Analysts See Greater Significance in Obama Wins
On “Potomac Primaries” night, it fell to the analysts to put the numbers in perspective.
“Barack Obama might keep calling himself the underdog. But from now on, that dog won’t hunt,” Paul West wrote in Wednesday’s Baltimore Sun.
“His smashing victories in three Mid-Atlantic primaries yesterday will likely be seen as a turning point in the 2008 presidential contest.
“Obama came roaring out of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia with a new lode of delegates, taking the lead for the first time over Hillary Clinton, who once seemed all but unbeatable.”
Or, as Chris Matthews recapped on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Wednesday, “Nationally, according to NBC’s election unit, Obama has the lead among pledged delegates, 1078 to 969. When you add in NBC’s best estimates about delegates yet to be counted and superdelegates, the total number of delegates for Obama is 1,313 and 1,273 for Clinton, not that far apart.”
In the New York Times, Adam Nagourney wrote, “The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president.”
NBC’s political director, Chuck Todd, said Clinton would have to score victories of 60 percent or more in each subsequent primary to stay in contention.
Writing from Virginia, with the District of Columbia and Maryland one of the three jurisdictions where Obama scored an impressive Democratic primary victory, Michael Paul Williams stepped back to make this argument about race in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
“Obama’s presidential run provides Americans with more than history-making potential,” Williams wrote. “It’s an opportunity to sort through America’s dirty laundry, toss it into the Maytag and squeeze the last drop out of the absurdity surrounding racial identity.
“In an era of Obama and Tiger Woods and an increasingly multiracial America, shouldn’t we revisit the ‘one-drop’ rule foisted upon us by nefarious agents of racial purity in the name of hierarchy?”
Another African American columnist, Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, caused a stir when he quoted Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell‘s comments at a Post-Gazette editorial board meeting.
“‘You’ve got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate,’ he said bluntly,” Norman wrote. “Our eyes only met briefly, perhaps because the governor wanted to spare the only black guy in the room from feeling self-conscious for backing an obvious loser.”
Rendell defended himself this way on “Hardball” Wednesday:
“Well, first of all, Chris, it happened in the context of an editorial board interview, where I was pushing for support on our education funding, the largest increase in education funding in Pennsylvania history, and our own state economic stimulus program. It was about an hour-and-15-minute interview. They asked me almost as I was walking out the door, how do I handicap the presidential race? And I went over what I thought the assets and the weaknesses of both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama were.
And to somehow have a columnist construe that as I was trying to inject race into the campaign — well, first of all, nothing I said would have helped Senator Clinton. If anything, it would have created sympathy for Senator Obama, number one. But number two, if I was going to do it, I wouldn’t have done it to six people in a room that didn’t have any windows. I would have picked a larger forum.
“It’s ridiculous, and it’s symptomatic of, I think, the media’s obsession with race. I think until we get to the point where white candidates can criticize African-American candidates on issues and vice versa and no one say, Oh, they’re being racist — until we get to that point, we haven’t made it all the way.”
Meanwhile, attention turned to the Latino vote and the March 4 primary in Texas, which “alone has about as many delegates as Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., combined,” as Todd J. Gilman wrote on Wednesday in the Dallas Morning News, quoting a Clinton supporter.
On New America Media, Louis E.V. Nevaer wrote, “More than four out of five Latino first-time voters under the age of 30 who voted for Barack Obama on Super Tuesday say that if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, they will not vote at all in the presidential election in November.”
However, the figures came from Nevaer’s company, Hispanic Economics, which was hired by the Obama campaign to survey Latino voters under 30 who supported the Illinois senator.
In the New York Daily News, Albany Bureau chief Joe Mahoney reported, “Two Latino lawmakers are irked by the sudden replacement of Hillary Clinton’s Hispanic campaign manager — and warned there could be a backlash at the polls.”
But Latina Lista blogger Marisa Treviño replied, “Well, though, yes, Maggie Williams is African American and she is replacing the top Latina in the campaign hierarchy — it means absolutely nada for the Latino community.”
Amy Alexander, thedailyvoice.com: Barack Sweeps Potomac Primary While Journalists Creep
Liz Cox Barrett, CJR Daily: Who’s Afraid of 60 Minutes?
Stanley Crouch, New York Daily News: The Democratic contest is no longer about race, if it ever was
Gromer Jeffers Jr., Dallas Morning News: Clinton-Obama primary battle a Texas toss-up
Tannette Johnson-Elie, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Minority business issues need a voice
Wil LaVeist, MIX Magazine, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot: Yes, White Men Can Jump?
Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher: How Sweep It Is for Obama and McCain
Dick Morris, syndicated: Why Hillary Will Lose
Larry Pinkney, BlackCommentator.com: Barack Obama and the Euphoria of Madness
Project for Excellence in Journalism: McCain, Clinton, and Obama in Coverage Derby Photo Finish
Bob Ray Sanders, Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Great U.S. leaders? We know who they are
Alessandra Stanley, New York Times: Instead of Men Behaving Badly, MSNBC Strains for a Polite Primary Night
Adrienne T. Washington, Washington Times: Enthusiasm brings out all sorts of supporters
DeWayne Wickham, USA Today: Clinton or Obama? What I considered before I voted
David Zurawik, Baltimore Sun: Cable TV outdoes local stations on local angles
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Publisher Wants Feds to Probe Bailey Killing
The publisher of the Oakland newspaper that slain journalist Chauncey Bailey edited said yesterday that his paper’s revenues have declined because of the slaying, and that he wants the federal government to investigate suspicions that the Oakland police were complicit in the assassination.
Paul Cobb, publisher of the Oakland Post, made the comments in Washington during and after a news conference by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, which released its 2008 annual report.
Cobb said after the session that the newspaper had lost $155,000 in revenue compared with the same period a year before. People might send sympathy cards, he told Journal-isms, “but they don’t do sympathy advertising. Some of them feel like, ‘let’s wait til this clears up.'”
Police placed Cobb and another man under protection last month after the man said two men he knew to be once associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery offered him $3,000 to lure Cobb to a place where they intended to kill him, Thomas Peele reported then for the Chauncey Bailey Project.
“The threat came five months after the Post’s editor, Chauncey Bailey, was shot to death as he walked to work on Aug. 2 near Alice and 14th streets. A bakery associate, Devaughndre Broussard, then 19, confessed the next day to killing Bailey because the journalist was planning a story [on the] business’s troubled finances, police said. Broussard later recanted and is awaiting trial,” Peele wrote.
Cobb said Wednesday that Bailey “was investigating the police and the Black Muslim Bakery and investigating the connection between the two” when he was killed. “I killed the story because it didn’t have total attribution,” he said at the news conference, “but the word got out in the streets that he was doing a story.”
Cobb went on to cite a number of instances where the police officer who befriended the suspect also conducted the investigation. “We are still, by the way, investigating the police,” Cobb said. “It is a tricky situation.”
A November story by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken began, “Yusuf Bey IV, the young leader of Your Black Muslim Bakery, boasted to his followers that he had avoided being implicated in the slaying of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey because of his relationship with the officer assigned to investigate the case.”
Referring to Oakland homicide investigator Sgt. Derwin Longmire, a 22-year department veteran, the story quoted Bey, 21, as saying, “The reason they didn’t pin the (Bailey) murder on me was because of Longmire.” It said Bey made the comments to two associates on an Aug. 6 video recording reviewed by the Chronicle.
Oakland police spokesman Roland Holmgren told Journal-isms that police are no longer commenting on the Bailey case.
Cobb asked reporters “to make phone calls to ask them about the progress of the case . . . and circulate their answers throughout the community, regardless of what it is.”
In its report, the press freedom group said, “It looks like 2008 will be an even tougher year for the media and without being at all complacent, we have to say it is very unlikely the job of journalists will get any easier in the months ahead. . . . Our main concern is about the elections scheduled during the year. Key votes will be held in countries whose leaders distrust independent journalists.”
At the news conference, Eritrean journalist Milkias Mihreteab compared his nation to North Korea and Soviet-era Albania, saying that since 2001, “the entire media” has disappeared, except for a “party mouthpiece.” “Don’t forget small and obscure countries like mine,” he pleaded. At least three journalists are believed to have died in secret prisons there, the organization reported last month.
Ayub Nuri, a journalist in the Kurdish-controlled northern portion of Iraq, talked about corruption in that part of the country, and the beating and harassment of journalists there. That section of Iraq often cited in the media as a beacon that stands in contrast to the rest of the nation.
A day after it was reported that director Steven Spielberg had quit as an artistic adviser for the Beijing Olympic Games, citing China’s close ties to the government of Sudan, He Qinglian, a Chinese economist, journalist and author, said at the news conference that since China promised to improve human rights in 2001 in order to secure the Olympics, “human rights standards have become worse and worse.”
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Magazine Single-Copy Sales Down; Subscriptions Up
Single-copy sales of several magazines aimed at people of color are down over the same period a year ago, but most have compensated by increasing their subscriber base, according to new preliminary figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Circulation increases were reported by Ebony, Essence, Jet, Latina, People en español, Sister2Sister and Vibe.
Hispanic, the men’s magazine King and the hip-hop magazine XXL showed decreases. Black Enterprise did not provide its figures in time for the audit, the organization said in its report this week.
