Commentator Calls Newspaper Malicious, Vindictive
Smith had been publicly silent about the Inquirer since he was stripped of his column in August and reassigned to the reporters ranks, an assignment he never accepted. But on Friday, he said through his high-powered attorney, Florida trial lawyer Willie E. Gary:
“I put my life and all that I have into the Philadelphia Inquirer first as a reporter and then as a general columnist. I was raised to work hard and play by the rules. That is what I have done. I’ve worked hard and earned every single promotion and accolade that I received while at the Inquirer.
“No one did me any favors or gave me anything, nor did I expect them to. What’s fair is fair and what’s right is right. What they have done to me is malicious, intentional and vindictive. They want to ruin my reputation and all of the hard work that I have done over the years.
“I have never abandoned a job in my whole life. I wasn’t raised that way. The Inquirer forced me out and smeared my name and credibility.
“My family always said that your name is all that you have, and they have tried to destroy it.”
Inquirer Editor William K. Marimow, read Smith’s statement over the telephone, paused, then told Journal-isms, “I haven’t made any comments, and I’m not going to now.”
Gary has been described in news accounts as “legendary” and a “multimillionaire litigator” whose firm has had 7,000 clients and 200 employees.
As reported in October, Smith’s name disappeared from the paper’s online staff list months ago and he retained Gary to challenge the Inquirer’s decision to reassign him. He has moved on to concentrate on his broadcasting career — he hosts an ESPN Radio show, is an ESPN NBA analyst — and, most recently, created a blog, stephenablog.typepad.com.
Bill Ross, a local representative of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia Local 10, told Journal-isms this week that the guild amended its grievance over Smith’s reassignment to include the firing.
Smith, 40, a New York native, attended Winston-Salem State University and interned at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution after graduation. He began his career covering high school sports for the New York Daily News, a beneficiary of the famous “black list” of African American sportswriting prospects shared by Larry Whiteside of the Boston Globe, who died last year.
In 1994, Smith joined the Inquirer, where he covered the Philadelphia 76ers, Temple University basketball and football and college sports. In broadcast and in print, he developed a reputation as outspoken and opinionated.
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Writers Explain Why Latinos Prefer Clinton to Obama
“In a sun-drenched community college courtyard in the heart of East Los Angeles on Thursday, Sen. Barack Obama tried to confront one of his greatest obstacles to doing well on Super Tuesday next week: winning over Latino voters,” Karl Vick and Alec MacGillis wrote from Los Angeles Friday in the Washington Post.
” . . . Hispanic voters here say Obama has a lot of ground to make up before Tuesday, when Democrats in California and 21 other states will vote. Obama is contending not only with the legacy of friction between blacks and Hispanics — a relationship that is particularly complex in Los Angeles — but also with a more basic problem: Many Los Angeles Latinos just don’t know much about him and feel more comfortable with his opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).”
Clarence Page, the Chicago Tribune columnist who is African American, wrote on Wednesday, “Obama faces an uphill fight as his campaign tries to prevent the talk of a black-Hispanic divide from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Columnists — Latino and otherwise— have been focusing on Latinos’ preference for Clinton over Obama as the Democratic presidential campaign heads for the Southwest.
“Do the Eastern media really expect us to buy the idea that the 44 million people who make up America’s largest minority have a beef with African-Americans?” Ruben Navarrette asked Wednesday in the San Diego Union-Tribune. “Does that include the Latinos who backed Obama in his campaigns in Illinois, and those who now support his presidential campaign? If anything, Latinos — especially those whose families have been in this country for generations — tend to have a keen understanding of racism, which makes them more likely to identify with the plight of African-Americans,” he said.
“Next thing you know, pundits are going to tell us that Latinos are too macho to elect a woman president.”
On her Latina Lista blog, Marisa Treviño wrote, “If there exists anything between Blacks and Latinos when it comes to national politics, it’s the fact that rather than be angry with our black hermanos— we’re envious that someone has arrived who is eloquent, inspiring and a person of color.”
Meanwhile, surveys appear to leave no doubt that Latinos are favoring Clinton.
“In New York, a new poll by the Hispanic Federation shows 66% of Latinos leaning toward Clinton and only 16% for Obama, with similar margins showing up in recent California polls. And the gap among Latinas is even more stark,” Juan Gonzalez wrote Friday in the New York Daily News.
