satisfaction.”

As Duff Wilson and Michael S. Schmidt reported on the front page of Friday’s New York Times, Mitchell “released a blistering report Thursday that tied 89 Major League Baseball players, including Roger Clemens, to the use of illegal, performance-enhancing drugs. The report used informant testimony and supporting documents to provide a richly detailed portrait of what Mr. Mitchell described as ‘baseball’s steroids era.’

“Mr. Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, was the most prominent name on a list that included seven other former most valuable players as well as players from all 30 teams. The list included more than a dozen players who have had significant roles with the Yankees, and more than a dozen Mets, too. It also included 11 players alone from the 2000 Los Angeles Dodgers.

“. . . Mr. Mitchell’s report of about 400 pages was based on interviews with more than 700 people, including 60 former players, and 115,000 pages of documents, including receipts, canceled checks, telephone records and e-mail messages.”

While the report pointed at the players, their enablers and baseball executives who failed to take action, others did not overlook the role of the news media.

In the Oakland Tribune, Monte Poole noted that “the issue of steroids in baseball was raised in 1988, when Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell linked use of the drugs to A’s outfielder Jose Canseco.”

But in his 2005 book “Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball,” Howard Bryant, then of the Boston Herald, described how the baseball press largely missed the steroids story during most of the 1990s. “We flunked,” Jon Heyman of Newsday was quoted as saying. “We blew it. I don’t remember writing any steroids stories in 1998. I just remember writing about a lot of home runs. It was a great story and we went with it. It would have taken a lot of guts to be the one to go in the other direction during that time, so I guess none of us had the guts.”

On Friday, Editor & Publisher reprinted an October 2006 story by Joe Strupp that “found that, in fact, baseball writers mainly ignored the warning signs. Some of them even admitted that to him.”

Bryant, now at ESPN.com, wrote that his colleagues anticipated the report by interviewing some of the same people as Mitchell’s staff. On Tuesday, Bryant wrote pessimistically, “As ESPN.com spoke with baseball people interviewed during the investigation, a common theme emerged: Investigators, while generally cordial, often revealed an alarming lack of knowledge regarding the day-to-day workings of baseball.”

By Friday, however, Bryant conceded the importance of the finished document and called for action on the record books. “By choosing not to address the record book in his report, Mitchell chose not to walk down the most important hallway of the steroids era, the corridor that— more than player suspensions or cancelled checks to drug dealers or the sensation of the latest hot name — will reveal the true cost of this era,” Bryant wrote.

Should Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner, “try to do something about Roger Clemens’ seven Cy Young Awards? If history matters, the answer is yes,” Bryant continued.

“At issue is whether the price of the steroids era will be a Hall of Fame that doesn’t include Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire, and whether players such as Frank Thomas (who voluntarily cooperated with the Mitchell investigators) or even Alex Rodriguez and others believed to be clean will have an asterisk attached to their accomplishments, too. For in this basket of dirty laundry, it is impossible to separate the clean shirts from the dirty socks.”

Rob Parker, in the Detroit News, was not so ready to concede the validity of Mitchell’s volume, which runs 311 pages, plus attachments, and cost, according to two baseball officials, more than $20 million, as the Washington Post said.

“The problem with the report . . . is that most of the evidence against the players named is circumstantial — at best,” Parker wrote.

“Worse, none of the evidence included positive drug tests— the best way to determine whether a player has, indeed, used banned drugs. Plus, the report was completed without talking to most of the players mentioned. Mitchell asked the players to answer claims they used performance-enhancing drugs — and they refused.”

The record books should not be tampered with, Rickey Hampton wrote in the Flint (Mich.) Journal, without this consideration: “If baseball is determined to asterisk present-day records, then it must go back to address the segregation era, too — if they are serious about the integrity of the sport,” Hampton wrote.

“Because if you say numbers were inflated in the steroid era, then you must say numbers were inflated in the segregated era, too, because of a racist policy implemented by MLB that locked out people of color.”

Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com disagreed with the naysayers, writing, “It’s rare I toss the word hero around. I normally reserve its use for soldiers, cops and my mom.

