Clinton Seen as “Doomed”; McCain Story Drops
The headline on the “Political Bulletin” column on the U.S. News & World Report Web site Wednesday was, “Media Sees Doom For Clinton After Latest Obama Wins.”
That wasn’t the only way the media became part of the presidential campaign story.
Sen. Hillary Clinton tried to claim it was the media that started a dust-up over whether Sen. Barack Obama “plagiarized” from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a friend and supporter. News outlets gravitated to a statement from Michelle Obama about just when she began to feel proud of the country. Then, Wednesday night, the New York Times dropped a story about a female lobbyist and the putative Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain.
“John McCain forced to deny romantic link with lobbyist,” blared the Web site headline of the Times of London, reporting on the New York Times story.
The article for the New York paper’s Thursday editions, by Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn W. Thompson, David D. Kirkpatrick and Stephen Labaton, said:
“Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.”
U.S. News began its summary of the news media’s “doom for Clinton” coverage this way:
“Sen. Barack Obama yesterday easily won the Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucuses, and the media is now openly questioning Sen. Hillary Clinton’s viability going forward. . . . The AP reports this morning that Obama ‘cruised past a fading’ Clinton, ‘gaining the upper hand in a Democratic presidential race for the ages.’ The wins, says the AP, ‘left the former first lady in desperate need of a comeback in a race she long commanded as front-runner.’ The Baltimore Sun reports, ‘Since Super Tuesday, everything has gone Obama’s way, and there have been few, if any, signs that Clinton can stop him.'”
Still, ABC News led its evening news with a flap over a statement Tuesday by Michelle Obama that had been seized upon by right-wing talk-show hosts:
“Campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Monday, Michelle Obama said, ‘For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change,’ ” ABC reported.
“In a rare move, Cindy McCain, wife of the Arizona senator, took on Michelle Obama’s comment Tuesday as she introduced her husband at a rally. ‘I’m proud of my country, I don’t know if you heard those words earlier. I’m very proud of my country,’ she said.”
“. . . In interviews on Wednesday, Michelle Obama attempted to clarify her remarks.
“‘What I was clearly talking about was that I’m proud in how Americans are engaging in the political process,’ she told WJAR in Rhode Island today.”
The Michelle Obama development followed a dustup in which “Top advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Democratic rival Barack Obama of plagiarism Monday, the latest effort by her campaign to undermine the Illinois senator’s credibility,” as Beth Fouhy reported Monday for the AP. “Obama shrugged off the criticism and noted Clinton has used his slogans, too. Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson, during a conference call with reporters, pointed to a speech Obama delivered at a Democratic Party dinner in Wisconsin on Saturday that lifted lines from an address by his friend, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.”
According to the Boston Globe on Tuesday, “Patrick, who has endorsed the senator from Illinois and is campaigning for him, shrugged off the controversy last night as ‘a tempest in a teapot,’ while Obama acknowledged earlier yesterday that he should have credited his friend, but added that he and Patrick agreed not only on many issues but on the language to describe them.”
The AP reported Tuesday that Clinton considered the media part of the story: “Hillary Rodham Clinton says reporters, not her campaign, uncovered evidence of Democratic rival Barack Obama sharing speech lines with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
“She made the claim Tuesday despite the fact her campaign posted video clips on YouTube illustrating similarities in the speeches and has suggested in several instances that the shared lines amount to plagiarism.”
By Wednesday, the Frontrunner political tip sheet said, “media coverage of the flap is turning increasingly negative toward the Clinton campaign. This morning, new reports call the Clinton campaign’s effort to distance itself from the emergence of the story ‘disingenuous’ and ‘clearly false,’ while commentators have largely downplayed the seriousness of Obama’s offense.”
Kevin Merida, Washington Post: Obama Wave Stuns Clinton’s Black Supporters
Timothy Noah, Slate: Obama, ABC, and Attribution: ABC News chides Obama while stealing credit from the Boston Globe
Eugene Kane, TheRoot.com: Letter from Milwaukee
Okello Oculi, the Monitor, Kampala, Uganda: Obama Must Tame America for the Continent of His Ancestors
Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: Clintons’ bias card has basis
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After a Year, Sánchez Is in a Unique Position in Cuba
“Word of Fidel Castro‘s resignation did not supplant the scheduled topic of last night’s ‘Mesa Redonda’ (Roundtable) political affairs show on Cuban TV — the 50th anniversary of the revolution’s Rebel Radio station,” Ray Sánchez blogged Wednesday from Havana for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
“For years the Cuban leader was a regular guest on the Mesa Redonda, occasionally speaking for hours while a panel of official reporters listened intently. Last year, Castro even gave a taped interview to the show’s regular host, Randy Alonso, from his undisclosed convalescence quarters.