“Some are trying to peddle the notion that Hispanics resist voting for a black candidate. Pure nonsense. . . . at this time and in this place, working-class Hispanics feel closer to the plain, hardworking style of Clinton than the dazzling and fuzzy promises of Obama.
“Women, especially, have heard sweet songs from good-looking men since the beginning of time — and that includes Jack and Ted Kennedy and, yes, Bill Clinton.
“Latinos have watched Hillary for years, in good times and bad. For whatever reason, they see their struggles for a better life in America mirrored in her remarkable journey.”
Gregory P. Rodriguez, who also writes for the Los Angeles Times, said the preference was a matter of proximity. He wrote on Time magazine’s Web site Saturday: “Hispanics, coming from many countries, are hardly monolithic; but all things being equal, Latino voters would probably prefer to support a Latino candidate over a non-Latino candidate, and a white candidate over a black candidate. That’s largely because they are less familiar with black politicians, as there are fewer big-name black candidates than white ones, and because, stereotypes not withstanding, many Latinos don’t live anywhere near African Americans. California, for example, which has the largest Latino population in the country, is only 6% black.”
Writing in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, academics Harry P. Pachon and Rodolfo O. de la Garza agreed with several of the others: “Undoubtedly some Latinos, like some members of every racial and ethnic group in the U.S., will cast their votes on the basis of race. For the majority of Latinos, however, it is the political calculus of long-established relationships combined with early outreach and the support of community influentials that are most likely to carry the day.”
Elisa Cramer, Palm Beach (Fla.) Post: The Britney Spears Democrats
Patrice Gaines, Washington Informer: Things Are Changing in the South
Arnold Garcia Jr. , Austin (Texas) American-Statesman: Before Barack Obama, there was Edward Brooke
Emil Guillermo, AsianWeek: ‘Obamalot’ And How It Can Backfire
Jen Haberkorn, Washington Times: Obama ’04 at odds with Obama ’08
Bob Herbert, New York Times: Questions for the Clintons
Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe: In S.C. primary, Clinton strategy foiled
Chip Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle: [Oakland] Mayor spends more time on Clinton than on city
Joseph Lowery, National Newspaper Publishers Association: A New Attitude Facing The Future Today With Barack Obama
Roland S. Martin, Creators Syndicate: Voters Not Swayed by Racial Politics
Lisa Wong Macabasco, AsianWeek: Presidential Candidates on Asian American Issues
Sheryl McCarthy, Newsday: America has fallen and needs a lift
Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Expect Rezko card to be played tonight
Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery, Washington Informer: Would an Obama Administration Look Like Fenty’s?
Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times: In Obama’s Pursuit of Latinos, Race Plays Role
Barack Obama, Indian Country Today: Making My Case in Indian Country
Steve Penn, Kansas City Star: Obama won crowd with words, actions
David Person, Huntsville (Ala.) Times: Barack Obama’s racial ‘bargaining’
Leonard Pitts Jr. , Miami Herald: Obama foes make appeal to ignorance, fear
Leonard Pitts Jr. , Miami Herald: ‘We need a leader,’ not a politician
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: Cards From a Worn-Out Deck
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: The Electability Thing
Bob Ray Sanders, Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Keeping that hope alive
Mary Sanchez, Kansas City Star: After Barack Obama, racial politics won’t be the same
Stan Simpson, Hartford (Conn.) Courant: Voting Habits Changing In State
Elmer Smith, Philadelphia Daily News: Is Barack Obama the new JFK?
Dawn Turner Trice, Chicago Tribune: Democrats’ race came down to race in S.C.
Ron Walters, National Newspaper Publishers Association: Resolving the Dilemma of Electoral Choice
Laura Washington, Chicago Sun-Times: Obama felt in local races
DeWayne Wickham, USA Today: In two states Obama won, the signs of ‘change’
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How to Make Poverty Front-Page News Again
John Edwards has bowed out of the Democratic presidential campaign for president, but he secured a pledge from the remaining Democrats — Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — that they would make the issue central to their campaigns and their presidencies.
In the January/February issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Mary Ellen Schoonmaker, an editorial-board member at the Record in northern New Jersey, asked Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., a political writer “who has his eye on poverty,” to suggest some ways to return poverty to front-page status at news organizations.
