Patriots Too Arrogant? . . . and a Note on Perspective
The New England Patriots, a 12-to-13-point favorite to beat the New York Giants Sunday in Super Bowl XLII, were stunned in their attempt to win a fourth world championship in seven seasons. They lost, 17-14, in what is being called the biggest Super Bowl upset since 1968, when Joe Namath’s New York Jets stunned the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.
Columnists of color opined that the Patriots were too arrogant, or maybe too tired. Or they suggested that the Giants, the “regular guys,” simply deserved it.
There was also commentary from one who wasn’t there. “I had a heart attack in the wee hours of Monday morning,” Michael Wilbon, Washington Post columnist and ESPN commentator, explained to Post readers on Friday.
Wilbon noted that some of the flowers and good wishes came from athletes he had criticized, such as the NBA’s Kobe Bryant. “The lesson learned is probably that a bad pass on third and 12, a missed jump shot at the buzzer or even a prolonged disagreement with a teammate doesn’t make that the dominant theme of a man’s life,” Wilbon wrote.
“It’s not like I won’t make a critical observation about Kobe in the playoffs, if necessary, just that such comments ought to be expressed in context and not cavalierly used to form larger judgments about a person’s life. At the very least there ought to be an acknowledgment of a sense of compassion and humanity that aren’t to be taken for granted.”
Mike Freeman, Sportsline: Pats pick poor time to stop eating humble pie
Roy S. Johnson blog: Super Bowl XLII: Biggest Upset Ever
John McCann, Durham, N.C., audio blog: Eli Manning and King David
Terence Moore, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Patriots didn’t deserve historical feat
Shaun Powell, Newsday: Magical Giants can’t be stopped
John Smallwood, Philadelphia Daily News: One win short of ‘the greatest’
Jean-Jacques Taylor, Dallas Morning News: Giants present Patriots with perfect storm, 17-14
Jason Whitlock, Kansas City Star: Pressure didn’t kill Patriots
George Willis, New York Post: UN-‘D’-LIEVABLE
Watch all the Super Bowl spots (Advertising Age)
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Two Months Later, Imus Getting Guests, Advertisers
“In the two months since his microphone was turned back on” at WABC radio in New York, “Don Imus has hardly suffered for company,” Jacques Steinberg reported on Sunday in the New York Times.
“Politicians like John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman and Bill Richardson have called him on the air to welcome him back and take his questions, as have Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and John McCain, who happily accepted Mr. Imus’s presidential endorsement.
“Newsmen like Tim Russert, Bob Schieffer and George Stephanopoulos have submitted to interviews, too, along with the authors Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the columnists Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman and Frank Rich of The New York Times.
“While it will be some time before Arbitron has calibrated how many listeners he has on the nearly 50 stations that do carry his show, many advertisers have seen little reason to wait. Bigelow Teas, Accountemps, NetJets, the Mohegan Sun casino, various car makers and a big New Jersey hospital are peddling their wares during his commercial breaks, at least in New York, just as they did before.
“Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, said he viewed the fast track of Mr. Imus’s return as a sign of how ‘cash and marketplace trump race.’ . . .
“But Mr. Gates said that the responsibility for Mr. Imus’s rebound lay not just with the elites of white America, but with those in the black community who led the charge for his firing.
” ‘People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were so vocal, and so triumphant in their moral victory,’ he said. ‘Where are they now?’
“. . . Michael Eric Dyson, a university professor in the sociology department at Georgetown University who has never been an Imus guest, lamented that the sting of the words uttered that day by Mr. Imus and his producer, Bernard McGuirk“— calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s” — had already begun to fade.
“In light of the offensiveness of those remarks, Mr. Dyson said he wished Mr. Imus’s guests had waited a bit longer before traipsing back.”
WABC programming director Phil Boyce told Journal-isms that Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page had been on the show, and said other African Americans had appeared on Martin Luther King Day. But Page said Boyce must have been thinking of someone else.
Spokeswoman Leslie Slender listed the other African American guests as Sister Louise D. Patterson, evangelist of the Church of God in Christ, and Harvard theologian the Rev. Peter Gomes, who both appeared on King Day; boxing promoter Don King; the singing Blind Boys of Alabama; Katie Harris of the Boriken Neighborhood Health Center in East Harlem and George Martin, co-captain of the New York Giants’ 1986 Super Bowl-winning team. Martin is walking across America to raise money for Sept. 11, 2001, charities. Commentator Carl Jeffers is scheduled Thursday.