“Last night, a guest host read Castro’s lengthy missive announcing that he would not accept reappointment as commander in chief or President of the State Council. When she reached the end of the letter, slight applause could be heard in the studio before the show faded to a video collage of the 81-year-old Castro over the years.
“The video ended. The panel immediately went into a discussion of the history of Rebel Radio. At the end of the show, the host read an editorial praising the Maximum Leader, saying that Castro’s commitment to his country was so complete that he ‘neglected his health and his personal life.'”
Just a year ago, Sánchez left Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, after 15 years “because I was fortunate enough to land a job in Havana,” he told Journal-isms then. “Six months before leaving Newsday for the Sun-Sentinel, I switched from news to sports because of frustration over a shrinking news hole and cuts in the New York staff.”
Today, as Mark Fitzgerald reported Tuesday in Editor & Publisher, Sánchez is the only U.S. newspaper correspondent reporting from Cuba.
“‘He’s on the street now, ground-pounding, updating the story on the Web, he’ll be blogging, and appearing on local TV and radio as time permits,’ Sun-Sentinel Editor Earl Maucker said Tuesday morning, about eight hours after the news broke that Cuban President Fidel Castro had resigned after 47 years of dictatorial rule,” Fitzgerald wrote.
“The Sun-Sentinel and its Tribune Co. sibling, the Chicago Tribune, have the only two U.S. newspaper bureaus that Communist authorities permit. The Chicago Tribune spot, however, has been vacant in the months since the government declined to renew the visa of reporter Gary Marx because of unspecified ‘problems’ with his reporting.”
In the Miami Herald, Frances Robles reported on the upcoming “Mesa Redonda,” saying, “Fidel Castro’s decision to step down made big headlines in South Florida, and Wednesday night it will finally make a news splash in Cuba.”
Gary Marx, Chicago Tribune: Will Castro’s exit trigger change?
Ana Menendez, Miami Herald: Old Man draws out a painful story that should have ended long ago
Miami Herald site: Fidel’s exit: The fallout
South Florida Sun-Sentinel site: After Castro
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Editorial Director of King Magazine Takes Over at XXL
Datwon Thomas, editorial director of King magazine, a publication aimed at black men, has additionally assumed the editorship of the hip-hop magazine XXL, which claims to be the largest in the hip-hop world, Jonathan Rheingold, XXL’s executive publisher, confirmed on Wednesday.
Both magazines are products of Harris Publications. Elliott Wilson, the previous editor of XXL, was fired last month.
Thomas, 32, told Journal-isms on Thursday one of his priorities would be to connect the magazine more to music on the Internet, since that is where more of his readers are finding it. “You can give them a basis for choosing what is quality,” he said. “There’s so much going on in hip-hop that isn’t being reported,” he said, mentioning such artists as Tanya Morgan.
He also said, “I’m one of the only young, black editors in a position like this. It is a privilege to do this type of work and still be cool and hip and smart. I’m trying to inspire as well” as edit magazines.
In the latest circulation figures reported by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, both King and XXL showed decreases for the six months ending Dec. 31. King stood at 211,888, down from 250,205 a year earlier; XXL at 270,833, down from 308,317. Vibe, which covers hip-hop but is apparently considered more than a hip-hop magazine, had a circulation of 894,861.
Thomas started at Vibe magazine as an intern in 1996. He was part of the startup of XXL in 1997, left to join Sean Combs at the Web site hookt.com, and said he came up with the idea for King, which began in 2001. The magazine Rides, which calls itself “the illest car magazine ever,” began in 2003.
He is not giving up his jobs at King and as editor-in-chief of Rides, but said as King’s editorial director, he is not involved in its day-to-day operations. [Updated Feb. 21]
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Abstinence Emphasis Hinders African AIDS Efforts
On Friday, the Nieman Foundation’s Nieman Watchdog Web site ran a piece by Josh Ruxin, founder and director of the Access Project in Rwanda, saying that President Bush’s efforts at disease prevention and treatment in Africa “have accomplished much — but reporters should consider the negative effects of the focus on abstinence-only programs, decreased funds for family planning and the anemic support for economic development.”