“But that’s what Mitchell is. He has taken baseball into a brave, new world, a world of accountability.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

New York Papers “Inject” Humor Into Coverage

“The black eyes for local heroes Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Paul [LoDuca], among others, did not stop New York dailies from seeing some of the black humor in the release of the Mitchell Report on drugs in baseball yesterday,” Editor & Publisher reported.

“The New York Post, of course, ‘injected’ the funniest line, opening one article, ‘George Mitchell caught Roger Clemens with his pants down— literally.’ Its front page shows five needles, carrying the names of abusers, shooting up a baseball, under the headline DISGRACE.”

“The back cover pictures Andy Pettitte and Clemens under the title, SHOT TO HELL.

“The more sedate New York Times, meanwhile, rises to the occasion on the front page of its sports section with tiny photos of dozens of IDed druggies — in the shape of a huge needle.

“The heading for Daily News’ columnist Bill Madden’s piece reads: ‘Clemens’ bid for Cooperstown likely will end with strikeout.'”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

They Loved Ike Turner in Mississippi, St. Louis

 

Rock pioneer Ike Turner might have been known worldwide, but nobody loved him like they did in Mississippi, where he was born, or in St. Louis, where he had lived, judging by coverage in the newspapers there.

“He was huge around here,” Christine Bertelson, assistant managing editor for arts and entertainment at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told Journal-isms. He moved to neighboring East St. Louis, Ill., in 1953, and that’s where he met Annie Mae Bullock, whose name became Tina Turner. Ike Turner is on the Walk of Fame of Blueberry Hill, a well-known local bar with a famous jukebox, she said.

On the day Turner died, the Post-Dispatch had run a story on Turner’s reaction to Mayor Francis Slay’s refusal to honor him with a City Hall proclamation.

“He’s just a household word here. It was stop the presses” when Turner, 76, died Wednesday at his home outside San Diego, Bertelson said. The Post-Dispatch ran the story, by Greg Jonsson, night general assignment reporter, and pop music writer Kevin C. Johnson in its lead position, most likely the only big-city newspaper to do so.

In Mississippi, the Clarion-Ledger, which publishes in the state capital of Jackson, quoted Mississippians assessing their native son.

“He had so much of the soul of Mississippi (inside him) . . . you could always feel that and taste that and smell that in his music,” Vasti Jackson, “a world-renowned jazz and blues musician and producer from Hattiesburg,” was quoted in the front-page story.

“The passing of Ike Turner reminds us once again that Mississippi is a wellspring of popular music,” added Jackson musician Raphael Semmes.

In Turner’s birthplace of Clarksdale, Miss., Editor Bubba Burnham wrote a folksy column noting that he first heard of Ike & Tina Turner when they released “A Fool in Love” in 1960. “That song had a raw and raunchy sound that lifted up my ears the very first time I heard it,” Burnham wrote. But he added that the Top 40 stations reaching Clarksdale from Chicago, Memphis and Little Rock didn’t play them.

“The only two stations that I could ever find an Ike & Tina tune was on WDIA, a black radio station that still airs in Memphis and on WROX during the ‘Early Wright Show’ which was pretty much on the air every night, unless pre-empted by an Ole Miss, Mississippi State or St. Louis Cardinal sporting event.”

The Web site FishBowl LA asked, “Who had the most tasteless headline for their Ike Turner obit?”

“The LAT doesn’t let the dead get off easy, with it’s headline: Rock Pioneer was known for abusing wife, Tina Turner. But still, that’s pretty straightforward and tame.

“The NYT, apparently, didn’t want to speak ill of the dead: Ike Turner, Musician and Songwriter in Duo With Tina Turner, Dies at 76

“The Melbourne Herald-Sun has a good one: Rock’s villain Ike Turner departs in shadow of infamy.

“But the winner has to be the New York Post with: Ike ‘Beats’ Tina to Death.

“Congratulations, Post. Your award will be presented to you at a special ceremony. In hell.”

[The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., similarly distinguished itself with, “Ike Turner’s legacy: Rockin’ R&B and beating Tina.”]