Eric Deggans, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: Don Imus’ color guard
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Bill Bennett, CNN Analyst, Gave $2,000 to McCain
“Last December, conservative author and CNN election analyst William J. Bennett gave over two thousand dollars to Sen. John McCain‘s presidential campaign, a fact that Bennett has not mentioned during any of his appearances on the network, according to a review of transcripts by the Huffington Post,” Nico Pitney wrote Friday in the online Huffington Post.
“Moreover, after giving the donation, Bennett claimed on-air that he was neutral in the GOP race, even as he repeatedly dispensed advice to McCain on how he could win over doubtful conservatives.”
“Informed of the donations, a CNN official said that Bennett also gave an unspecified amount to Mitt Romney‘s campaign in January 2008, which would not show up on the latest campaign filings.
“Last month, Talking Points Memo reported that, for the duration of the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton backers James Carville and Paul Begala would no longer be appearing on CNN unless they were paired with a supporter of Barack Obama. The CNN official said Bennett’s situation was different since he had given to more than one candidate.”
[Feb. 5 update: A CNN spokeswoman told Journal-isms: “Bill Bennett continues to appear on our political panel because he has not endorsed a presidential candidate and is not advising any one campaign. He has made contributions to both McCain and Romney, but he has stated again and again he does not know who he will vote for.”]
Meanwhile, Robin Washington scored a coup in 2004 by having President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry write pieces on their candidacies for Minnesota’s Duluth News Tribune, where Washington is editorial page editor. This week, he duplicated the achievement.
Monday’s paper featured front-page opinion pieces from Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Tuesday’s has articles from Republicans Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Three of them strove to find a local angle: Obama, of Illinois, declared, “As a Great Lakes senator . . . ” McCain called the Great Lakes a national treasure, and Romney said Minnesotans suffer from high heating bills.
Asian American Journalists Association: Media Advisory: Avoid Use of “Native Hawaiian”
Merlene Davis, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader: Clintons put racial politics in play
Editorial, Native American Times: Native Times endorses Obama for President
Editor & Publisher: ‘La Opinión’ Backs Obama, McCain
Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe: How Edwards advanced the Democrats’ debate
Dwight Lewis, Nashville Tennessean: Edwards exit, Huckabee may shake up Super Tuesday
Rhonda Chriss Lokeman, Kansas City Star: Feminists vs. Feminuts
Mark Mellman, Los Angeles Times: Can a woman or a black man win?
Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Debate was all Hollywood glitz, lacking passion
Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Out of spotlight, Obama meets gritty side of L.A.
Louis E.V. Nevaer, New America Media: The Latino Voting Paradox
Elena Ong, AsianWeek: Why I’m Voting For Clinton
Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: Candidates meet at borders
Les Payne, Newsday: Clinton plays the race-gender card
Lee Thach, Nguoi-Viet: Are We Ready for an [Enter Attribute] President?
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Kenyan Radio Stations Said to Inflame Hatreds
“Vernacular radio stations that air comments referring to communities as ‘baboons,’ ‘weeds,’ or ‘animals of the west’ are being singled out as a partial cause to the ethnic bloodletting in Kenya,” Tim Querengesser wrote Saturday in the Nation newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya.
“The messages are rarely direct calls to violence but are laced with cultural references that are given legitimacy when a station broadcasts them, says Strategic Research executive director Caesar Handa, who has been monitoring the airwaves after the election.”
Kwamboka Oyaro noted for the Inter Press Service, “The violence has reportedly claimed over 1,000 lives and displaced some 250,000 people since the December election.
“David Ochami, a commissioner with the Media Council of Kenya, told IPS that long before the elections were held, vernacular radio stations had ignited ethnic consciousness among the listeners ‘making them support leaders from their own tribe and harbour bad feelings about people from other communities.'”