As Bush toured Africa on Wednesday, the Washington Post ran just such a piece by Craig Timberg, from Johannesburg.
“Bush’s initiative, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has not found a way to prevent a significant number of the estimated 1.7 million new cases of HIV each year in Africa. Nearly half of today’s 15-year-olds in South Africa, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the program, will contract the virus in their lifetimes at current infection rates, estimates show,” Timberg wrote.
“Prevention messages, inside the clinics and beyond, continue to stress condoms, HIV testing and abstinence —none of which have demonstrated major impacts in slowing the AIDS epidemic in Africa.
“Interventions that research shows can slow the epidemic, such as circumcising men, encouraging monogamy and making contraception widely available to infected women, have gained relatively little attention. And new technologies, such as vaccines and vaginal microbicides, have continued to disappoint in research trials despite massive investments.”
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Chauncey Bailey Wins Polk Award Posthumously
Chauncey W. Bailey Jr., slain editor of the weekly Oakland (Calif.) Post, will be honored posthumously with the George Polk Award for Local Reporting, Long Island University announced on Tuesday.
Bailey was gunned down on Aug. 2 “while in the midst of investigating a local business, Your Black Muslim Bakery, which has been linked to kidnapping, rape, torture and several killings, now including Bailey’s. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the slaying was the first allegedly targeted killing of a journalist in the United States since 1993. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Bailey earned a reputation as a tireless, hard-nosed journalist who was dedicated to addressing the concerns of black communities in California’s Bay Area,” the organization said.
New America Media and the Maynard Institute have convened an array of Bay Area journalists, media organizations and local university journalism departments to form an investigative team to honor and continue Bailey’s work.
The collaboration is known as the Chauncey Bailey Project.
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Activist, Yes, but Smiley’s Still Not a Journalist
Tavis Smiley is sometimes called a journalist, though he creates news events and accepted a Chrysler automobile from a sponsor. In 2004, asked to clarify his role, his publicist, Joel Brokaw, told Journal-isms, “Mr. Smiley is not a journalist by training or profession, nor does he refer to himself by that title. Mr. Smiley is a television and radio talk show host, commentator, author, public speaker and activist.”
So some were struck when Smiley told the Washington Post’s Darryl Fears on Saturday for a blog item, “My job is to ask the critical question, to raise these issues and keep these guys focused. There are some people who are disappointed that I’m not jumping up and down saying, ‘Vote for Barack Obama.’ That’s not my role as a journalist. That’s not what I do.”
Asked to clarify, Brokaw said Smiley hadn’t changed his self-description.
“Mr. Smiley said that Mr. Fears was referring to him as a journalist in their conversation,” Brokaw said. “As a teacher of English as a second language in Europe many years ago and a good speaker of foreign languages, I learned that we naturally look to use as few words as possible in conversation, our own form of spoken shorthand. So, for Mr. Fears, it was easier to lump all the roles Mr. Smiley does in that one word. I can only assume that it came up in the context, and Mr. Smiley did not make a big deal out of it to clarify in the short time he had to speak with him. I certainly wouldn’t attach any greater meaning to it than that.”
Fears told Journal-isms, “I recall Mr. Smiley saying that he was a journalist. As evidence, I quoted him saying that. I can’t recall who used the word ‘journalist’ first, but if he had a problem with it, why wouldn’t he have corrected me? Had I called him something else, would he have corrected me?”
C-SPAN plans to carry “Tavis Smiley Presents . . . State of the Black Union 2008: Reclaiming our Democracy, Recasting our Future” on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. live from New Orleans, times approximate.
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Short Takes
“The publisher of three of the San Francisco Bay area’s largest daily newspapers is offering employees buyouts and bracing them for layoffs in another blow to the struggling newspaper industry,” Evelyn Nieves reported Wednesday for the Associated Press. “The Bay Area News Group publishes the San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times and other daily and weekly newspapers in the region.” John Armstrong, publisher of the Bay Area News Group, wrote in a memo that the buy-out acceptance deadline was March 3. “Very quickly thereafter, we will make a decision on layoffs.”