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

St. Clair Bourne, Premier Documentarian, Dies at 64

[Added Dec. 15]

 

 

St. Clair Bourne, among the most prominent African American documentary filmmakers and a chronicler of the form in a longstanding newsletter, “Chamba Notes,” died Saturday in a New York hospital after an operation to remove a brain tumor. He was 64.

“He was a real race man,” his writing collaborator, Lou Potter, told Journal-isms. “The director and producer of more than forty films, Bourne has often created closely empathetic works that focus on individuals, usually—like himself—black and male — Paul Robeson, John Henrik Clarke, Langston Hughes, Imamu Amiri Baraka (nee LeRoi Jones), and Gordon Parks, the subject of the recent Bourne-produced ‘Half Past Autumn,'” Clifford Thompson wrote in a 2001 essay in the publication Cineaste.

For the past year, he had been working on a documentary about veteran Memphis-based civil rights photographer Ernest Withers, who died in October at age 84, and continued a project on the Black Panthers. Bourne was best known for the documentaries on Renaissance man Robeson and Afrocentric historian Clarke, and for “Making ‘Do the Right Thing’,” a 1989 work about Spike Lee’s now-classic film about race relations in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section.

But he also went to Ireland with a small group of black ministers and activists and produced and directed “The Black and the Green,” released in 1983.

“The 40-minute film, presented as a journal, explores parallels between Northern Irish Catholics and American blacks. In the Belfast ghetto, the delegation members are strangers in a familiar land of crushed tenements, graffiti-stained walls and heavily armed law officers,” Richard Harrington wrote in the Washington Post.

“‘The Black and The Green’ ends up seeming pro-Irish Republican Army in the same sense that a film about Selma in the ’60s might have ended up seeming pro-black, but then, ‘I’m a filmmaker from the ’60s,’ Bourne says. ‘I try to be humanistically political. I don’t try to impose easy answers. And to me it’s a step in my own development, and perhaps for documentaries in America, if a situation that is not clearly identifiable as ‘black-American’ can be looked at by black Americans.”

Bourne’s father, St. Clair Bourne Sr., worked for the New York Amsterdam News and the old People’s Voice, another black New York paper, in the 1930s and 1940s. “My father was a journalist who worked with the black press. So that was the first major influence on me,” he told an interviewer from Black Camera for a 2006 interview.

“I grew up during the Civil Rights Movement and would look at the reality of what was going on and observe that what was being represented on television was incorrect. While most of the network documentary units weren’t, say, sympathetic, they at least were interested in telling the story. The problem though was that they were telling it from a different culture. They didn’t understand the people and just got it wrong. I felt that as someone who was interested in journalism and whose father was a journalist that I could tell the story better than the networks could. So I had to learn the tools of documentary filmmaking. I went to film school and tried to combine activism with TV journalism. My decision to become a filmmaker then was the result of these factors.”

The New Yorker began his career with the old public television “Black Journal” series in the late 1960s, which evolved, after the involvement of Tony Brown, now dean of the Hampton University communications school, into “Tony Brown’s Journal,” which still airs. It was during the “Black Journal” period that he began “Chamba Notes.”

“When I first worked for ‘Black Journal,’ it was what I call ‘innovative TV journalism,'” Bourne said in the Black Camera interview. “It was innovative because editorially we took the position of the black subjects in the documentaries we made. We tried to capture what they thought and what they did, and very rarely was that done by other filmmakers.

“Most of mainstream and public television journalism in the late 1960s, and even during the ’70s, was from the point of view of an outsider looking at a subculture — white people looking at black people. What we said was that we identify with and are a part of the subjects we are filming. We have more skills than they do, but we are subject to many of the same pressures and circumstances as they are. We spoke out on behalf of them and us at the same time. I call this critical stance the ‘internal voice’ of our practice of documentary filmmaking. Thus, one of the characteristics of my films is to express the internal voice of my subject, whether it is black or otherwise.”