“People talk all the time about media bias,” Dionne said. “I actually think there’s a structural bias in the media against the poor. Newspapers are built to cover the wealthy and the famous much more than they are built to cover the working class or the poor.
“There are entire business sections devoted to what the people running big companies do. There are whole sections that focus on gossip about celebrities and rich sports figures. There are good reasons why all these sections exist, but taken together, this is a very large commitment on the part of journalists to a particular slice of society. There is no part of the newspaper routinely devoted to the coverage of the problems of poor people, or struggling working-class— or even middle-class— people. So anyone who cares about covering these matters knows he or she has to fight this structural issue. That said, a lot of these stories are very compelling stories. . . .”
Schoonmaker concludes with this observation from Dionne:
“Poverty stories don’t have to be grim. We don’t write often enough about solutions, about programs or agencies that work— and explain to readers why they work. We don’t write often enough about people who work with the poor. There are many religious organizations that do amazing work, and whose commitment is something many in a community can relate to. There are affluent churches and synagogues that partner with houses of worship in less-affluent parts of their communities. These are often settings in which the well-off and the less well-off relate to each other in human ways, and not as ‘caregivers’ and ‘clients.’ And the poor often have a sense of humor about their own condition, which can create a spark of recognition in readers.”
Cary Clack, San Antonio Express-News: Thank you, voters, for ending my, um, agony
Mary C. Curtis, Charlotte (N.C.) Observer: Edwards is out, but he left his mark
Errol Louis, New York Daily News: Let’s keep the message alive
Barry Saunders, Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer: Edwards lacked traction
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Ebony Cover Wonders, Will It Be in Our Lifetime?
The March issue of Ebony magazine features Sen. Barack Obama and the words, “In Our Lifetime: Are we really witnessing the election of the nation’s first black president?”
In the piece by Sylvester Monroe, Kevin Chappell and Bryan Monroe, the authors quote Obama staffer Karen Richardson attempting to debunk the “false reports early in the campaign that there were no African-Americans in top campaign staff positions. In an accompanying q-and-a by Sylvester Monroe, Obama says, “the reason I appeal for the Black vote is not because of my race. It’s because of my history.”
Richardson holds undergraduate and law degrees from Howard University and a master’s in international relations from the London School of Economics, and has a godfather named Muhammad Ali. She is one of several professionals quoted who took leave from their jobs to work on the Obama campaign.
“Richardson emphasizes the more than two-dozen talented Blacks in key slots that Obama has attracted from the ranks of the nation’s best and brightest minds,” the story says. “Like New Jersey State Campaign Director Mark Alexander, whose father, Clifford Alexander, was Secretary of the Army in President Bill Clinton‘s administration, foreign policy adviser Susan Rice, who was an assistant secretary of state under Clinton, and National Policy Director Matthew Nugen, a veteran of the Democratic National Committee and former adviser to Joe Lieberman‘s 2000 presidential campaign. . . . ‘people don’t realize . . .the state policy director of Iowa is African-American, and nobody would ever think that.” The issue goes on sale Feb. 11.
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National Latino Group Targets Cable “Hate Speech”
National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguia announced plans to pressure television network executives and candidates seeking their parties’ presidential nominations to clamp down on what the group considers to be “hate speech” that has emerged from the debate over immigration, Suzanne Gamboa reported Friday for the Associated Press.
“The group launched a Web site to counter the speech, wecanstopthehate.org, with clips of what it considers offensive comments on television as well as a tracking of hate crimes.
“Some of the remarks the Hispanic group identified included referring to immigrants as an ‘army of invaders’ or an ‘invading force,’ associating immigrants with animals, accusing immigrants of bringing crime and diseases like leprosy to the U.S., and purveying a conspiracy theory that Latinos are trying to take back parts of the United States once ruled by Mexico.
“Murguia named as offenders Pat Buchanan, who appears on MSNBC as a commentator, CNN’s Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck of Headline News, a CNN network.”
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3 of Color to Be Business Journalism Interns
Kate Diaz of Northwestern University and Ashley Macha of Arizona State University are among seven students selected for 10-week business journalism internships at major publications for the summer, according to Arizona State University’s Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
A third student of color was selected, but chose not to be identified as such, Deputy Director Jonathan J. Higuera said.