Lee Enterprises, which became the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper company in 2005 when it bought Pulitzer Inc., owners of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had no people of color on its 16-member management team and none on its board of directors then. On Wednesday it announced it had appointed Leonard J. Elmore to its board. “Elmore, 55, entered the legal profession as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, N.Y., after a 10-year career as a professional basketball player with the Indiana Pacers, Kansas City Kings, Milwaukee Bucks, New Jersey Nets and New York Knicks. He later founded Precept Sports & Entertainment Inc., a management and marketing company that specialized in representing professional athletes and consulting with corporations in sport-related marketing,” an announcement said.
The Albuquerque Tribune will publish its final edition on Saturday, the E.W. Scripps Co. announced on Wednesday, saying it had tried for seven months to sell the paper. “Scripps notified The Tribune’s 38 editorial employees today of the decision to discontinue publication.” Scripps acquired the paper in 1923 from its founder, Carlton Cole “Carl” Magee The staff includes at least seven African American and Latino journalists.
“Sam Zell is at it again! Vinnie Malcolm, the General Manager of KTLA, was tossed out today,” the Web site ERSnews.com reported on Tuesday, “one day before Ed Wilson, the new head of Tribune Broadcasting was to pay a visit to KTLA in Los Angeles. Vinnie Malcolm presided over one of the most spectacular freefalls of a television station in the history of broadcasting. KTLA, at one time, was one of the highest rated television stations in LA. . . . Last year Malcolm missed his sales projections by $34-million. Their Morning News is nearly dead last in the ratings. Their ‘Prime News’ struggles to be number three. Only one station bills less in this market: KCOP-TV.”
“Santita Jackson has been suspended as midday host at WVON-AM (1690) in a dispute over Black History Month features on the African-American news/talk station,” Robert Feder reported Wednesday in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Jackson, 44, eldest daughter of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, has been off the air since Friday with no explanation to listeners.”
“NBC News said Tuesday it has reprimanded the employee responsible for mistakenly flashing a picture of Osama bin Laden on MSNBC as Chris Matthews talked about Barack Obama,” David Bauder reported for the Associated Press. “This mistake was inexcusable,” MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said in the story.
“The 10th annual HBCU National Newspaper Conference was an opportunity for student journalists from newspapers around the country to come together in Baltimore to compete for awards and discuss the problems they are experiencing at black college newspaper today,” Mike McCray wrote Tuesday for Black College Wire, discussing last weekend’s gathering of student journalists at historically black colleges and universities. Conference coordinator Denise Brown told Journal-isms 326 people attended, including 200 students from 20 schools.
The St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council, which “is seeking to build a casino in upstate New York is suing the New York Post for $60 million because of two editorials the newspaper published that accused the tribe of being a ‘criminal enterprise’ with ‘an extended history of often-violent criminality,'” Jared Irmas reported Wednesday in the New York Sun.
Mirthala Salinas, the onetime rising star at Telemundo whose career crashed after an affair with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has landed on AM radio. Hoy reported Wednesday, in Spanish, that Salinas is now a co-anchor of “Hoy por Hoy” on 690 XTRA AM in Los Angeles. The show airs Monday through Friday, according to Kevin Roderick in LA Observed.
Charges have been dropped against New York Post reporter Leonardo Blair, who in December gave readers an account of being stopped and frisked by two cops, “amid a disturbing upswing in complaints lodged against the NYPD,” the Post said. He had been accused of making “unreasonable noise” and “disobeying a lawful order.” Blair returned to National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More” on Tuesday to update listeners on his story. Host Michel Martin added, “Meanwhile, the New York Police Department released data showing that nearly half a million such stops occurred last year, mainly involving African Americans and Hispanics.”
“Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, lost another round in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court yesterday even as he awaits a pivotal ruling from a federal appeals court,” Emilie Lounsberry reported Wednesday in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The state’s highest court rejected Abu-Jamal’s request for a hearing into his contention that witnesses in his case committed perjury. The justices concluded that he had waited too long before raising his arguments.”
In the deadly chaos in Kenya that followed disputed December election results, “it is some Kenyan media, especially the independent private media, that have proved their worth as the vanguards of society. In fact the Kenyan Council mostly made up of private media has shown the way by refusing to air or publish” inflammatory government advertisements, Amos Safo wrote Monday in Ghana’s Public Agenda.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said Jawed Ahmad, an Afghan who worked for Canadian television station CTV News, has been held without charge by the U.S. military in Afghanistan since October, and that the military should file charges or set him free. ?