Thompson wrote about an exchange between actors Danny Aiello and John Turturro a third of the way into “Making Do the Right Thing.” “The transition is so seamless that it may take a moment to realize that we are watching a scene not only from ‘Making Do the Right Thing’ but also from ‘Do the Right Thing’ itself, and that Bourne has so skillfully blended his viewpoint with Lee’s that, if only for an instant, it is unclear which is which, or if there is any meaningful difference.”

Bourne is survived by a sister, Judith Bourne, a lawyer in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Spanish-Language Papers Find Clinton the Favorite

 

 

“A new poll of Hispanic voters conducted for ImpreMedia’s chain of Spanish-language newspapers finds that Hillary Clinton would trounce Rudy Giuliani, her closest Republican opponent, if the presidential election were held now,” Editor & Publisher reported on Thursday.

“By an even greater margin, Clinton is favored over Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, according to the poll conducted by Avanze in the five states with the highest numbers of Hispanics: California, Illinois, New York, Florida and Texas. Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor who was born in California but raised in Mexico City, scores barely a blip . . .

“The poll was published in ImpreMedia newspapers including the dailies La Opinion in Los Angeles and El Diario La Prensa in New York City. The poll’s results echo the findings of a survey released last week by the Pew Hispanic Center, which reported that Hispanics increasingly are shifting their political party affiliation from the GOP in favor of the Democrats.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Kaufman and Valerie Bauerlein reported in the Wall Street Journal, “Barack Obama’s rising poll numbers among white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are having an unexpected ripple effect: Some black voters are switching their allegiance from Hillary Clinton and lining up behind him too. That could mean a further tightening of the Democratic presidential race, especially in southern states where blacks make up as many as half of Democratic primary voters.”

The Pew Center for People and the Press, meanwhile, reported Thursday that, “Oprah Winfrey’s well-publicized appearances with Barack Obama have raised Obama’s visibility, especially among African Americans. Roughly a quarter of Americans (26%) say they have heard more about Obama recently than any other presidential candidate, up from just 10% in November. Meanwhile, though Hillary Clinton remains the most visible candidate overall, the proportion citing her as the candidate they have heard the most about fell from a high of 61% in November to 41% in the current poll.

“Far more African Americans cite Obama (51%) than Clinton (27%) as the candidate they have heard the most about recently.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Comments on Obama Story Skip Editing Process

 

Perry Bacon Jr.

A journalism professor started a back-and-forth on the Romenesko Web site at the Poynter Institute when he asked, “Since when does the Post assign 27-year-olds to write Page 1 presidential campaign pieces?”

The reference by Chris Daly of Boston University was to a much-criticized front-page piece by the Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. on discredited rumors that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has ties to Muslims. As reported on Nov. 30, Paul McLeary, writing online for the Columbia Journalism Review, said it “may be the single worst campaign ’08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle.”

Among those participating in the back-and-forth were Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine; Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post, Jack Shafer of Slate magazine and David Von Drehle of Time.

 

Bill Hamilton

Nearly all focused on Daly’s comments about Bacon’s age, overlooking Daly’s second question, “Who edited this story?” Since reporters don’t put stories in the paper by themselves, it’s worth recalling that several journalists participate in the newspaper editing process and that Assistant Managing Editor Bill Hamilton, interviewed by Michael Calderone for Politico.com, said, “It obviously makes me think about how I edited it. . . Obviously we did something that we should have been careful about.”

Daly replied on Dec. 11 to the “deluge of comments” by saying, “I did not mean to suggest that there is some minimum age requirement for writing about national politics.”

The professor of journalism also said, “Like many blogs, mine is a venue for criticism, analysis and commentary. It is not an outlet for reporting or research.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Black Broadcasters Seek Return of Tax Incentive

The National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters asked Congress on Dec. 5 to take steps to increase minority ownership of broadcast outlets as the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing on media ownership.

“I am here today to make three requests of the Committee,” James L. Winston, executive director of the group, said.

“Please support reinstatement of the minority tax certificate policy to promote minority ownership of broadcast facilities.

“Please prevent the FCC from further relaxing any of its broadcast ownership rules until it has adopted meaningful policies to promote minority ownership of broadcast facilities.