Of those magazines, single-copy sales were down at all but Sister2Sister, which reported an increase in single-copy sales of 3.4 percent and a rise of 9.7 percent overall, from 189,280 to 207,589. People en español showed an overall increase, unlike the general-interest People magazine, which showed a decline.
The figures cover the six months ending Dec. 31.
Overall, Dylan Stableford reported Monday in Folio magazine, “Among the top 25 magazines in terms of total paid and verified circulation, only AARP (with a membership-based paid circulation of 23.4 million for its bimonthly magazine) showed an increase of more than two percent over the second half of 2006. Time (-17.57%) Playboy (-10.04%) and Reader’s Digest (-7.64%) all showed significant drops in overall circulation.
“In terms of single copy sales, seven of the top 10 showed decreases in sales in the last six months of 2007 versus the previous year, with Glamour (down 13.24%) taking the biggest hit. American Media Inc.’s National Enquirer (-15.25%) and Good Housekeeping (-20.71%) also saw significant declines among the top 25 magazines sold at the newsstand. “
Of the magazines aimed at people of color, the latest figures show African American Family Magazine at 25,788; Ebony, 1,459,219; Essence, 1,085,945; Hispanic Magazine, 300,963; Jet, 943,796; King, 211,888; Latina, 492,255; Sister2Sister, 207,589; Vibe, 894,861; XXL, 270,833. In addition, O: The Oprah Magazine stood at 2,405,177.
Jason Fell, Folio magazine: Report: African-Americans Reading More Magazines
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Black Weekly Hires Miami Herald for Distribution
Florida’s Broward Times, a black weekly bought last year by Robert G. Beatty, formerly the Miami Herald’s vice president of public affairs and general counsel, has changed its name to the South Florida Times, expanded its reach into Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, and hired the Herald “to print and distribute each publication throughout the region,” the paper announced on Wednesday.
The Fort Lauderdale-based paper was created in 1989. Last April, Beatty set his sights on changing the look and content of the newspaper, increasing circulation and eventually expanding into Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. He also said he was paying employees better than the dailies — the Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
“Beatty hired Bradley C. Bennett, a former Miami Herald assistant city editor, as the paper’s executive editor, and retained Elgin Jones as an investigative reporter, who wrote for the Times under previous ownership,” a news release said.
“A key mission of this newspaper is to form a bridge between people of different cultures and unite them by pointing out what they have in common,” Bennett said in the release. “Economic development, for example, is just as important in Liberty City as it is in northwest Fort Lauderdale and Boynton Beach. Unfair immigration policies affecting Haitian Americans are just as important in Richmond Heights as they are in Pompano Beach and Delray Beach. The economic and climate factors that have attracted large numbers of Jamaican immigrants to South Florida are as poignant in Royal Palm Beach as they are in Miramar and North Miami Beach.”
“The newspaper has continued to break news in the black community that daily newspapers, including The Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, frequently follow with their own stories. News of financial improprieties by the Broward Black Elected Officials, Inc.; Broward County’s unexplained firing of Alicia Antone, the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center director; the use of DNA evidence to solve the Angela Savage murder in Deerfield Beach; the soil contamination in the Durrs neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale; and many other developments first appeared in the newspaper’s pages. Only later did these stories appear in mainstream publications.”
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Miami Herald Settles Jockey’s Libel Lawsuit
“Jockey Jose Santos and The Miami Herald have reached a settlement in a libel lawsuit he filed against the newspaper in 2005, the newspaper’s attorney said Monday,” the Miami Herald reported on Tuesday.
“Santos rode Funny Cide to victories in the 2003 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes. The suit accused the newspaper of printing an article that falsely ‘accused Jose Santos of carrying an unauthorized and illegal object in his hand during his Kentucky Derby ride of Funny Cide.'”
“Derby racing stewards later concluded Santos was holding only his whip.”
“The settlement terms are confidential, the attorneys said.”
The reporter misunderstood Santos, a Spanish speaker, and the Herald later apologized.
“More than 200 people fulminated about the screwup in letters to the editor,” Chuck Strouse wrote shortly afterward in Miami’s alternative paper New Times.
“So let me get this straight,” Strouse continued. “In Miami, the most Hispanic city in the country, the newspaper of record screwed up because someone misunderstood a Spanish speaker?”
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Short Takes
“An African-American employee of ABC says co-workers hung a black baby doll from a noose near his work station at a West Side maintenance shop and that bosses refused to take it down for years,” Thomas Zambito wrote Wednesday in the New York Daily News. “Oswald Wilson sued ABC and parent company Disney Monday in Manhattan Federal Court, citing a pattern of racial discrimination that has caused him physical pain and emotional suffering.”
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell has decided to join the Facebook social networking site, but with misgivings, she told readers on Tuesday. “That journalists have to put themselves in this virtual marketplace makes me a little sad. It just seems phony,” she wrote. “It feels like we are scuffling Baby Boomers trying to keep up with Generations X, Y and Z.”