“Our ongoing message to all students and journalists of color is that there are tremendous opportunities in business journalism,” Director Andrew Leckey told Journal-isms.
“That is why we have made daylong presentations at minority annual journalism conventions for the past four years and include a number of journalists of color in our seminar fellowship programs as well. Minorities are underrepresented in the ranks of business journalists. My own students and interns of color have succeeded at the highest levels of television, print and online business reporting based on their talent.”
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Short Takes
Melanie McFarland, television critic at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is leaving the paper and “joining the Internet Movie Database as its TV editor, a place that serves as the starting point of countless TV-related conversations, and has been known to settle its fair share of bets,” she told readers on Jan. 30. “Following a short and very necessary break, I intend to return to my first love — writing, and resume blogging about TV.” McFarland’s departure leaves only a handful of African Americans with her job at a daily newspaper, including Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times, Suzanne Ryan of the Boston Globe, Mekeisha Madden Toby of the Detroit News and Kevin Thompson of Florida’s Palm Beach Post.
Some folks in the press are calling the Feb. 5 primaries “Tsunami Tuesday,” “in reference to the huge wave of major results about to come. Something in the back of my head makes me uneasy about that term, which has gained popularity only this presidential cycle, the first since the Asian/South Asian tsunami of 2004. It seems to be a term that’s in bad taste, at the very least, considering almost 300,000 people perished in that tsunami,” Sree Sreenivasan wrote Thursday on the South Asian Journalists Association Web site.
On Thursday, National Black AIDS Awareness Day, Black Entertainment Television plans a news special, “Stigma: The Silent Killer,” a half-hour that examines the role that stigmas have played in the spread of HIV/AIDS among people of color in both the U.S. and the Caribbean, the network announced. It is part of a public education partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation, the “BET Rap-It-Up” Campaign, and airs at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time. Judge Greg Mathis wrote a commentary about the day for BlackAmericaWeb.com.
In Chicago, “WSNS-Channel 44, the Telemundo/NBC Spanish-language station, this week marked the first anniversary of its revamped news programs with substantial increases in viewership,” Robert Feder reported in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Although still lagging behind Univision rival WGBO-Channel 66, Telemundo’s 5 p.m. news with Tsi-tsi-ki Felix is up 13 percent in the ratings, and its 10 p.m. ‘En Contexto’ with Vicente Serrano is up 27 percent.”
“Alycia Lane‘s civil attorney went to court today, saying that he is looking ‘for the facts and circumstances’ surrounding her firing from KYW-TV (CBS3), her former television station,” Michael Klein wrote Wednesday in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Paul R. Rosen “seeks Lane’s personnel file, documents surrounding the firing and investigation and documents surrounding the firing of other reporters, and specifically ‘any other anchor or reporter of Latina descent, African American descent or the descent of any other minority group.'” Lane, born to a Puerto Rican mother and a father of Welsh descent, was fired on New Year’s Day, “about two weeks after she was arrested in New York and accused of hitting a police officer,” Klein noted.
For Black History Month, David Mills, a journalist-turned-television writer, compiled on Thursday some of the ways the N-word has been used over the years in everyday language, according to reference books. “N- chaser,” “n- navel” and “n- news” are among his examples.
“Huffington Post has the video of an exchange between anchors Don Lemon (who is African American) and Kyra Phillips (who’s not) and their guest, ‘CNN Open House’ host Gerri Willis (who also is not), in which Phillips refers to to the trio as a ‘reverse Oreo,'” the TV Newser column informed readers on Thursday.
Peggy Boston, wife of Bernie Boston, the longtime Washington photographer who died in Basye, Va., on Jan. 22 from complications of a rare blood disorder, has arranged for friends to gather Saturday, Feb. 23, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the studio of Dennis Brack, 318 Third St. NE, rear, in Washington for a brief ceremony at 2:30 p.m., she said. A second gathering is planned for Sunday, Feb. 24, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Fort Valley Nursery, 1175 S. Hisey Ave., Woodstock, Va., with a brief ceremony at 2:30 p.m. Memorial contributions may be made to the Bernie Boston Photo Archives Fund written to Rochester Institute of Technology (BBPAF in memo) and mailed to Heather Engel, Rochester Institute of Technology, Office of Development, 1 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623-9932.