Participants at a workshop organized in Nairobi by California-based media advocacy group Internews also said media owners played a major role in encouraging the violence. “They had vested interests in either camp of the political divide,” a reporter with Kenya Broadcasting Corporation said, adding that he and his colleagues wanted to tell the real story but they couldn’t because the stories could portray the government in a bad light, Oyaro wrote.
The government slapped a blanket ban on live broadcasters soon after violence broke out in the country.
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Short Takes
Bert Roughton, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s managing editor for print, suggested a ban on articles focusing on Democrats a few weeks ago “when it seemed to him that reporters and editors were suggesting a number of stories on the Democratic side of the presidential race,” Angela Tuck, public editor at the newspaper, told readers on Saturday. “It accomplished what I was after,” Roughton said in her column. “Our really gifted political writer, Aaron Gould Sheinin,” wrote a piece for Jan. 17, “taking a look at how elusive a perfect candidate has been for Georgia Republicans. That helped us sustain our political balance as we headed into the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, which attracted a lot of Democrats to town and inevitably brought them to Page One,” Roughton continued.
Sandra Rowe, editor of the Oregonian of Portland, and Executive Editor Peter Bhatia, have been named Editor & Publisher’s Editors of the Year for 2008. The two have run the Oregonian since 1993. Bhatia, a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is of Indian descent and is active in the South Asian Journalists Association.
In the first 24 hours that the story of married Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick‘s text-message love notes to his girlfriend was posted on freep.com, it received 1.2 million page views, Gannett Co. editors wrote on the company’s Web site. “In the first three days of coverage, total page views surpassed four million. Single-copy sales also were up,” the site says. The paper had almost 14,000 entries from chief of staff Christine Beatty’s city-issued texting device, Free Press Editor Paul Anger wrote, but “After much discussion, we decided against using those containing overly explicit sexual terms — yes, using them would prove to any skeptics what the mayor and Beatty were up to, but we ultimately decided we had less offensive messages that proved the same thing.” The text messages showed the couple lied about their relationship last summer at a police whistle-blower trial that has cost the city more than $9 million.
“The Bush administration proposed cutting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s appropriation in half in 2009 and by even more after that,” John Eggerton reported Monday in Broadcasting & Cable. “The proposal continues a trend in which Republicans try to slash the . . . budget, sometimes invoking an alleged liberal bias. Democrats like Rep. Ed Markey (Mass.) push back, and the cuts are eventually rescinded.” National Public Radio CEO Ken Stern said in a statement, “The last time funding was challenged, more than 2 million Americans who count on public broadcasting contacted their members of Congress and made their voices heard. We welcome their renewed support as we respond to this challenge.”
Black voters posed questions about the presidential race to a panel of black journalists and academics Thursday at Morgan State University. The panel was convened by National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation,” C. Fraser Smith reported Sunday in the Baltimore Sun. “One got the sense of an inexorably rising tide of support for Mr. Obama,” Smith wrote, referring to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.
In Seattle, “KOMO-TV has named Robert Santos as its newest weathercaster. Santos will anchor the weekend weathercasts and will report on environmental issues three days a week,” the Seattle Times reported on Friday. “Santos, a native of Guam who was raised in California, has a degree from Pepperdine University and has been a broadcaster for 17 years. Most recently he was the weekend weather/general assignment reporter for KVBC in Las Vegas, hired there in October 2006.”
Jayson Musson has taken his “Black Like Me” column, squeezed out of the Philadelphia Weekly alternative newspaper, to cyberspace. “The column will now be appearing bi-weekly on www.freenewsprojects.blogspot.com,” he told Journal-isms. He said he would be alternating it weekly with interviews he does with visual artists and musicians. “Black Like Me” ran for 10 months, until the end of November. “We’ve been running some very thin issues,” A&E Editor Steven Wells said, leaving no room for the column. Musson, 30, also plans a book of the Philadelphia Weekly columns.
“Outgoing KTVU anchorman Dennis Richmond underwent successful surgery for prostate cancer last week and is in the middle of a recovery period that is expected to keep him off the air for at least another week,” Chuck Barney reported Saturday for the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times. “It was the second major operation in less than six months for Richmond, who plans to retire in May.” In 1969, while working for KTVU as a part-time clerk-typist, Richmond won a scholarship to the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at Columbia University, a predecessor of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. He returned to the station after completing the program.