Monica Lozano, publisher of La Opinión in Los Angeles, was named Tuesday to the newly created position of ImpreMedia’s senior vice president of newspapers, the Spanish-language publishing company said. Lozano will continue as La Opinión, publisher, Editor & Publisher reported on Tuesday.
In conjunction with the Chicago Defender’s transition from daily to weekly, “the Defender rolled out its new Web site on January 15, and has had over 45,000 unique visitors since then,” Leila Noelliste told Defender readers. “The site’s local and national news are actively updated throughout the week.” She quoted the Defender’s director of finance, Carol Bell, as saying, “We can get people who sit 12 and 14 hours a day at their computer. We have electronic subscriptions where people can subscribe to get news as we update it daily.”
Focusing on business news is “the most coveted beat in journalism,” Carl Quintanilla, co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” told Alissa Krinsky on Tuesday for the TV Newser column. “Look at the lead of every newspaper, magazine and television show in this country. It’s about the economy and where we’re headed. Are there moments where I wouldn’t mind being in a hurricane or on a campaign trail doing politics? Sure. But money, as a story, has every human element general news has: anger, inspiration, jealousy, greed . . . It’s just a matter of telling those stories with a human touch.”
Lenise Ligon, suddenly let go on June 14 from WBTV-TV in Charlotte, N.C., is joining Fox affiliate WALA-TV in Mobile, Ala., as Monday-through-Friday primary anchor, her agent, Mort Meisner Associates, announced.
Cliff Redding, a veteran copy editor who was fired by the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press after words from the gag page traditionally composed for a departing employee’s send-off ended up on the paper’s Web site, will be copy editing at the Glendale (Calif.) News-Press, a community-based publication and offshoot of the Los Angeles Times. He also is copy-editing “Journal-isms.”
Ann Curry was to broadcast live from the Democratic Republic of the Congo on NBC News’ “Today,” on Feb. 13 and 14, “live from the city of Goma, the center of the World’s worst and deadliest conflict since World War II. She will also tell the stories of the women and children of the Congo and their horrific struggles,” the network announced.
“While their Urdu-language pages exploit the divided political loyalties within New York’s 400,000-member-strong Pakistani community, these two editors are physically divided only by the wall between the unmarked storefronts in which they work, on Hillside Avenue in the Pakistani enclave in Jamaica, Queens,” Adam B. Ellick wrote Sunday in a New York Times feature. He was describing Mahammed Farooqi, editor and publisher of the Pakistan Post, and Khalil ur Rehman is editor of the Urdu Times.
One of the superdelegates for the Democratic National Convention is a former journalist, Myron Lowery, Nashvillepost.com reported. Lowery was elected to the Memphis City Council in 1992 after having been a television reporter and weekend anchor at WMC-TV in that city. He is a delegate for Sen. Hillary Clinton and addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1996.
Universal Press Syndicate will distribute “Dare to Ask,” a creation of Phillip J. Milano, a 21-year newspaper veteran who promotes cross-cultural dialogue in his columns and books, starting March 2, Editor & Publisher reports. Milano is an assistant city editor at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.
In Pakistan, “The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the murder of Dr. Chishti Mujahid, a columnist for the weekly magazine Akbar-e-Jehan, who was shot and killed in a targeted attack outside his home in Quetta on Saturday,” the group said. “Mujahid, an eye doctor who had written a column for more than 20 years, was shot in the head and chest by an unknown gunman as he left his house, according to the Pakistani Federal Union of Journalists and local news reports. The spokesman for a banned insurgent group, the Baluch Liberation Army, claimed responsibility for the murder in a phone call to the Quetta Press Club, saying Mujahid was ‘against’ the Baluch cause, local news reports said.”
In Niger, “A Niamey criminal appeal court today rejected a request for the release of journalist Moussa Kaka and ruled that the transcripts of controversial telephone taps can, after all, be used in evidence against him, allowing prosecutors to proceed with their case, one of his lawyers, Moussa Coulibaly, said” on Tuesday, Reporters Without Borders reported. “Kaka was arrested on 20 September on a charge of ‘complicity in a conspiracy against the authority of the state.'”
In Congo, “Investigative reporter Maurice Kayombo of the privately-owned monthly Les Grands Enjeux was released yesterday on the orders of justice and human rights minister Symphorien Mutombo Bakafua Nsenda, Reporters Without Borders reported on Wednesday. Kayombo was arrested Jan. 9 “when he went to interview ministry of mines secretary-general Christophe Kaninio, and was charged with blackmail and ‘disparaging an official.’ He had been researching a story about possible irregularities in the allocation of mining contracts,” the group said.