“Please investigate Arbitron’s new Portable People Meter Audience Measurement system, because it appears that within its design is a critical flaw in the gathering and processing of the audience data which has resulted in a clear bias against the reporting of minority audiences.”

The next day, “The Federal Communications Commission officially asked Congress to pass a law that would give tax incentives to media companies that sell communications outlets to small businesses, including women and minorities,” John Eggerton reported in Broadcasting & Cable.

From 1978 to 1995, the minority tax certificate policy provided companies selling broadcast stations a deferral of the capital gains tax on the sale, if the sale was made to a company owned and controlled by minorities, Winston explained. “From 1978 to 1995, the tax certificate policy was the single most significant factor in the growth of minority ownership of broadcast stations,” he said.

“Republicans targeted the program for elimination when reports surfaced after the November election that Viacom was planning to avoid as much as $640 million in taxes by unloading its cable systems to a partnership headed by black entrepreneur Frank Washington,” Variety reported at the time.

NABOB represents the interests of the 245 radio and 13 television stations owned by African Americans, Winston said.

“Late Friday, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) weighed in on the media-ownership debate, telling Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin in a letter that if he did not delay an FCC vote on the broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership rules, they would ask that the Appropriations Committee deny any funding to implement that decision,” Eggerton reported.

“It is the latest in a series of gambits to try to block the vote, including a Senate bill that would not allow it to go through.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Short Takes

 

Tracey Wong Briggs

 

Reischea Canidate

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

St. Clair Bourne Leaves Progressive Paths to Follow

Knowledge of the passing of St. Clair Bourne, my Omega Psi Phi fraternity brother, friend and respected colleague, came as a shock during a telephone conversation today with a another close friend while discussing the virtues of New York City and Black politics.

“Sinky,” as he was known by many of his closest friends and contacts reaching back to college (during his professional days he insisted that nickname be dropped and buried!) was extraordinary from the day he arrived on Georgetown University’s campus as freshman.

St. Clair, two years my junior, was always distinctive on campus with his clean-cut New York look, rarely seen without his three-piece suit and wing-tip shoes. He was often teased by his soon-to-be fraternity brothers as “preppy and classy.” Tall, handsome, very smart, the scion of a respected West Indian family and son of a noted Black journalist, early on he was targeted by the leaders of the Kappa Psi chapter for membership.

As a founding member and first president of the new Omega chapter at neighboring D.C. Teachers College (now part of the University of the District of Columbia), I got to know St. Clair well during his pledge period and later as a fraternity brother.

Our paths continued to cross as I pursued my career as an executive with the National Association of Broadcasters and he evolved as a producer in public broadcasting and later as a renowned independent documentary producer/director and filmmaker. Ironically, while both of us passionately worked toward achieving greater parity for African Americans in media, there were occasions when St. Clair would call me to offer critical appraisals of my efforts and to suggest (sometimes) more radical measures for desired results. He was a vital link to the needs and realities of the worlds of African diaspora independent filmmakers and the mission of their works.

By his example, wisdom and works, St. Clair Bourne leaves the community of responsible, talented independent filmmakers progressive paths to follow.

Thank you my dear brother for leaving the world far better than you found it more than 25 years ago. You will be missed!

Dwight M. Ellis
Dec. 16, 2007

A Loss of a Man, a Communicator, an Art

Two years out of college and a couple months before Reagan invaded Grenada, I was privileged to join the National Alliance of Third World Journalists for a fact-finding mission to Grenada. I was assigned a roomie, St. Clair Bourne.

I was clueless to his greatness then, yet he tucked me under his wing and allowed me to stay in touch over the years and visit him in New York.

When I joined a fledgling film group in Dallas, Black Cinematheque, he was gracious enough to accept an invitation once or twice as a special guest to our festivals and screen his works. He even tried once, unsolicited, to turn something I’d written into a documentary. And there were scores of kids he mentored from the beginning and along the way.

What a loss, of a man, a communicator and an art.

Kevin B. Blackistone
Sports Opinionist
ESPN, AOL Sports, XM Satellite Radio
Dec. 16, 2007

Exit mobile version